ACL-2000 Invited Speakers


Speaker Affiliations


Susan E. Brennan

Associate Professor and Cognitive/Experimental Area Head
Department of Psychology
State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA

Associate Editor
Discourse Processes


Roger K. Moore

Chief Scientific Officer
20/20 Speech Ltd.

Visiting Professor
University College London

President
International Speech Communication Association

President
Permanent Council of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing


Jun'ichi Tsujii

Professor and Head of Tsujii Laboratory
Department of Information Science
University of Tokyo

Professor of Computational Linguistics
Centre for Computational Linguistics
University of Science and Technology in Manchester (UMIST), UK


Schedule

Tuesday, 3 October
11:40 - 12:40 Susan E. Brennan Processes that Shape Conversation and their Implications for Computational Linguistics
Wednesday, 4 October
11:40 - 12:40 Jun'ichi Tsujii Generic NLP Technologies: Language, Knowledge and Information Extraction
Friday, 6 October
11:40 - 12:40 Roger K. Moore Spoken Language Technology: Where Do We Go From Here?



Abstracts


Processes that Shape Conversation and their Implications for Computational Linguistics

Susan E. Brennan

Experimental studies of interactive language use have shed light on the cognitive and interpersonal processes that shape conversation; corpora are the emergent products of these processes. I will survey studies that focus on under-modelled aspects of interactive language use, including the processing of spontaneous speech and disfluencies; metalinguistic displays such as hedges; interactive processes that affect choices of referring expressions; and how communication media shape conversations. The findings suggest some agendas for computational linguistics.


Generic NLP Technologies: Language, Knowledge and Information Extraction

Jun'ichi Tsujii

We have witnessed significant progress in NLP applications such as information extraction (IE), summarization, machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR), etc. The progress will be accelerated by advances in speech technology, which not only enables us to interact with systems via speech but also to store and retrieve texts input via speech.

The progress of NLP applications in this decade has been mainly accomplished by the rapid development of corpus-based and statistical techniques, while rather simple techniques have been used as far as the structural aspects of language are concerned.

In this paper, we will discuss how we can combine more sophisticated, linguistically elaborate techniques with the current statistical techniques and what kinds of improvement we can expect from such an integration of different knowledge types and methods.


Spoken Language Technology: Where Do We Go From Here?

Roger K. Moore

Recent years have seen dramatic developments in the capabilities and applications of spoken language technology. From a few niche applications for a range of expensive solutions, the field has developed to the point where keenly-priced products have swept the awards at consumer electronics shows. Speech recognisers has reached the high-street store, and a significant proportion of the developed world's population has now been exposed to the possibility of controlling one's computer, or creating a document, by voice.

This apparent progress in spoken language technology has been fuelled by a number of developments: the relentless increase in desktop computing power, the introduction of statistical modelling techniques, the availability of vast quantities of recorded speech material, and the institution of public system evaluations.

However, our understanding of the fundamental patterning in speech has progressed at a much slower pace, not least in the area of its high-level linguistic properties. Spoken language understanding continues to be an elusive goal, and the prosodic linkage between acoustic and linguistic patterning is still something of a mystery.

This talk will illuminate these issues, and will conclude with an analysis of the options for future spoken language R&D.


Last modified: Sat Sep 9, 2000