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<Paper uid="H94-1001">
  <Title>Overview of the 1994 ARPA Human Language Technology Workshop</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="3" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. THE 1994 ARPA HUMAN
LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY
WORKSHOP
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> As with past workshops, the 1994 HLT Workshop provided a forum where researchers were able to share information about very recent technical progress in a highly interactive setting. The scope included all areas of spoken and written language research under ARPA's HLT program, including speech recognition, speech understanding, text understanding, information retrieval, and machine translation, with an emphasis on topics of particular current interest such as evaluation of language understanding systems, and statistical and learning methods.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The majority of the workshop participants receive funding under ARPA's HLT program.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Other participants included: government researchers and users of the technology; researchers not funded by ARPA who participate voluntarily in these programs; and selected visitors from both inside and outside the United States. Non-U.S. participation was particularly strong in 1994, with 30 attendees representing 9 countries; many of these non-U.S, attendees participated directly and voluntarily in the various formal evaluations of human language systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In all, there were 230 attendees at the 1994 Workshop, consisting of approximately 150 from ARPA sites, 30 U.S. government representatives, 30 non-U.S, participants, and 20 non-ARPA attendees from the U.S.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> For the first time, this HLT Workshop directly followed an ARPA Spoken Language Technology (SLT) Workshop which was held at the same location on March 6-8. This allowed the detailed reporting and discussion of the latest evaluations of speech recognition and spoken language systems to be held at the SLT Workshop, allowing time for broader coverage of technical topics at the HLT Workshop. It also facilitated the attendance at both Workshops of the non-U.S, participants in these evaluations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The SLT Workshop was chaired by Richard Stem of Carnegie Mellon University and attracted approximately 125 attendees. A separate SLT  motivation, mission, theme areas, accomplishments, and future directions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Doddington emphasized the key role of Human Language Technology in providing people with the ability to effectively use the National Information Infrastructure. He stated a three-part Human Language Technology Program Mission, to: develop Human Language Technologies of key importance;  , demonstrate Human Language Technologies in compelling application contexts; and * transfer Human Language Technologies into productive use.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Doddington emphasized the dual roles of ILechnology R&amp;D and technology transfer in serving this mission. In the ARPA HLT Program, R&amp;D progress is driven by establishing formal technical challenge tasks in the theme areas including speech recognition, speech understanding, document retrieval, information extraction from text, and machine translation, and by providing infrastructure support including corpus development and regular, formal evaluations of the technology. Technology transfer is driven by identifying critical needs and technology transfer champions, and supporting the transfer with focussed R&amp;D. Doddington summarized and highlighted recent progress in; spoken language understanding in the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) task; large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition; document detection; and machine translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> With regard to new technical directions, he highlighted the current investigation of a task-independent evaluation of understanding, referred to as Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), which constituted a major topic of discussion later in the Workshop.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="3" start_page="3" end_page="3" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. HIGHLIGHTS OF THE
WORKSHOP SESSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The Workshop was comprised of 14 sessions, including a government panel session and a demonstration session. For a good overview of the technical content of the workshop, the reader is encouraged to first read the Session Chairs' summaries which precede the collected papers from each of the sessions. These summaries provide perspective on the research reported as well as outlining the key points in each set of papers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A few of the highlights of the Workshop included: The impressive progress reported by the Linguistic Data Consortium (three papers in Session 1) in collecting and disseminating lexicons, text resources, and speech corpora which are supporting the advancement of Human Language Technology worldwide.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * The new hub and spoke paradigm for large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (CSR) evaluation, which has successfully balanced common evaluation and diverse research goals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The Human Language Evaluation Session, which included many diverse views on the evaluation of language understanding and a spirited discussion of the Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) approaches currently being explored in the ARPA HLT community.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> A strong Machine Translation Session, including a report on a very substantial recent evaluation which included 19 participants; the fact that all but three of these participants were volunteers not supported by ARPA is indicative of ARPA's world leadership role in this area.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> A Demonstration Session, organized and chaired by Victor Abrash, which included demonstrations of HLT for command and control data access, spoken language translation, access to data sources on the information highway, text retrieval and understanding, and reading education.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> A double-length session on Statistical and Learning Methods, highlighting the continuing progress in corpus-based approaches to text understanding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> A Government Panel, organized and chaired by Oscar Garcia, which included both U.S.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> and international views on the directions of Human Language Technology.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> A New Directions Session, highlighted by a presentation by a Canadian astronaut and speech researcher, Julie Payette, on applications of speech recognition in space, and also including two papers describing ways in which speech recognition technology has been applied to the automatic recognition of handwritten text.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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