RE: Speech Rec Grammar Draft

Hi,

The Voice Browser Working Group is currently working on the "Semantic
Interpretation" specification.  It will define a standard use of tags for
extracting meaning from speech input matching a grammar.  I'm not in a
position to comment on when the first draft will be available.

Assignments similar to (but not exactly the same as) "action=shut;" will be
possible but there's a lot more detail to come.  So for now you should
consider the examples in the current spec as indicative only.

FYI, we're also working on a significant update to the grammar specification
itself and will be ensuring that the Semantic Interpretation and Speech
Recognition Grammar Format specs are aligned.

--Andrew Hunt
  SpeechWorks International
  -----Original Message-----
  From: www-voice-request@w3.org [mailto:www-voice-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Thomas X. Hoban
  Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 4:56 PM
  To: www-voice@w3.org
  Subject: Speech Rec Grammar Draft


  I have some comments and questions regarding the W3C Working Draft for
Speech Recognition Grammar.

  I find most of the spec reasonably strait forward.  However, an area which
is not clear to me is how you extract meaning from an utterance.

  In section 2.6, the spec defines the "tag" attribute.  While this is a
step in the right direction, I think it falls short.   The example provided
in 2.6 shows tag attributes which define name value pairs.  In the example,
one pattern is mapped to tag="action=open" and another is mapped to
tag="action=shut".  If I can borrow the term "slot" which Nuance uses, then
you could say that "action" is a slot and "open" and "close" are values that
fill the slot named "action".  To make the pattern more reusable, it might
be useful to define another attribute which defines the slot name.  Maybe,
you call the new attribute "slot" or "slotname".   Slot names would be
defined in some ancestor element one or more levels up from elements which
define tag attributes.

  So the example in 2.6:

  <one-of>
      <item tag="action=open;"> open </item>
      <item tag="action=shut;"> close </item>
  </one-of>

  Could be instead written as

  <one-of slot="action">
      <item tag="open"> open </item>
      <item tag="shut"> close </item>
  </one-of>