The challenge of domain-independent speech understanding

To achieve widespread acceptance, speech understanding technology needs to be domain independent. Deep understanding, however, appears to require knowledge that is domain specific. Speech understanding technology, therefore, must be partitioned into domain-independent and domain-specific components. Development of domain-independent components could be promoted by creation of semantically annotated corpora. Any such corpus, however, would be difficult to produce and would necessarily be controversial because of lack of widespread agreement on principles of semantic analysis. The use of such a corpus for performance evaluation should therefore be left largely up to the research community rather than being imposed by funding agencies