The goal of speech research at Carnegie Mellon continues to be the development of spoken language systems that effectively integrate speech processing into the human-computer interface in a way that facilitates the use of computers in the performance of practical tasks. Component technologites are being developed in the context of spoken language systems in two domains: the DARPA-standard ATIS travel planning task, and CMU's office management task. Research in spoken language is currently focussed in the following areas:• Improved speech recognition technologies. Research is directed toward increasing the useful vocabulary of the speech recognizer, using better subword models and vocabulary-independent recognition techniques, providing for rapid configuration for new tasks.• Fluent human/machine interfaces. The goal of research in the spoken language interface is the development of an understanding of how people interact by voice with computer systems. Specific development systems such as the Office Manager are used to study this interaction.• Understanding spontaneous spoken language. Actual spoken language is ill-formed with respect to grammar, syntax, and semantics. We are analyzing many types of spontaneous speech phenomena and developing appropriate syntactic and semantic representations of language that enable spontaneous speech to be understood in a robust fashion.• Dialog modeling. This goal of this research is to identify invariant properties of spontaneous spoken dialog at both the utterance and dialog level, and to apply constraints based on dialog, semantic, and pragmantic knowledge to enhance speech recognition. These knowledge sources can also be used to learn new vocabulary items incrementally.• Acoustical and environmental robustness. The goal of this work is to make speech recognition robust with respect to variability in acoustical ambience and choice of microphone, so that recognition accuracy using desk-top or bezel-mounted microphones in office environments will become comparable to performance using close-talking microphones.
['Raj Reddy']
Spoken-language research at Carnegie Mellon