DARPA Speech Understanding Research

Introduction

DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. In 1970, among such technologies was speech recognition. As the DARPA's then-director George Heilemeir stated, "Get computers to read Morse code in the presence of other code and noise, get computers to identify/detect key words in a stream of speech, [...] make a real contribution to command and control, and; do a good thing in sonar". Thus, the main reason why it was the US Ministry of Defense who would fund such a project is that it could serve the navy's purposes.

Historical Context

There had been partially successful attempts to understand discrete speech (see, for example, Bell's Audrey) but no system to understand speech that is continious existed at the time. Moreover, previous methods dealt with vocabularies no larger than 200 words (e.g., IBM's 16-word "Shoebox"), while DARPA's SUR aimed at a vocabulary with at least one thousand words. Overall, the goals of this five-year project were as follows:

Accept connected speech

From many cooperative speakers

Accepting 1000 words

Yielding only <10% semantic errors

Real-time understanding

Key Innovations

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Impact

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Future research

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References

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Group members

• Igor Marchenko
• Wangyiyao Zhou
• Yanpei Ouyang
• Youyang Cai
• Yi Lei