SESSION 10: GOVERNMENT PANEL 
Oscar N. Garcia, Chair 
Interactive Systems Program 
Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems 
Computer, Information Science, and Engineering 
National Science Foundation 
ogarcia@nsf.gov 
ABSTRACT 
The Workshop included an extended group of 
presentations by selected US government agencies and 
an invited guest from the European Community. These 
presentations, amplified in the following pages, 
indicated the importance given to speech and natural 
language research and development, and the approach of 
each agency to adapt their philosophy and activities to 
those aspects which they considered most important to 
their charter. Reactions from the audience were taken 
within the time allocated to the presentations. 
SUMMARY STATEMENTS 
The first presentation was by Calvin Olano of the 
Department of Defense, where he has been involved 
over the years in the development and acquisition of 
spoken language systems. His remarks, while mostly 
oriented to the ARPA spoken language research efforts, 
were broadly applicable to other human language 
technology programs. His presentation emphasized the 
advantages of tuning the system design to take 
advantage of the characteristics of the task at hand. He 
envisioned not only imposing the statistical and 
architectural constraints of the specific task but also 
including higher level semantic constraints in specific 
systems. He proposed an "infinite data" paradigm in 
which vocabulary limitations on recognition were lifted. 
Comments from the audience included the need to have 
general systems and algorithms that did not suffer from 
task- imposed constraints in their effectiveness. 
The second presentation was about the research 
underway at the Naval Research Laboratory. The 
speaker was Dr. Helen Gigley, Head of the Human 
Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory at NRL, who 
covered not only the human language technology (HLT) 
research and development in their HCI laboratory but 
also work at the Navy Center for Applied Research in 
Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI), both groups housed 
within the Information Technology Division of NRL. 
In particular, video-taped demonstrations were shown 
and the evaluation processes in their investigations of 
narrow-band speech and multimodal communication 
were explained, as well as the work on spoken language 
and graphics interaction at NCARAI. Questions and 
answers addressed the porting of ARPA supported HLT 
Work (Sphinx II) to new platforms and new applications 
at NRL. 
This presentation was followed by Dr. Melissa Holland 
of the U.S. Army Research Institute who described their 
work in the development of educational tools for the use 
of NLP techniques in the teaching and maintenance of 
language skills other than English, as driven by Army 
needs. The products of the exploratory development 
work are sufficiently well-developed prototypes that 
they are used in language labs and evaluation research 
environments. Languages covered included German, 
Arabic and Spanish, often using tools developed in the 
ARPA Planning program such as the KB and discourse 
tracker, with a deliberate orientation towards dual use of 
the developed technology. The Q&A period included 
an exchange relating to the near future orientation and 
work done by the language program within the ARI. 
The presentation by Dr. Y. T. Chien, Director of the 
Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems 
Division at NSF, focused on the National Information 
Infrastructure (NII) related committees in which he 
participates. Three areas were singled out: the Task 
Group which he, representing NSF, co-chairs with an 
ARPA representative on the new HPCC component 
called Information Infrastructure Technology and 
Applications (IITA); the work, co-chaired with NASA 
on Virtual Reality; and finally, the NII Technology 
Policy Group chaired by ARPA. All these groups 
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cover multimodal activities involving speech. In 
particular, Q&As addressed the NSF/ARPA initiative 
on HLT, which had just been awarded, and the broad 
range of aspects covered. 
The final presentation was made by Dr. Nino Varile, 
Scientific Technical Manager of the Linguistic Research 
and Engineering (LRE) Programme of the European 
Union. The programme described involves application 
projects, tools and resources, standardization and 
applied research. Particular projects singled out were the 
development of a common software platform and 
consensus building approaches for encoding. 
Additionally, an international collaborative project with 
NSF to carry out a survey of the state-of-the-art in NLP 
and speech, was mentioned. Questions were related to 
the industrial collaborative orientation of the 
programme which was acknowledged by the speaker. 
FINAL DISCUSSION 
A lively discussion followed in which approaches to 
standardization, testing, and user input versus leadership 
by imaginative technology managers were contrasted, in 
particular with regards to the ARPA program and that of 
the European Union. After some interesting arguments 
it was agreed that, while looking at the needs of the 
users is a necessary part of the development process, the 
user is often not the best judge of the Ix)tenfial ways in 
which the technology to solve the user's problems can 
be applied to expanded benefits. Both sides of the 
Atlantic agreed that a combination of user input with 
enlightened technology leadership is the best approach 
and that rather similar approaches were used in both 
continents. 
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