Session 3: Spoken Language Systems III

Since February 91, the ATIS database has been updated and, in an effort to quickly collect a larger amount of training and test data, a concerted effort has taken place in collecting data at five different sites (AT&T, BBN, CMU, MIT, and SRI). (See [1] for details.) About 10,000 spontaneous utterances were collected, of which about half were annotated (text transcriptions, reference answers, etc.) by December 20. Thus, for the first time since the decision to adopt ATIS as the common task for evaluation, the different sites had available to them sufficient amounts of training data that is similar in nature to the data to be used in testing the systems, albeit the different sites did not have much time to work on the new data before the evaluation was performed.