Expanding the scope of the ATIS task: the ATIS-3 corpus

The Air Travel Information System (ATIS) domain serves as the common evaluation task for ARPA spoken language system developers. To support this task, the Multi-Site ATIS Data COllection Working group (MADCOW) coordinates data collection activities. This paper describes recent MADCOW activities. In particular, this paper describes the migration of the ATIS task to a richer relational database and development corpus (ATIS-3) and describes the ATIS-3 corpus. The expanded database, which includes information on 46 US and Canadian cities and 23,457 flights, was released in the fall of 1992, and data collection for the ATIS-3 corpus began shortly thereafter. The ATIS-3 corpus now consists of a total of 8297 released training utterances and 3211 utterances reserved for testing, collected at BBN, CMU, MIT, NIST and SRI. 2906 of the training utterances have been annotated with the correct information from the database. This paper describes the ATIS-3 corpus in detail, including breakdowns of data by type (e.g. context-independent, context-dependent, and unevaluable)and variations in the data collected at different sites. This paper also includes a description of the ATIS-3 database. Finally, we discuss future data collection and evaluation plans.