- Lori S. Levin, D. Gates, A. Lavie, A. Waibel. 1998. An interlingua based on domain actions for machine translation of task-oriented dialogues. Abstract: This paper describes an interlingua for spoken language translation that is based on domain actions in the travel planning domain. Domain actions are composed of speech acts (e.g., request-information), attributes (e.g., size, price), and objects (e.g., hotel, ﬂight) and can take arguments. Development of the interlingua is guided by a database containing travel dialogues in English, Korean, Japanese, and Italian. There are currently 423 domain actions that cover hotel reservation and transportation. The interlingua will soon be extended to cover tours, tourist attractions, and events. The interlingua is used by the C-STAR speech translation consortium for translating travel planning dialogues in six languages: English, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian, and French. The paper also addresses the role of the interlingua in Carnegie Mellon’s J ANUS translation system.
