From Speech Recognition to Spoken Language Understanding: The Development of the MIT SUMMIT and VOYAGER Systems

Spoken language is one of the most natural, efficient, flexible, and economical means of communication among humans. As computers play an ever increasing role in our lives, it is important that we address the issue of providing a graceful human-machine interface through spoken language. In this paper, we will describe our recent efforts in moving beyond the scope of speech recognition into the realm of spoken-language understanding. Specifically, we report on the development of an urban navigation and exploration system called VOYAGER, an application which we have used as a basis for performing research in spoken-language understanding.