  This paper describes a new approach and a system SCREEN for fault-tolerant
speech parsing. SCREEEN stands for Symbolic Connectionist Robust EnterprisE for
Natural language. Speech parsing describes the syntactic and semantic analysis
of spontaneous spoken language. The general approach is based on incremental
immediate flat analysis, learning of syntactic and semantic speech parsing,
parallel integration of current hypotheses, and the consideration of various
forms of speech related errors. The goal for this approach is to explore the
parallel interactions between various knowledge sources for learning
incremental fault-tolerant speech parsing. This approach is examined in a
system SCREEN using various hybrid connectionist techniques. Hybrid
connectionist techniques are examined because of their promising properties of
inherent fault tolerance, learning, gradedness and parallel constraint
integration. The input for SCREEN is hypotheses about recognized words of a
spoken utterance potentially analyzed by a speech system, the output is
hypotheses about the flat syntactic and semantic analysis of the utterance. In
this paper we focus on the general approach, the overall architecture, and
examples for learning flat syntactic speech parsing. Different from most other
speech language architectures SCREEN emphasizes an interactive rather than an
autonomous position, learning rather than encoding, flat analysis rather than
in-depth analysis, and fault-tolerant processing of phonetic, syntactic and
semantic knowledge.
