\mysection{Introduction}
\label{intro}

Recent technological advances in computing and networking infrastructure have
opened up the opportunity of new and exciting applications for the broad
general public.  Among these, Electronic Commerce (E-commerce) has emerged as
the application with the greatest utility for everyday general usage,
resulting in enormous growth over the last few years, with expectations of
orders of magnitude further growth in the upcoming decade.  E-commerce opens
the possibility of selling goods and services on a global market supported by
the World-Wide Web.  Up to now, however, interactions have mainly been menu
based, guiding customers through a predesigned choice space allowing a limited
set of predefined results.  The next generation of E-commerce will need to
overcome this limitation.  Similar to today's ``traditional'' commerce,
E-commerce should develop into a collaborative activity involving information
presentation, negotiation, recommendation and problem solving, in which the
customer is allowed to explore alternative solutions, dynamically adapting
his/her goals, while the E-service provider reacts by eliciting unexpressed
needs and configuring viable alternatives.

In order to enable E-commerce with human negotiation, the underlying
technology must be capable of dealing with human-to-human communication.
Furthermore, as the reach of electronic markets naturally transcends national
boundaries, linguistic boundaries must also be removed.  Transnational
multilingual human-to-human communication must then be provided to enable
flexible and effective E-commerce world-wide.  E-commerce service providers
can partially solve the problem by using teams of human operators covering a
variety of relevant languages.  However, such solutions are expensive and may
even be infeasible in the context of specific tasks such as product
maintenance, trouble shooting and repair, where the relevant operator must
possess both technical and language competence.  Resorting to a lingua franca,
such as English, is only a poor substitute and disenfranchises the providers
from their markets and customers.

{\sc Nespole!} aims at providing a system capable of supporting
advanced needs in E-commerce and E-service by fully integrating
automatic speech-to-speech translation (henceforth, STST) into the
underlying technology.  The project builds on years of research
experience on STST by the project partners both within and outside of
C-STAR~\footnote{Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research
{\tt http://www.c-star.org}}, as well as on research conducted by
various other national and international projects (such as Verbmobil).
However, {\sc Nespole!}  will not only address accuracy of
translation, but will extend the investigation to the ability of
humans to negotiate and jointly solve problems.  Enabling effective
cross-lingual spoken human-to-human communication in the context of
multimodal interaction in a joint workspace is the overarching
challenge of this project.  It will feature multiple synergistic
translation programs (using a multi-engine approach) that range from
concept driven analysis and interlingua based translation modules, to
simple dictionary and phrase-book lookup to statistical direct
translation schemes.  {\sc Nespole!}  will also provide for non-verbal
communication by way of multimedia presentations, shared collaborative
spaces and multimodal interaction and manipulation of the objects in
these joint E-commerce spaces.

The STST and multimedia technologies developed in the course of the project
will be demonstrated by means of two showcases. The first, at the end of the
first fourteen months of the project, will support multilingual negotiation
and discussion between a tourist information/service provider (a so-called
{\it destination}) and a customer.  The goal of the interaction is to plan a
trip, by exploring a wide range of available options for various sub-tasks,
including travel, accommodation, attractions and recreation, cultural events,
dining and so on.\footnote{Tourism is one of the economical sectors with more
growth chances, and among those to take the greatest advantage of the
availability of telecommunication supports such as the Web, video-conference,
etc. Also, tourism is involved in an important change consisting in a shift
from the current broker-supported market (agencies, tour operators) to a
situation in which the customer directly contacts and negotiates with a local
representative of service providers (the destinations). Such a change is
motivated by, and at the same time induces a parallel shift from ways to
organize the offer around a fixed number of solutions, towards scenarios in
which the keywords are flexibility and negotiation.}  In a second showcase,
the tourist scenario will be greatly expanded.  In addition, a second,
completely different domain will be addressed, consisting of a video help-desk
for technical support, trouble shooting and repair, also capable of acting as
a training environment for local retailers and technicians of an international
company. Four languages will be considered: English, German, French and
Italian.

