Exploiting Both Local and Global Constraints for Multi-Span Statistical Language Modeling

Apple Technology Group, Apple Computer, Inc.
November 18 1997

Abstract
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A new framework is proposed to integrate the various constraints, both
local and global, that are present in the language. Local constraints
are captured via n-gram language modeling, while global constraints
are taken into account through the use of latent semantic analysis. An
integrative formulation is derived for the combination of these two
paradigms, resulting in several families of multi-span language models
for large vocabulary speech recognition. Because of the inherent
complementarity in the two types of constraints, the performance of
the integrated language models, as measured by perplexity, compares
favorably with the corresponding n-gram performance.

Biographical Information:

Jerome R. Bellegarda received the Diplome d'Ingenieur degree
(summa cum laude) from the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Electricite
et de Mecanique, Nancy, France, in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY, in 1984 and 1987, respectively.

In 1987 he was a Research Associate in the Department of Electrical
Engineering at the University of Rochester, developing multiple access
coding techniques. From 1988 to 1994 he was a Research Staff Member at
the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, working on
various improvements to the modeling component of the IBM speech
recognition system, and developing advanced feature extraction and
recognition modeling algorithms for cursive on-line handwriting. In
1994 he joined Apple Computer, Cupertino, CA, where he is currently
Principal Scientist in the Spoken Language Research Group. At Apple
he has worked on speaker adaptation, Asian dictation, statistical
language modeling, and advanced dialog interactions. His research
interests include voice-driven man-machine communications, multiple
input/output modalities, and multimedia knowledge management.

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