Overview of the 
Third DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop 
Richard M. Stern, General Chair 
School of Computer Science 
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Carnegie Mellon University 
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 
The Third DARPA Speech and Natural Language 
Workshop was designed to provide a forum for the presen- 
tation of research results and the discussion of technical 
issues related to a variety of DARPA research programs in 
spoken language systems, speech recognition, natural lan- 
guage processing, and related areas. The workshop also 
provided an opportunity to discuss the long-term goals of 
these programs, to develop strategies that will facilitate the 
sharing of databases and useful technology by all sites in 
the DARPA community, and to develop standards by 
which progress can be evaluated. 
One of the major focal points of the three-day workshop 
was an extended discussion of the new DARPA spoken- 
language common task, the Air Travel Information System 
(ATIS). The topics of these sessions, which were or- 
ganized and chaired by Dave Pallett, included descriptions 
of the rationale and infrastructure of the task, as well as 
reports from sites that had just completed the first round of 
common evaluations of spoken-language systems in the 
ATIS domain. The other special session, organized by 
Mitch Marcus, concerned the automatic acquisition of lin- 
guistic structure. This session highlighted significant 
progress being made in the exploitation of large corpora 
and in the fusion of symbolic and probabilistic methods. 
The remainder of the technical program consisted of 
reports on recent progress and new technical developments 
in the areas of speech recognition (including results from 
the latest benchmark evaluations on the Resource Manage- 
ment task), natural language processing, and spoken lan- 
guage system. David Nagel delivered a keynote address on 
spoken language and the personal computer. 
The technical program was augmented by an evening 
session of system demonstrations coordinated by Victor 
Zue, with videotaped presentations by AT&T Bell 
Laboratories, Columbia, and Texas Instruments, and live 
demos by Dragon Systems, Entropic Systems, MIT, and 
MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Both the videotapes and the live 
demos were highly effective: the live systems were the 
focus of a great deal of attention and scrutiny throughout 
the meeting, and the videotapes provided a good picture of 
the current status of other systems that were not so easily 
transported. Many of us were extremely impressed by the 
performance of the systems demonstrated live at Hidden 
Valley. The promotional film Advances in Spoken- 
Language Research 1970-1990: A DARPA Perspective was 
also screened to an approving audience. The CMU speech 
group hosted the attendees at an open house following the 
workshop which included demonstrations of their spoken 
language and speech recognition systems. 
This volume includes the papers of the technical 
program, plus site reports from the various DARPA con- 
tractors, and a white paper by Cliff Weinstein on speech 
processing in military computer-based systems. 
In recent years the DARPA speech and natural language 
workshops have evolved from a small informal discussion 
of current progress and plans to a much larger and more 
formal meeting which has become a primary forum for the 
exchange of major research results. The success of this 
series of workshops, and of the underlying DARPA- 
sponsored program of research in spoken language, has 
been confirmed by the recent widespread surge of interest 
in spoken-language systems outside the DARPA com- 
munity, and by the extremely high standards of excellence 
of the papers presented at the meeting itself. 
Many people were responsible for the success of this 
workshop. The inputs of the Organizing Committee, Lyn 
Bates, Lynette Hirschman, Mitch Marcus, Kathy 
McKeown, Doug Paul, Patti Price, Salim Roukos, and Vic- 
tor Zue, were crucial not only in the selection of papers for 
the technical program, but also for many meta-level deci- 
sions which greatly affected the overall shape of the 
workshop. The advice of the two previous workshop 
chairs, Lynette Hirschman and Victor Zue, was extremely 
valuable. Dave Pallett's assistance in organizing the tech- 
nical program is gratefully acknowledged, as well. I also 
thank Judy Bandola, Romina Fincher, and Shilpa Agarwal 
for their help in coordinating the flow of paper and infor- 
mation, John Hampshire and Christopher Young for their 
help in translating document formats, as well as Bob Bren- 
nan, Eric Thayer, and Bob Weide for their technical assis- 
tance at the meeting itself. Finally, Charles Wayne 
deserves major credit for his oversight of the spoken lan- 
guage program and for his vision of what the speech and 
natural language workshops could become. 
