Effects of Language Ontology on Transatlantic Automatic Speech Understanding Research Collaboration in the Air Traffic Management Domain

As researchers around the globe develop applications for the use of Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain, Air Traffic Control (ATC) language ontologies will play a critical role in enabling research collaboration. The MITRE Corporation (MITRE) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), having independently developed ATC language ontologies for specific applications, recently compared these ontologies to identify opportunities for improvement and harmonization. This paper extends the topic in two ways. First, this paper describes the specific ways in which ontologies facilitate the sharing of and collaboration on data, models, algorithms, metrics, and applications in the ATM domain. Second, this paper provides comparative analysis of word frequencies in ATC speech in the United States and Europe to illustrate that, whereas methods and tools for evaluating ASRU applications can be shared across researchers, the specific models would not work well between regions due to differences in the underlying corpus data.