A large vocabulary semantic network for computerised speech recognition

The work presented in this paper deals with the construction of a large-vocabulary semantic network to assist computerised speech or text recognition. The semantic network is systematically constructed with semantic information about nouns and verbs from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English by the application of pattern matching rules. It is represented in the form of a directed graph where nodes represent word senses and links represent the types of conceptual relationships. A semantic score, for pairwise combinations of word candidates in a speech recognition lattice, can be derived by traversing the network and calculating the conceptual distance between the senses of these candidates.