During Oct.1 to 18, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held the 2007 Language Recognition Evaluation (2007 LER).

The goal of the NIST Language Recognition evaluation (LRE) series is to establish the baseline of current performance capability for language recognition of conversational telephone speech and to lay the groundwork for further research efforts in the field. The series had its first evaluation in 1996. Since it entered the new millennium, LER was held for three times in 2003, 2005 and 2007 respectively. The organizations participated in also increased from 7 in 2003 to 21 in 2007. Most of the participated organizations are the outstanding research institute from Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. 　

In order to promote the application course of LER, NIST began to adopt the new record platform, which can transform the signal channel to multiple ones. Moreover, dialects were also collected to be under test. All together 29 institutes joined in the 2007 NIST LRE, among them 21 returned the system test result. Many well-known institutes participated in the test, such as MIT-LL, Cambridge, BUT, OHSU, LIMSI, LPT, UC Berkeley and so on. Some institute even joined hands, such as Lincoln Laboratory and IBM, Nanyang Technological University and InfoComm Research Center, Holland TNO, South Africa Spescom DataVoice and SUN University and so on.  

In the fierce competition, ThinkIT Lab of IACAS won the 6^th place in the test. Though our language recognition technology kept ahead in the domestic market, we had a long to go to catch up with the classic institutes in the world. The members of ThinkIT lab would work harder and harder to realize their persistent goal -- catching up with and overtaking the first in the world.