Natural Language Dialogue group

In this paper we describe the first phase of development of our speech-to-speech system between English and Modern Persian under the DARPA Babylon program. We give an overview of the various system components: the front end ASR, the machine translation system and the speech generation system. Challenges such as the sparseness of available spoken language data and solutions that have been employed to maximize the obtained
benefits from using these limited resources are examined. Efforts in the creation of the user interface and the underlying dialog management system for mediated communication are described.