The report consists of a collection of papers describing the BBN Speech Understanding system, a research prototype computer system designed to understand and respond appropriately to instructions, commands, and questions expressed in ordinary continuous speech. This 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.
