Towards understanding spoken Tunisian dialect

Abstract

This paper presents a method for semantic interpretation designed for Tunisian dialect. Our method is based on lexical semantics to overcome the lack of resources for the studied dialect. This method is Ontology-based which allows exploiting the ontological concepts for semantic annotation and ontological relations for interpretation. This combination reduces inaccuracies and increases the rate of comprehension. This paper also details the process of building the Ontology used for annotation and interpretation of Tunisian dialect utterances in the context of speech understanding in dialogue systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.