Junlan Feng

Speech and language processing over the web

This article has provided a brief overview of how the marriage of speech and language technologies with the Web is changing the way people communicate and access information. Advances are happening at a rapid pace through improved algorithms, wider penetration of the Web, availability of data, and faster computing. As the Web continues to evolve, research initiatives need to continue to address difficult challenges in areas of information mining of multimedia data, multimodal search of Web and media contents, speaker recognition for reducing Internet fraud, interactive question/answering for Web-based self-service, Web mining for knowledge discovery, two-way language translation, and Web page personalization and ranking. Progress in these areas will help to generate exciting new business opportunities for mobile Internet, secure voice print, ubiquitous multilingual communication, IPTV, globalization of customer care, and information search of massive amounts of data.