ROBUST LANGUAGE PROCESSOR FOR SEGMENTING AND PARSING LANGUAGE CONTAINI NG MULTIPLE INSTRUCTIONS

Apparatus and method are provided for segmenting, parsing, interpreting and formatting the content of instructions such as air traffic control instructions. Output from a speech recognizer is so processed to produce such instructions in a structured format such as for input to other software. There are two main components: an instruction segmenter and a robust parser. In the instruction segmenter, the recognized text produced by the speech recognizer is segmented into independent instructions and each instruction is processed. The instruction segmenter receives a recognized air traffic control or other instruction, and segments it into individual commands. Utterances or other language are thereby broken up into their component instructions by detecting probable instruction boundaries. If normal processing fails, then robust backup processing is invoked, as a fallback after a fixed time per word has elapsed or a processing failure has occurred. The robust parser allows the system to extract information from utterances that are not necessarily well formed or may have extraneous comments in them.