The BBN Speech Understanding system was a computer system designed to understand and respond appropriately to instructions, commands, and questions expressed in ordinary continuous speech.

The system attempts to combine knowledge of vocabulary and of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic constraints with knowledge of acoustics, phonetics, and phonology to form an integrated speech understanding system, using the knowledge from those higher level linguistic constraints to compensate for acoustic and phonological indeterminacies.

This was my first project at BBN, working with a team led by Bill Woods and others, including Lyn Bates and Bonnie Webber.

I focused on the use of pragmatics in speech understanding, speech generation, information retrieval, and interactive dialogue.