As users become more accustomed to using their mobile devices to organize and schedule their lives, there is more of a demand for applications that can make that process easier. Automatic speech recognition technology has already been developed to enable essentially unlimited vocabulary in a mobile setting. Understanding the words that are spoken is the next challenge. In this paper, we describe efforts to develop a dataset and classifier to recognize named entities in speech. Using sets of both real and simulated data, in conjunction with a very large set of real named entities, we created a challenging corpus of training and test data. We use these data to develop a classifier to identify names and locations on a word-by-word basis. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the data and determining a set of features to use for named entity recognition. We report on our classification performance on these data, as well as point to future work in improving all aspects of the system.

Spoken dialogue systems are common interfaces to backend data in information retrieval domains. As more data is made available on the Web and IE technology matures, dialogue systems, whether they be speech- or text-based, will be more in demand to provide user-friendly access to this data. However, dialogue systems must become both easier to configure, as well as more informative than the traditional form-based systems that are currently available. We present techniques in this paper to address the issue of automating both content selection for use in summary responses and in system initiative queries.