LREC 2006 - Proceedings sorted by papers

Title	Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems
Authors	D. Verdonik, M. Rojc
Abstract	The paper represents the Turdis database of spontaneous conversations in tourist domain in Slovenian language. Database was built for use in developing speech-to-speech translation components, however it can be used also for developing dialog systems or used for linguistic researches. The idea was to record a database of telephone conversations in tourism where the naturalness of conversations is affected as little as possible while we still obtain a permission for recording from all the speakers. When recording in studio environment there can be many problems. It is especially difficult to imitate a tourist agent if a speaker does not have such experiences and therefore lacks the background knowledge that a tourist agent has. Therefore the Turdis database was recorded with professional tourist agents. The agreement with local tourist companies enabled that we recorded a tourist agent while he was at his working place in his working time answering the telephone. Callers were contacted individually and asked to use the Turdis system and make a call to selected tourist company. Technically the recording was done using PC ISDN card. Database was orthographically transcribed with Transcriber tool. At the present it includes cca 43 000 words.
Keywords
Full paper	Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems

Title

Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems

Authors

D. Verdonik, M. Rojc

Abstract

The paper represents the Turdis database of spontaneous conversations in tourist domain in Slovenian language. Database was built for use in developing speech-to-speech translation components, however it can be used also for developing dialog systems or used for linguistic researches. The idea was to record a database of telephone conversations in tourism where the naturalness of conversations is affected as little as possible while we still obtain a permission for recording from all the speakers. When recording in studio environment there can be many problems. It is especially difficult to imitate a tourist agent if a speaker does not have such experiences and therefore lacks the background knowledge that a tourist agent has. Therefore the Turdis database was recorded with professional tourist agents. The agreement with local tourist companies enabled that we recorded a tourist agent while he was at his working place in his working time answering the telephone. Callers were contacted individually and asked to use the Turdis system and make a call to selected tourist company. Technically the recording was done using PC ISDN card. Database was orthographically transcribed with Transcriber tool. At the present it includes cca 43 000 words.

Keywords

Full paper

Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems