Multilingual human-computer interactions: from information access to language learning

The paper describes the authors' recent work in developing multilingual conversational systems that support human-computer interactions. The approach is based on the premise that a common semantic representation can be extracted from the input for all languages, at least within the context of restricted domains. In the design of such systems, language dependent information is separated from the system kernel as much as possible, and encoded in external data structures. The internal system manager, discourse and dialogue component, and database are all maintained in a language transparent form. They describe two possible application areas for such multilingual capabilities: on-line information access using multilingual spoken dialogue, and the learning and maintenance of a foreign language using a multilingual conversational system.