EditorialIntroduction to the Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding in Conversational Systems
Section snippets
Introduction and previous work
Understanding spoken language is about extracting the meaning from speech utterances. Although there continues to be endless debates in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience on what constitutes the meaning of a natural language utterance (Jackendoff, 2002), for the purpose of human–computer interactive systems, “meaning” is regarded as a representation that can be executed by an interpreter in order to change the state of the system. In such systems, understanding spoken
History of SLU
From the early 1990s, there have been a variety of practical goal-oriented spoken dialog systems (SDSs) for applications in limited domains. These systems, typically, identified the users’ intents expressed in natural language, and acted on them appropriately, in order to satisfy the users’ requests. The intents and actions were predefined to suit the capabilities of the system. In such systems, typically, the speaker’s utterance is first recognized using an automatic speech recognizer (ASR).
About this volume
In the past few years, there has been a substantial increase in interest in information extraction from the NLP community, question-answering in the information retrieval community, and spoken dialog systems in the speech processing community. Spoken language understanding is an especially attractive topic for cross-fertilization of ideas between speech, AI, IR and NLP communities. This Special Issue is in part a compilation of extended versions of the papers presented at the Spoken Language
Future directions
The papers in this issue echo similar themes in terms of the future directions for research in spoken language understanding:
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the authors for contributing to this volume, Speech Communication Journal Editor-in-Chief Renato De Mori, and Elsevier Editorial Production Department (Linda Mulder and Mary Lynn van Dijk) for their help and patience, and the anonymous reviewers for selecting and improving the presentation of the papers.
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Understanding Is a Process
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2018, ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - ProceedingsMultimodality and Spoken Dialogue Systems
2016, SpringerBriefs in Speech TechnologyA joint model for discovery of aspects in utterances
2012, 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2012 - Proceedings of the ConferenceHelping agents help their users despite imperfect speech recognition
2011, AAAI Spring Symposium - Technical ReportDigital speech technology: An overview
2010, Computer Synthesized Speech Technologies: Tools for Aiding Impairment