Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly important speech-driven Information Retrieval platforms that assist users with various tasks. We discuss open problems and challenges with respect to modeling spoken information queries for virtual assistants, and list opportunities where Information Retrieval methods and research can be applied to improve the quality of virtual assistant speech recognition. We discuss how query domain classification, knowledge graphs and user interaction data, and query personalization can be helpful to improve the accurate recognition of spoken information domain queries. Finally, we also provide a brief overview of current problems and challenges in speech recognition.

翻译：虚拟助手正日益成为重要的语音驱动信息检索平台，帮助用户完成各种任务。我们探讨了针对虚拟助手口语信息查询建模所面临的开放问题与挑战，并列举了信息检索方法与研究可用于提升虚拟助手语音识别质量的机遇。我们讨论了查询领域分类、知识图谱与用户交互数据以及查询个性化如何有助于提高口语信息领域查询的准确识别。最后，我们还简要概述了当前语音识别领域存在的问题与挑战。