Assessment and Evaluation 4.1 General Principles of Specification and Assessment of Speech and Language Processing Systems

Very few speech and language processing applications involve “stand-alone” speech and language technology. Speech, handwriting and text provide essential components of the more general human computer interface alongside other input/output modalities such as pointing, imaging and graphics. This means that the actions and behaviours of the speech and language-specific components of a complex multi-modal “human-computer interface” (HCI) inevitably have to be orchestrated with respect to the other modalities and to the application itself, and this is usually achieved by some form of interactive dialogue process (simultaneously taking into account the wide range of human factors involved).