Workplan

Domains:
1.Tourism
2.Help desk

Languages:
1.English
2.German
3.Italian
4.French

Work packages:
1.Management
2.Requirements
3.Show-cases Development
4.Human Language Technology (HLT) Modules
5.Testing and Evaluation
6.Dissemination

Partners:
•ITC-irst. For Italian language and both domains: 
•Management
•Requirements
•CMU. For English language and both domains: 
•?
•UKA. For German language and both domains: 
•HLT modules
•CLIPS. For French language and both domains: 
•Dissemination
•APT (Trentino tourism association): 
•
•AETHRA: 
•Show-cases development
•ALCATEL:
•?

In the following, the term scientific partners will indicate ITC-irst, CMU, UKA and CLIPS.

Work packages
Management
....

Requirements
Tourism Domain Definition 
Help-desk Domain Definition 
The users are the partners having the necessary knowledge to define the domains in detail. They will provide all the material necessary to a complete conceptual description of the domain. 
Intermediate Representation Definition 
The design of the IR is critical for the project success, as it determines the set of all and only the things which are to be considered. If it requires too complete a representation, then it will induce a failure everytime something is missing, due to either disfluencies in the input or an error in the system. On the other hand, if something can not be represented in the IR, then there is no way of taking it into account. Fortunately, all the scientific partners have a successful preceeding common experience which will surely be a very good starting point, both in positive for the things which worked and in negative, for the detected problems. 
A point to be considered is whether we should include in the IR some multimodal information, what and in which way.
CMU has the best experience to guide the IR design. Nevertheless, all the scientific partners need to be involved in it, in order to have the best results.

Show-case development
The overall system hardware architecture needs to be designed in the perspective of the future real application of the system. Nevertheless, the show-cases architecture can accomplish the developments requirments, provided that an easy way to pass from the show-case design to the future system one is given.
The final system will consider a service provider, corresponding to the system user, that is the tourist destination in the first scenario, and the help-desk provider in the second one. Of course, it will be necessary that all the system is in the service provider site, as the requirements the potential client is required to fulfill should be minimum. The  client need only to have a personal computer, WEB access and a browser in order to access the service. 
On the other hand, as long as the system is under development, it is advisable that every module is as close as possible to the site which developed it and which is therefore  responsible for its debugging and maintenance. Therefore, during development it is better to have a distributed architecture, where the HLT modules are in the site which developed them and only the IR and the material supporting the negotiation are exchanged.
First Show-case (tourism)
Second Show-case (tourism + help desk)
Hardware architecture
Software architecture
HLT modules
User study 
In order to determine the requirements for the system, it is very important to deeply study the way in which the user performs the task the system should manage to perform. While the domain definition is independent from the language, the user study will focus on the language dependent aspects. This will permit both the design of the functional requirement of the system and the show-cases HLT modules evaluation. This study includes both interviews with the users and the study of data collected with their help, if possible directly on the field. If on the field collection will not be possible, then simulations will be planned, by strictly following their indications.
Each scientific site will collect and annotate the data needed for the development and evaluations of the modules it is responsible of.
HLT Modules
The system architecture is based on an Intermediate Representation (IR) independent from the source and target languages. The translation from language A to language B is then performed in two steps. First of all, the IR is built corresponding to the input utterance, in language A. Then, from the IR, the output utterance in language B is generated.
For every language, two chains need to be built: an analysis chain for building the IR from the input utterance, and a synthesis chain, for g:enerating the speech utterance from the IF. The two chains are referred to as HLT Modules. Every scientific partner will use different approaches for realizing these modules: therefore, also their comparison will be taken into account.
Every site has the responsibility of building these modules for the language it considers: English for CMU, German for UKA, Italian for ITC-irst, French for CLIPS. 
Testing and evaluation
Dissemination
Temporal plan

(number of month - task)

First showcase for tourism:
1.
2.
3.Requirements design (Tourism domain definition, user study and IR for tourism)
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.Implementation (HLT modules and system integration)
10.
11.
12.Testing/Evaluation of the first tourism showcase

Second showcase for a more general tourism application and help desk:
13.
14.
15.Requirements design (Tourism domain extension definition, help desk domain definition, user study and IR for tourism extension and for help desk definition)
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.Implementation (HLT modules and system integration)
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30. Testing/Evaluation of the second complete showcase