Building Spoken Language Systems

The Spoken Language Systems Lab was formally created in 2001, bringing together the expertise of several research groups that shared a common goal: to bridge the gap between natural spoken language and the underlying semantic information, focusing on European Portuguese. This paper describes our efforts towards this long-term goal, starting by the two main areas of activity: semantic processing of multimedia contents, and multimodal dialogue systems. These strongly interdisciplinary areas integrate several core technologies developed in the lab, namely speech recognition and synthesis. This interdisciplinarity is also strongly patent in the the lab's most recent activities, such as speech-to-speech translation.