Putting natural in natural language processing

Human language is firstly spoken and only secondarily written. Text, however, is a very convenient and efficient representation oflanguage, and modern civilization has made it ubiquitous. Thus the field of NLP has overwhelmingly focused on processing written ratherthan spoken language. Work on spoken language, on the other hand, has been siloed off within the largely separate speech processingcommunity which has been inordinately preoccupied with transcribing speech into text. Recent advances in deep learning have led to afortuitous convergence in methods between speech processing and mainstream NLP. Arguably, the time is ripe for a unification of thesetwo fields, and for starting to take spoken language seriously as the primary mode of human communication. Truly natural language processingcould lead to better integration with the rest of language science and could lead to systems which are more data-efficient and morehuman-like, and which can communicate beyond the textual modality.