PASS: A Parallel Speech Understanding System

A key issue in spoken language processing has become the integration of speech understanding and natural language processing(NLP). This paper presents a parallel computational model for the integration of speech and NLP. The model adopts a hierarchically-structured knowledge base and memory-based parsing techniques. Processing is carried out by passing multiple markers in parallel through the knowledge base. Speech-specific problems such as insertion, deletion, and substitution have been analyzed and their parallel solutions are provided. The complete system has been implemented on the Semantic Network Array Processor(SNAP) and is operational. Results show an 80% sentence recognition rate for the Air Traffic Control domain. Moreover, a 15-fold speed-up can be obtained over an identical sequential implementation with an increasing speed advantage as the size of the knowledge base grows.