Elsevier

Speech Communication

Volume 48, Issues 3–4, March–April 2006, Pages 233-238
Speech Communication

Editorial
Introduction to the Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding in Conversational Systems

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2005.09.001Get rights and content

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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