Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 18:46:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mary Hopkins <mhopkins@fas.harvard.edu>
To: Boston Voice Users <boston-voice-users@harvee.billerica.ma.us>
Subject: Re: GBC/ACM

>Conversational Spoken Language Systems for Human-Computer Interaction
>
>James Glass, Spoken Language Systems Group, Laboratory of Computer
>Science, MIT
>
>Thursday, 23 April 1998
>MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Room 518
>545 Technology Square
>(Joint Meeting with the IEEE-CS)
>Meeting starts at 6:30pm
>
>Meeting Overview
>As the user community for computers rapidly expands from experienced
>programmers to naive [sic] users, we must seriously address the issue of
>the human-computer interface.  It is highly desirable to allow a user to
>access information and solve problems via spoken input using their [sic]
>native language.  In many of these applications involving interactive
>problem solving (e.g. extracting information from a database), speech
>recognition technology must be augmented with natural language
>processing so that the speech can be understood, sometimes within the
>context of a verbal dialogue, and the appropriate, verbal response
>generated.
>
>In this talk I will present an overview of recent research at MIT on
>conversational system development.  I will outline some of the
>challenges facing researchers trying to move beyond recognition to
>complete understanding of the spontaneous-speech input.  I will then
>describe the approaches we are developing for speech recognition,
>language understanding and generation, meaning representation, as well
>as discourse and dialogue.  Our experiences with issues of data
>collection, system evaluation, portability, and multilinguality will
>also be discussed.
>
>The talk will incorporate both video clips and live demonstrations of
>several spoken language systems that have been developed in our group,
>including a web-based spoken language interface for on-line information
>access in the travel domain, and a telephone-based interface for weather
>forecast information.
>
>Speaker Biography
>James R. Glass (http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/jrg) obtained his Ph.D.
>degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1988.
> He is currently a Principal Research Scientist and Associate Head of
>the Spoken Language Systems Group in MIT's Laboratory for Computer
>Science.  Dr. Glass is a former member of the IEEE Signal Processing
>Society Technical Committee on Speech Processing and is currently and
>associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio
>Processing.
>
>This meeting is co-sponsored by the GBC/ACM and the Boston Section of
>the IEEE Computer Society.
>
>Directions to MIT LCS:
>The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science is located at 545 Technology
>Square on Main Street in Cambridge near the intersection of Main and
>Vassar.  Parking is available in front of the building.  The closest T
>stop is Kendall Square on the Red Line.  Please see
>http://whereis.mit.edu/doc/getting-to-mit.html for additional directions
>to MIT and http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?locate=lcs for a map showing
>the location of the MIT LCS.