SUMMARY OF SESSION 9 - FUTURE PLANS 
Clifford Weinstein, chairman 
Charles Wayne presented overviews for both the Spoken Language and Written 
Language Programs. Under the Spoken Language Program, he emphasized the integration of 
speech and natural language technology into Spoken Language Systems. The need for 
common corpora and tasks, as well as systematic, objective performance evaluation, was 
stressed for both the Spoken and Written Language Programs. In the SLS area, some of the 
key goals were outlined for technical advances, including: moving from read speech to 
spontaneous speech, from fixed to expandable vocabulary, from a limited grammar to a 
habitable natural grammar, from a single utterance to interactive dialogue, and from high 
word recognition accuracy to high utterance understanding accuracy. A goal for 1993 was set 
forth for 90% speaker-independent understanding of natural, task-oriented utterances with 
a 5,000 word vocabulary. In the Written Language Program description, the continuing need 
for performance goals and evaluations extending beyond the June 1989 Message 
Understanding Conference was emphasized. New directions which were mentioned included: 
learning techniques for greater robustness and faster porting, and (possibly) machine 
translation as a framework for system integration. 
A general discussion followed, on topics including: SLS plan; role of SLS 
demonstration tasks; Written Language Program plan; speech recognition technology; natural 
language technology; corpora for both spoken and written language; and possible DoD 
applications. In the discussion on near-term DoD applications of SLS, it was argued that the 
technology for spoken language understanding, still in its infancy, should first be developed 
in the context of the demonstration tasks and systems, before transition to real applications. 
The topic of common SLS corpus and task was raised, and engendered much 
discussion with many points of view. Jack Godfrey of Texas Instruments set the background 
for this discussion by describing TI's current efforts in collecting pilot data on the BBN 
personnel management database query task. A great deal of discussion ensued on whether 
this was an appropriate common task, and a variety of other possible tasks were discussed. It 
was agreed that these issues would need to be resolved in smaller working groups, 
Charles Wayne closed the session with brief descriptions of two speculative new 
ideas being discussed at DARPA/ISTO. The first, "Spoon-Size Microsystems," focuses on 
very small systems (e.g., wristwatch-size speech recognition) which would be built on a 
dual-use (DoD and non-DoD) technology. The second, the "Invisible Assistant", is a system 
which, though extremely compact, could interact with people using speech and imagery as an 
intelligent aid. 
For the record, this session coincided with the San Francisco earthquake, and 
those leaving the session saw earthquake pictures, rather than the canceled World Series 
game, on television. 
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