Semantic understanding of hypotheses returned by a speech engine could improve the quality of recognition and in cases of misrecognition speed the identification of errors and potential substitutions. Unfortunately, semantic recognition using
natural language parsers is hard since semantic and syntactic rules for
processing language are complex and computationally expensive. Additionally, semantic recognition should be performed in a knowledge domain—
a domain of interest such as
radiology,
pathology, or tort law. This adds additional complexity to building semantic rules. The method described achieves semantic understanding by
coupling a
speech recognition engine to a semantic recognizer, which draws from a
database of domain sentences derived from a document corpus, and a
knowledge base created for these domain sentences. The method is able to identify in near real-time the best
sentence hypotheses from the speech recognizer and its associated meanings, i.e. propositions, which belong to the knowledge domain, and if no hypotheses are found mark it as invalid for easy identification. For invalid sentences, closely matched sentences from the domain
database can be displayed to speed correction. The semantic propositions can be semantically typed, such as normal and abnormal, further aiding in the identification of recognition errors. The
system automatically displays the semantic meaning of related ideas of valid sentences by retrieving proposition (s) from the
knowledge base.