SYSTEM AND METHOD USING NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING FOR SPEECH CONTROL APPLICATION

The present invention is a computer apparatus and method for adding speech interpreting capabilities to an interactive voice response system. An annotated corpus is used to list valid utterances within a gramma r along with token data for each valid utterance representing the meaning behind the valid utterance. When valid utterances are detected, the interactive voice response system requests that a search is made through the annotated corpus to find the token identified with the valid utterance. This token is returned to the interactive voice response system. If the valid utterance included a variable, additional processing is performed to interpret the variable and return additional data representing the variable.