The Hearsay-II Speech-Understanding System: Integrating Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty (Erman, Hayes-Roth, Lesser, Reddy, 1980)

The Hearsay-II Speech-Understanding System: Integrating Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty (Erman, Hayes-Roth, Lesser, Reddy, 1980)

Lee D. Erman, Frederick Hayes-Roth, Victor R. Lesser, D. Raj Reddy

ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 12, No. 2, June 1980

JLJ - Curiously, this work published in 1980, cites a work published in 1981. I did not know that time travel existed in 1980. Someone must have time-traveled to 1981, read the paper in question, then returned to 1980, and published this work. (Actually, the cited 1981 work by A.R. Smith was scheduled to be published in 1981.)

p.213 The Hearsay-II system, developed during the DARPA-sponsored five-year speech understanding research program, represents both a specific solution to the speech-understanding problem and a general framework for coordinating independent processes to achieve cooperative problem-solving behavior... At each step in the interpretive process, ambiguity and uncertainty arise.
The Hearsay-II problem-solving framework... allocates limited processing resources first to the most promising incremental actions. The final configuration of the Hearsay-II system comprises problem-solving components to generate and evaluate speech hypotheses, and a focus-of-control mechanism to identify potential actions of greatest value... the system successfully integrates and coordinates all of these independent activities to resolve uncertainty and control combinatorics. Several adaptations of the Hearsay-II framework have already been undertaken in other problem-solving domains

p.249 Hearsay-II is implemented in the SAIL programming system [REIS76], an Algol-60 dialect with a sophisticated compile-time macro facility as well as a large number of data structures (including lists and sets) and control modes which are implemented fairly efficiently.