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<Paper uid="H89-2008">
  <Title>THE VOYAGER SPEECH UNDERSTANDING SYSTEM: A PROGRESS REPORT*</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Recently, we have been directing our research effort towards spoken language understanding as part of the DARPA Spoken Language System program. The project is motivated by the belief that many of the applications suitable for human/machine interaction using speech typically involve interactive problem solving. That is, in addition to converting the speech signal to text, the computer must also understand the linguistic structure of a sentence in order to generate the correct response. We have focused our attention on three main issues. First, the system must integrate speech recognition with natural language in order to achieve speech understanding. Second, the system must have a realistic application domain, and be able to translate spoken input into appropriate actions. Finally, the system must begin to deal with spontaneous speech, since people do not always utter grammatically well-formed sentences during a spoken dialogue.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Over the past six months, we have constructed the skeleton of a spoken language system. The purpose of this paper is to describe the various components of this system. In related activities, we have collected a sizeable spontaneous speech database, and have used the data for analyses, system training and evaluation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The collection and analysis of the spontaneous speech database, and the preliminary evaluation of our spoken language system are described in two companion papers that appear elsewhere in these proceedings \[1,2\].</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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