The Sundial Speech Understanding and Dialogue Project: Results and Implications for Translation

This paper describes the ESPRIT SUNDIAL project which ran for five years, finishing 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 problem of specifying an interactive system are outlined and the method of Wizard-of-Oz simulation 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 and, particularly, interpretive telephony are identified.