@inproceedings{verdonik-rojc-2006-ready,
    title = "Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems",
    author = "Verdonik, Darinka  and
      Rojc, Matej",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Gangemi, Aldo  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Tapias, Daniel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}`06)",
    month = may,
    year = "2006",
    address = "Genoa, Italy",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/L06-1153/",
    abstract = "The paper represents the Turdis database of spontaneous conversations in tourist domain in Slovenian language. Database was built for use in developing speech-to-speech translation components, however it can be used also for developing dialog systems or used for linguistic researches. The idea was to record a database of telephone conversations in tourism where the naturalness of conversations is affected as little as possible while we still obtain a permission for recording from all the speakers. When recording in studio environment there can be many problems. It is especially difficult to imitate a tourist agent if a speaker does not have such experiences and therefore lacks the background knowledge that a tourist agent has. Therefore the Turdis database was recorded with professional tourist agents. The agreement with local tourist companies enabled that we recorded a tourist agent while he was at his working place in his working time answering the telephone. Callers were contacted individually and asked to use the Turdis system and make a call to selected tourist company. Technically the recording was done using PC ISDN card. Database was orthographically transcribed with Transcriber tool. At the present it includes cca 43 000 words."
}