Automatic speech recognition and its application to information extraction

Abstract

This paper describes recent progress and the author's perspectives of speech recognition technology. Applications of speech recognition technology can be classified into two main areas, dictation and human-computer dialogue systems. In the dictation domain, the automatic broadcast news transcription is now actively investigated, especially under the DARPA project. The broadcast news dictation technologyhas recently been integrated with information extraction and retrieval technology and many application systems, such as automatic voice document indexing and retrieval systems, are under development. In the human-computer interaction domain, a variety of experimental systems for informationretrieval through spoken dialogue are being investigated. In spite of the remarkable recent progress, we are still behind our ultimate goal of understanding free conversational speech uttered by any speaker under any environment. This paper also describes the most important research issues that we should attack in order to advance to our ultimate goal of fluent speech recognition.