Preliminary ATIS Development at MIT

Introduction DARPA has recently initiated a plan for a common spoken language task, to be developed independently by all members of the DARPA community, with the hope that it will provide a mechanism leading to appropriate formal evaluation procedures at the level of spoken language. The task that was selected for this purpose is the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) task, based on selected tables from the Official Airline Guide (OAG). It was decided that the first evaluation would be limited in scope to deal with text input only, and to cover only sentences that could be understood unambiguously out of context. Data have been recorded over the past several months at Texas Instruments, using an interface that involves a "wizard" who fully interprets the meaning of the subject 's sentences, and generates database responses using a menu driven data access system.