{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Vocal Speech Understanding System","authors":[{"name":"Stephen E. Levinson","slug":"stephen-e-levinson","given":"Stephen E.","family":"Levinson","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"This paper describes the VOCAL (Voice Operated CALculator) speech understanding system. VOCAL is a software package that lets its user program a computer to perform numerical calculations by speaking to it in English-like sentences. To accomplish this, VOCAL uses processes for acoustic, grammatical, and semantic analysis. These individual procedures, which are relatively simple, are embedded in a control structure that uses the information from each component to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of spoken sentences. One unique feature of VOCAL, which is essential to the development of speech understanding systems, is that it is complete and self-contained. Coded in standard FORTRAN, it is compact enough to run on many minicomputers and can be used in a real-time, on-line environment on slightly more powerful machines. Testing has shown that despite a correct word identification rate of less that 60% the VOCAL system usually correctly interprets even very long sentences.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/78","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/0078.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/78.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/bibtex/78","volume":{"slug":"1975","title":"Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1975","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/","year":1975,"location":"Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR","dates":"","editors":"Patrick Winston and Carl Hewitt","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Speech Understanding","track":"Speech Understanding","number":78,"pages":{"first":499,"last":504},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}