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

The ESPRIT SUNDIAL project ran for five 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 of specifying 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.