Within the EC SQEL project, the German EVAR spoken dialogue system has been extended to handle four different languages and domains: German, Slovak, and Czech (national train connections), and Slovenian (European flights). The SQEL demonstrator can also access databases on the WWW, enabling users without an internet connection to meet their information needs by just using the phone. When the system starts up, the caller is free to use any of the implemented languages. A multilingual word recognizer implicitly identifies the language, which is then associated with the appropriate domain and database. For the remainder of the dialogue, the corresponding monolingual recognizer is employed. The existence of language-independent parameters (e.g. goal/source location) has meant that porting the system to a new language does not involve an extensive restructuring of the interpretation process within the Dialogue Manager. This is sufficiently flexible to switch between the different domains and languages.
Cite as: Aretoulaki, M., Harbeck, S., Gallwitz, F., Nöth, E., Niemann, H., Ivanecky, J., Ipsic, I., Pavesic, N., Matousek, V. (1998) SQEL: a multilingual and multifunctional dialogue system. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0329, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-76
@inproceedings{aretoulaki98_icslp,
author={Maria Aretoulaki and Stefan Harbeck and Florian Gallwitz and Elmar Nöth and Heinrich Niemann and Jozef Ivanecky and Ivo Ipsic and Nikola Pavesic and Vaclav Matousek},
title={{SQEL: a multilingual and multifunctional dialogue system}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0329},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-76}
}