Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) Version 1.0

This document defines the process of Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition and the syntax and semantics of semantic interpretation tags that can be added to speech recognition grammars to compute information to return to an application on the basis of rules and tokens that were matched by the speech recognizer. In particular, it defines the syntax and semantics of the contents of Tags in the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS). The results of semantic interpretation describe the meaning of a natural language utterance. The current specification represents this information as an ECMAScript object, and defines a mechanism to serialize the result into XML. The W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity (MMI) is defining an XML data format (EMMA) for containing and annotating the information in user utterances. It is expected that the EMMA language will be able to integrate results generated by Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition. Semantic Interpretation may be useful in combination with other specifications, such as Stochastic Language Models, but their use with N-grams has not yet been studied.