The ATIS spoken language systems pilot corpus

Speech research has made tremendous progress in the past using the following paradigm:• define the research problem,• collect a corpus to objectively measure progress, and• solve the research problem.Natural language research, on the other hand, has typically progressed without the benefit of any corpus of data with which to test research hypotheses. We describe the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) pilot corpus, a corpus designed to measure progress in Spoken Language Systems that include both a speech and natural language component. This pilot marks the first full-scale attempt to collect such a corpus and provides guidelines for future efforts.