Summary of Session 9 - Future Plans

Charles Wayne presented overviews for both the Spoken Language and Written Language Programs. Under the Spoken Language Program, he emphasized the integration of speech and natural language technology into Spoken Language Systems. The need for common corpora and tasks, as well as systematic, objective performance evaluation, was stressed for both the Spoken and Written Language Programs. In the SLS area, some of the key goals were outlined for technical advances, including: moving from read speech to spontaneous speech, from fixed to expandable vocabulary, from a limited grammar to a habitable natural grammar, from a single utterance to interactive dialogue, and from high word recognition accuracy to high utterance understanding accuracy. A goal for 1993 was set forth for 90% speaker-independent understanding of natural, task-oriented utterances with a 5,000 word vocabulary. In the Written Language Program description, the continuing need for performance goals and evaluations extending beyond the June 1989 Message Understanding Conference was emphasized. New directions which were mentioned included: learning techniques for greater robustness and faster porting, and (possibly) machine translation as a framework for system integration.