We describe a multilingual Open Source CALL game, CALL-SLT, which reuses speech translation technology developed using the Regulus platform to create an automatic conversation partner that allows intermediate-level language students to improve their fluency. We contrast CALL-SLT with Wang's and Seneff's ``translation game'' system, in particular focussing on three issues. First, we argue that the grammar-based recognition architecture offered by Regulus is more suitable for this type of application; second, that it is preferable to prompt the student in a language-neutral form, rather than in the L1; and third, that we can profitably record successful interactions by native speakers and store them to be reused as online help for students. The current system, which will be demoed at the conference, supports four L2s (English, French, Japanese and Swedish) and two L1s (English and French). We conclude by describing an evaluation exercise, where a version of CALL-SLT configured for English L2 and French L1 was used by several hundred high school students. About half of the subjects reported positive impressions of the system.

Regulus is an Open Source platform that supports construction of rule-based medium-vocabulary spoken dialogue applications. It has already been used to build several substantial speech-enabled applications, including NASA’s Clarissa procedure navigator and Geneva University’s MedSLT medical speech translator. System like these would be far more useful if they were available on a hand-held device, rather than, as with the present version, on a laptop. In this paper we describe the Open Source framework we have developed, which makes it possible to run Regulus applications on generally available mobile devices, using a distributed client-server architecture that offers transparent and reliable integration with different types of ASR systems. We describe the architecture, an implemented calendar application prototype hosted on a mobile device, and an evaluation. The evaluation shows that performance on the mobile device is as good as performance on a normal desktop PC.

In this article we address the task of automatic text structuring into linear and non-overlapping thematic episodes. Our investigation reports on the use of various lexical, acoustic and syntactic features, and makes a comparison of how these features influence performance of automatic topic segmentation. Using datasets containing multi-party meeting transcriptions, we base our experiments on a proven state-of-the-art approach using support vector classification.

This article describes an interface for searching and browsing multimodal recordings of group meetings. We provide first an overall perspective of meeting processing and retrieval applications, and distinguish between the media/modalities that are recorded and the ones that are used for browsing. We then proceed to describe the data and the annotations that are stored in a meeting database. Two scenarios of use for the transcript-based query and browsing interface (TQB) are then outlined: search and browse vs. overview and browse. The main functionalities of TQB, namely the database backend and the multimedia rendering solutions are described. An outline of evaluation perspectives is finally provided, with a description of the user interaction features that will be monitored.