Research Framework

Abstract

Spoken language projects are mainly concerned with applications for information retrieval, remote control and the support of human-to-human communication. Information retrieval is scanning and selecting information according to user-specific requirements. Examples are the European projects LE-ACCESS (Automated Call Center Through Speech Understanding System) and LE-ARISE (Automatic Railway Information), the ATIS (Air Travel Information Services) project under the sponsorship of the American AREA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) research organization, the European projects ESPRIT-MASK (Multimodal Multimedia Automated Service Kiosk), ESPRIT-SUNDIAL (Speech Understanding and Dialogue) and the ESPRIT Long-Term Research Concerted Action DISC (Spoken Language Dialogue Systems and Components - Best practice in development and evaluation). Remote control applications help to get access to a wide range of complicated and sometimes inconsistent user interfaces. Examples are the European programs TIDE-HOME (Home applications Optimum Multimedia/multimodal system for Environment control) and LE-VODIS (Voice Operated Driver Information Systems). Example for applications that support human-to-human communication are C-STAR and VERBMOBIL, a language technology project in the field of automatic machine translation. The project is funded by the German Ministry of Research and Technology (BMFT).