MLIAM: NESPOLE! - Negotiating through Spoken Language in E-commerce

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project, which will be carried out by a consortium of six partners in the US and Europe, aims to remove language barriers and enable the broad general public to do business on the internet via an effective cross lingual human to human communication facility. Two major obstacles toward this goal will be attacked: the domain limitation of speech translation systems, and the use of advanced multi-modal interfaces and their integration with language assistance functions. The PI's team will exploit a mixture of strengths in a multi engine approach, while also expanding the basic capabilities of the engines to enhance their robustness and portability. Prototype systems involving actual service providers will be configured and studied in the context of extensive e-commerce use. Four of the partners (CMU, University of Karlsruhe, IRST, CLIPS) are scientific institutions who have worked together for many years within the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR) and have an elaborate and solid base of state-of-the art speech translation technology at their disposal. The two commercial partners (APT and AETHRA) will provide Web-based and video-conferencing infrastructure along with a user/customer business community for extensive and realistic user studies. The prototype system (or set of systems) constructed in the course of the project will be tested and demonstrated via two showcase applications- one in the more limited travel domain, the other in a very broad help-desk scenario in which real users will conduct multi-modal and translingual e-commerce transactions. The technology resulting from this project will have immediate relevancy to numerous and diverse other applications that require natural language understanding in multi-modal settings. I