Twenty-Five Years of Evolution in Speech and Language Processing

Dong Yu, Yifan Gong, Michael A. Picheny, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Rohit Prasad, Heiga Zen, Jan Skoglund, Jan Honza Cernocký, Lukás Burget, Abdelrahman Mohamed

Abstract: In this article, we summarize the evolution of speech and language processing (SLP) in the past 25 years. We first provide a snapshot of popular research topics and the associated state of the art (SOTA) in various subfields of SLP 25 years ago, and then highlight the shift in research topics over the years. We describe the major breakthroughs in each of the subfields and the main driving forces that led us to the SOTA today. Societal impacts and potential future directions are also discussed.