SESSION 9: GOVERNMENT PANEL 
Carol J. Van Ess-Dykema, Chair 
U.S. Department of Defense 
Fort Meade, Maryland 
1. ABSTRACT 
The purpose of the Government Panel session is to inform the 
research community about Human Language Technology research 
sponsored by the individual Government agencies that the panel- 
ists represent. The researchers gain a better understanding of the 
potential market beyond ARPA, for their research skills and prod- 
uct. Government agencies who may need what the researchers can 
offer benefit when the informed researchers contact the agencies. 
In the climate of declining Government funding for the Defense 
Department, the Session Chair noted that the contracts will be 
fewer and go to the contractors who are most knowledgable about 
the research that is going on Government-wide and to those who 
are knowledgeable about how their skills and products can meet 
Government user needs. The Government Panel session was 
moved closer to the middle of the agenda this year to facilitate 
continued discussion among the panelists and other Government 
representatives present, with the research community, before the 
Workshop ended. 
2. PANEL STATEMENTS 
Dr. Helen Gigley, Head of the Human-Computer Interac- 
tion Laboratory at the Naval Research Laboratory, Wash- 
ington, D.C., described Government-wide Human 
Language Technology needs and the role of researchers in 
meeting them. She specifically addressed Government 
Human Language Technology in terms of business uses and 
needs, military uses, and education/training needs. She 
pointed out that introducing technology does not necessar- 
ily increase effectiveness, arguing that we need to consider 
the impact of adopting technology before rather than after it 
is put in place. She cited the military need of real time and 
accurate speech processing performance and the lack of 
military commanders' trust of technology that might con- 
tain or produce errors. Lastly, she argued that researchers 
need to consider their contribution not only as a basic sci- 
entific result but as a result within society having social and 
moral implications. 
Dr. Joseph Kielman, Chief Scientist at the Federal Bureau 
of Investigation (FBI), Washington, D.C., indicated that in 
the past the FBI had focussed significant resources on the 
intercept of spoken language and written text, with the first 
priority being to increase the efficiency or effectiveness of 
collection and distribution of data. He reported, however, 
that the situation was changing, identifying the following 
Human Language Technology capabilities to be of current 
interest to the FBI: 1) speech detection, 2) speaker and lan- 
guage recognition, 3) speech understanding, 4) text under- 
standing and 5) machine translation. He reported that these 
technologies would be used to process language data in the 
domains of counter intelligence, terrorism and white collar 
crime, by FBI's personnel at headquarters, four regional 
data centers, 56 field offices, 400 resident agencies, perma- 
nent monitoring plants and temporary lookouts. 
Dr. Susan Chipman, a Program Manager at the Office of 
Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, Virginia, described 
the Cognitive Science Program research sponsored by 
ONR. She defined the ONR mission as one of improving 
naval training for its personnel. Two clusters of language- 
related research currently underway include tutorial dis- 
course and improving the readability of instructional texts 
and documentation. She attributed the interest in emulating 
the effectiveness of human tutors with artificially intelli- 
gent computerized instructional systems, to the reported 
effectiveness of one-on-one tutorial instruction by human 
tutors. The need to improve text readability stems from the 
fact that the military services and their contractors produce 
enormous amounts of text, system documentation and 
training materials for the personnel who will operate and 
maintain those systems, and which must be readable and 
comprehensible by ONR personnel. 
Dr. Jesse Fussell, Chief of the Communications Sciences 
Division, at the Department of Defense, Fort Meade, Mary- 
land, identified both technical and nontechnical problems 
in technology transfer as well as making recommendations 
to the research community about how to stimulate the tech- 
nology transfer process. He believes that insufficient study 
of the process of converting an algorithm from one domain, 
that is supported by a well defined and documented corpus, 
to a different operational domain, which may have little or 
no pre-marked training or testing data, is a technical prob- 
lem that researchers still need to overcome. Nontechnical 
problems he believes still need to be overcome to achieve 
technology transfer include the researcher's lack of under- 
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standing of the customer's needs and operating procedures. 
He challenged the researchers to broaden their research 
efforts by producing prototype systems for extended evalu- 
ation in an operational setting. 
Dr. Y. T. Chien, Director of the Information, Robotics and 
Intelligent Systems Division, at the National Science Foun- 
dation (NSF), Washington, D.C., defined NSF's mission as 
that of maintaining the health of the U.S. science and tech- 
nology base. He contrasted NSF with ARPA, saying that 
NSF supports more and smaller projects, resulting in NSF 
being more broad-based than ARPA. He discussed the Clin- 
ton administration's technology policies, particularly the 
creation of a national information infrastructure which he 
noted will create societal needs in knowledge intensive 
activities. He encouraged researchers to add value to this 
national information infrastructure. He also encouraged 
them to act like researchers in the larger sciences and to 
define an aggressive research agenda for Human Language 
Technology. 
ence at NSF, there were many occasions when researchers 
declined to participate in an intemational exchange because 
they did not want to take a year off from their present 
endeavors. 
The discussion period ended with a researcher's observation 
that the research community did not have access to real 
problems, and thus he called for better communication 
between researchers and users. Another researcher 
responded by citing the "dual use" principle advocated by 
the Clinton administration, as a way for researchers to lower 
the cost of technology transfer and to open the door for bet- 
ter researcher - user communication. 
3. AUDIENCE REACTIONS 
The first question was if any of the panelists knew whether 
the Clinton administration planned to invest as much 
money in advanced technologies as has been invested by 
large companies in the past. Jess Fussell responded that 
only 7% of DoD's research and development budget was 
for research, in contrast to 93% for development. He said it 
was necessary for researchers to convince the developers 
that research is worthwhile. Joe Kielman stated that the 
FBI's budget had little research and development money 
but that he felt that by cooperation and collaboration among 
Government agencies, a worthwhile Government research 
effort could be continued. A Government representative in 
the audience from the National Institute of Standards and 
Technology (NIST) stated that the Department of Com- 
merce may receive funding for high risk-high payoff 
"opportunistic" research. 
One of the foreign visitors responded by stating she 
believed it was a government's responsibility to market 
technological research results. A discussion then ensued 
regarding the cost of deploying technology in the form of a 
product in the workplace. One researcher stated that tech- 
nology could be sold more successfully to the Government 
if it were presented in the form of a visionary idea. Another 
researcher defined the customer as the person that can con- 
vince someone to take a risk and can provide the research- 
ers access to real problems. In response to this latter 
comment, Joe Kielman responded that management is often 
loathe to take a risk without seeing a demonstration capa- 
bility first. 
The discussion then turned to an inquiry about collabora- 
tion between U.S. and foreign researchers in performing 
Human Language Technology research with a pedagogical 
emphasis. Y.T. Chien responded that based on his experi- 
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