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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Japanese 5th Generation Effort
Message-ID: <293@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 18-Aug-83 11:16:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.293
Posted: Thu Aug 18 11:16:24 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Aug-83 17:53:05 EDT
References: <4248@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M, Toronto, Canada
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There seems to be an analogy between the 5th generation project and
the ARPA-SUR project on automatic speech understanding of a decade ago.
Both are top-down, initiated with a great deal of hope, and dependent
on solving some "nitty-gritty problems" at the bottom. The result of
the ARPA-SUR project was at first to slow down research in ASR (automatic
speech recognition) because a lot of people got scared off by finding
how hard the problem really is. But it did, as Robert Amsler suggests
the 5th generation project will, show just what "nitty-gritty problems"
are important. It provided a great step forward in speech recognition,
not only for those who continued to work on projects initiated by
ARPA-SUR, but also for those who have come afterward. I doubt we would
now be where we are in ASR if it had not been for that apparently failed
project ten years ago. (Parenthetically, notice that a lot of the
subsequent advances in ASR have been due to the Japanese, and that
European/American researchers freely use those advances.)

Martin Taylor