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<Paper uid="W02-0717">
  <Title>A Multi-Perspective Evaluation of the NESPOLE! Speech-to-Speech Translation System</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="1" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> is a speech-to-speech machine translation project designed to provide fully functional speech-to-speech capabilities within real-world settings of common users involved in e-commerce applications. The project is a collaboration between three European research groups  Nespole! { NEgotiation through SPOken Language in E-commerce. See the project web-site at http://nespole.itc.it for further details.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (IRST in Trento, Italy; ISL at Universit&amp;quot;at Karlsruhe (TH); and CLIPS at Universit eJoseph Fourier in Grenoble, France), one US research group (ISL at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA) and two industrial partners (APT; Trento, Italy { the Trentino provincial tourism board, and AETHRA; Ancona, Italy { a tele-communications company). The project is funded jointly by the European Commission and the US NSF. Over the past two years, we have developed a fully functional showcase of the Nespole! system within the domain of travel and tourism, and have signi cantly improved system performance and usability based on a series of studies and evaluations with real users. Our experience has shown that improving translation quality is only one of several important issues that must be addressed in achieving a practical real-world speech-to-speech translation system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper describes how we tackled these issues and evaluates their e ect on system performance and usability. We focus on four main issues: (1) assessing system performance under various network tra c conditions and architectural con gurations; (2) a study on the usage and utility of multi-modality in the context of multi-lingual communication; (3) a comparison of the features of the individual speech recognition engines, and (4) an end-to-end evaluation of the demonstration system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Association for Computational Linguistics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Algorithms and Systems, Philadelphia, July 2002, pp. 121-128. Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech-to-Speech Translation:</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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