Cognitive Informatics : The Future of Spoken Language Processing ?

There is no doubt that the past 50 years have seen spectacular progress in our scientific understanding of how human beings use and process spoken language, as well as in our technical ability to mimic such behaviour in practical computer-based systems. However, despite these impressive achievements, we still have a long way to go before these two areas of knowledge and discovery converge on a coherent ‘theory’ of spoken language processing; a theory that could serve to both explain the intricacies of human speech behaviour as well as support a truly ubiquitous technology for spoken language processing. This paper discusses the prospects for a deeper and more unified understanding of spoken language processing and concludes that future progress may come from the newly emerging field of ‘Cognitive Informatics’.