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This paper represents a status report on the MIT ATIS system. The most significant new achievement is that we now have a speech-input mode. It is based on the MIT SUMMIT system using context independent phone models, and includes a word-pair grammar with perplexity 92 (on the June-90 test set). In addition, we have completely redesigned the back-end component, in order to emphasize portability and extensibility. The parser now produces an intermediate semantic frame representation, which serves as the focal point for all back-end operations, such as history management, text generation, and SQL query generation. Most of those aspects of the system that are tied to a particular domain are now entered through a set of tables associated with a small artificial language for decoding them. We have also improved the display of the database table, making it considerably easier for a subject to comprehend the information given. We report here on the results of the official DARPA February-91 evaluation, as well as on results of an evaluation on data collected at MIT, for both speech input and text input.

As part of our effort in developing a spoken language system for interactive problem solving, we recently collected a sizeable amount of speech data. This database is composed of spontaneous sentences which were collected during a simulated human/machine dialogue. Since a computer log of the spoken dialogue was maintained, we were able to ask the subjects to provide read versions of the sentences as well. This paper documents the data collection process, and provides some preliminary analyses of the collected data.