Towards speech as a knowledge resource

Speech is a tantalizing mode of human communication. On the one hand, humans understand speech with ease and use speech to express complex ideas, information, and knowledge. On the other hand, automatic speech recognition with computers is still very hard, and extracting knowledge from speech is even harder. In this paper we motivate the study of speech as a knowledge resource and briefly survey a family of related applications and systems being developed at IBM Research aimed towards the goal of exploiting speech as a knowledge resource.