Spoken Language Processing: Where Do We Go from Here?

Recent years have seen steady improvements in the quality and performance of speech-based human-machine interaction driven by a significant convergence in the methods and techniques employed. However, the quantity of training data required to improve state-of-the-art systems seems to be growing exponentially, yet performance appears to be reaching an asymptote that is not only well short of human performance, but which may also be inadequate for many real-world applications. This suggests that there may be a fundamental flaw in the underlying architecture of contemporary systems, and the future direction for research into spoken language processing is currently uncertain.