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

Darinka Verdonik, Matej 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.
Anthology ID:
L06-1153
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/279_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Darinka Verdonik and Matej Rojc. 2006. Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems (Verdonik & Rojc, LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/279_pdf.pdf