Spoken Language Processing: Time to Look Outside?

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the field of spoken language processing has made impressive progress from simple laboratory demonstrations to mainstream consumer products. However, commercial applications such as Siri highlight the fact that there is still some way to go in creating Autonomous Social Agents that are truly capable of conversing effectively with their human counterparts in real-world situations. This paper suggests that it may be time for the spoken language processing community to take an interest in the potentially important developments that are occurring in related fields such as cognitive neuroscience, intelligent systems and developmental robotics. It then gives an insight into how such ideas might be integrated into a novel Mutual Beliefs Desires Intentions Actions and Consequences (MBDIAC) framework that places a focus on generative models of communicative behaviour which are recruited for interpreting the behaviour of others.