Natural Language and Speech: Symposium Proceedings, Brussels, November 26-27, 1991 (ESPRIT Basic Research Series) - Hardcover

This volume in the Basic Research Series consists of the proceedings of the Symposium on Natural Language and Speech held during the ESPRIT Conference of November 1991 - a conference that serves to open up ESPRIT results not only to the ESPRIT community but also to the entire European IT industry and its users. The symposium is organised by the newly launched Network of Excellence on Language and Speech (3701) which brings together the foremost European experts and institutions in these two domains. By bringing together these two communities, which have so far been working in relative isolation from each other, the network aims to augment the focusing of research onto the long-term goal of the "construction of an integrated model of the cognitive chain linking speech to reasoning via natural language". To advance towards this industrially significant goal, the network operates at different levels - a strategy for research, a coordination for the training of needed researchers and a coordination of the use of its resource and communication infrastructure for the most efficient interworking of the members of the community who are spread all over Europe. This symposium is a small but significant building block for the achievement of the goals of the network.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Symposium onNatural Language and Speech held during the ESPRITconference of November 1991. The symposiumwas organized bythe newly launched Network of Excellence on Language andSpeech which brings together the foremost European expertsand institutions in the two domains. The proceedings contain ten invited papers from leadingexperts in language and speech research, together with a setof position papers from a panel session on 'Spoken languagesystems: technological goals and integration issues'. Thepapers cover a wide spectrum of research topics, rangingfrom logical aspects of discourse structure to problems ofprosody and automatic speech understanding. A recurrenttheme is the development of an integrated cognitivelymotivated theory of the process by which spoken language isunderstood. This volume is the second of the ESPRIT Basic ResearchSeries. The ESPRIT Basic Research efforts aim atforging stronglinks between academic and industrial teamscarrying out research, often interdisciplinary, at theforefront of information technology. The quality of contentof this series and its broad distribution should have amajorimpact in making these advances accessible to bothacademic and industrial researchers.