Chapter 6. Grammars for Dialog

You will have noticed that the inputs in the form-filling dialogs studied in the previous chapter were restricted to single words and phrases. This chapter introduces the use of grammars to interpret more complex inputs and also to extract their meaning. Two types of grammars in common use for commercial applications are hand-crafted grammars for input that is predictable and well-defined, and statistical grammars for more robust performance with the less well-formed input typical of conversational speech.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to develop apps that support more extended user input, making use of hand-crafted as well as statistical grammars.