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<Paper uid="H93-1009">
  <Title>A * Bilingual VOYAGER System 1</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In the fall of 1989, our group first demonstrated VOY-AGER, a system that can engage in verbal dialogues with users about a geographical region within Cambridge, Massachusetts \[2\]. The system can provide users with information about distances, travel times, or directions between objects located within this area (e.g., restaurants, hotels, post offices, subway stops), as well as information such as addresses or telephone numbers of the objects themselves. While VOYAGER is constrained both in its capabilities and domain of knowledge, it contains all the essential components of a spoken-language system, including discourse maintenance and language generation. The VOYAGER application provided us with our first experience with the development of spoken language systems, helped us understand the issues related to this endeavor, and provided a framework for our subsequent system development efforts \[3, 4\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  Over the past few years, we have become increasingly interested in developing multilingual spoken language systems. There are several ongoing international spoken language translation projects whose goal is to enable humans to communicate with each other in their imtive tongues \[5, 6\]. Our objective, however, is somewhat different. Specifically, we are interested in developing multilingual human-computer interfaces, such that the information stored in the database can be accessed and received in multiple spoken languages. We believe that there is great utility in having such systems, since information is fast becoming globally accessible. Furthermore, we suspect that this type of multilingual system may be easier to develop than speech translation systems, since the system only needs to anticipate the diversity of one side of the conversation, i.e., the human side. During the past year, we have begun to develop a multilingual version of VOYAGER. This paper will describe our work in extending VOYAGER'S capability from English to Japanese.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Since VOYAGER was originally designed only for English, a number of changes were necessary to accommodate multiple languages. In the next section, we describe our approach to developing multilingual systems, and the modifications made to the original system. A discussion of the specific implementation of the various components for Japanese will follow. Finally, performance evaluation of the Japanese VOYAGER system will be presented, followed by a brief description of future plans.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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