2003 Symposium on Next Generation Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Although there have been significant advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) over the last twenty years using a pattern-matching paradigm, the progress has begun to slow recently. Furthermore, the current state-of-the-art has yet to rival human speech recognition capability. One potential area for improvement is to find ways to evaluate and incorporate the vast knowledge sources developed outside the ASR community and establish open sharable infrastructures to facilitate collaborative ASR research. As speech recognition technology is critical to realize the promise of universal access to information for all people, it is timely to examine options the community can take up to bridge the performance gap. This project is to organize a highly focused two-day symposium and invite top minds in US academia, industry and government to assess the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art ASR technologies, and discuss potential approaches to accelerating ASR advances. The symposium theme will be centered on integrating multi-disciplinary sources of knowledge, from acoustics, speech, linguistics, human computer interaction, cognitive science, signal processing, and computer science, into every stage of ASR component and system design. At the conclusion of the meeting, all the presentation materials will be collated into a report and disseminated to the research community and other stakeholders. This research should inspire new directions in ASR, conceptualize new cyber-infrastructures for research and education in speech science and technology, and recommend ways to lower ASR entry barriers and increase the talent pool in human language and communication research by enabling a diverse community of researchers.