One DODer's View of ARPA Spoken Language Directions

DOD support for ARPA/HLT speech research stems from the belief that large vocabulary continuous speech recognition and speech understanding will have advantages in portability, and in the variety of applications sustainable from a single, basic speech system. With some imagination one can envision applications in such remotely related areas as speaker identification and language identification. changes in a problem over time. Once the initial system is trained, an adequate port to a new problem should be possible with limited training. Improved performance should be achievable over time by bootstrapping techniques that require minimum user interaction.