While spoken language systems are now used for many applications, language engineering technology is still not adequate for all important tasks. For instance, automatic recognition of natural conversational speech results in incorrect transcription of one- third of the words spoken. Parsing sentences from newspaper articles leads to faulty automatic analysis of half the sentences. The need to make progress in this important area is obvious. The number of available language engineering personnel is small and relatively few universities presently educate students capable of performing the required tasks. The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University is organizing a six week workshop on Language Engineering from July 13 to August 24, 1998, in which teams of professionals and students will work together to advance the state of the art. Three topics will be addressed: (1) Dynamic Segmental Models of Speech Coarticulation; (2) Rapid Speech Recognizer Adaptation to New Speakers; (3) Core Natural Language Processing Technology Applicable to Multiple Languages. University professors, leading industrial and government researchers presently working in widely dispersed locations, graduate students, and six or more undergraduate students selected through a nationwide search will participate in this workshop. Significant technological innovations, training of students, cross-fertilization of ideas from various disciplines, initiation of collaborative research, and creation of valuable training and test corpora are expected to result from this endeavor.
