The SUNDIAL speech understanding and dialogue project: Results and implications for translation

The ESPRIT SUNDIAL project ran forfive years, concluding in August 1993. The objective of the project was to design and build telephone-access spoken language interfaces to computer databases. After introducing the aims and objectives of the project, the problems ofspecifying an interactive system are outlined and the Wizard-of-Oz simulation method described. The architecture of the resulting system is introduced, and system transaction success results of up to 96.6% are reported. In the final section, some implications for machine translation - particularly interpretive telephony — are identified.