Building And Sharing Multilingual Speech Resources Using ERIM Generic Platforms

In the framework of projects ChinFaDial and ERIM we have developed in recent years several platforms allowing to handle various aspects of bilingual spoken dialogues on the web —mainly, spontaneous speech corpus collection through distant human interpreting. Current development of the core ERIM-Interp and ERIM-Collect platforms now includes multimodal user interaction, integration of some machine aids (such as speech turn logs through speech recognition, or tentatively speech machine translation, both based on server-grounded market products), and next, online aids to speakers and/or interpreters. First collected data should be made available on the web in fall 2004 (DistribDial) along with, as soon as available, a robust version of the collecting platform, in order to promote collaborative building, and sharing, of "raw" unannotated multilingual speech corpora. A variant of the ERIM environment is to extend to distant e-training in interpreting, possibly creating situations which should in turn, in our view, foster larger-scale data collection and sharing in open access mode.