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\title{\vspace{-0.5in}
       {{\sc Spectrum}:\\ 
       Speech Communication and Translation\\ Under Mobile Environments\\
       Proposal for NSF ITR Program\\
       Project Summary\vspace{-0.5in}}}
\author{}
\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

The focus of the proposed \spectrum project is communication robustness in
spoken language translation (SLT).  In addition to conducting scientific
research to advance the state-of-the-art in SLT, we will build a prototype of
a mobile platform for travel related services.  The platform will include
spoken language translation for human-human communication as well as spoken
human-machine dialogue for other information and services.  Both spoken
human-human communication and human-machine communication will be enhanced
with fall-back modalities to smooth over communication failures.  Evaluation
will be based on a suite of metrics related to usability.

\spectrum is designed to be a joint collaborative project between our group 
at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon and three
European research groups at ITC-irst in Italy, Universit\'{e} Joseph
Fourier in France and the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.  The
project consortium will also include Aethra --- an Italian
telecommunications commercial company.  It follows on the footsteps
of the \nespole project currently in progress, involving the same
consortium members, and funded by the European Community and NSF under
the Multilingual Information Access and Management (MLIAM) program.  A partner
proposal for \spectrum has been submitted by our European partners to
the Fifth Framework program.

\spectrum goes beyond {\sc Nespole!} in addressing a new round of scientific 
challenges and in focusing on a broader notion of communication
robustness that goes beyond the noise tolerance of parsing and speech
recognition.  Most current efforts in spoken language translation
(SLT) address a rather narrow notion of robustness, targeting the
capability of modules and of the system as a whole to provide sensible
answers even in the presence of corrupted input, incomplete
information, etc. Such a concern is natural as long as SLT systems
play a passive role, and their objective is limited to translation of
isolated messages from one language to another. For actual use,
though, it is crucial to start addressing the question of how SLT
systems can be designed that play a more active role in securing
achievement of communicative goals.  Communication robustness
encompasses, in our view, all the ways in which communication can
fail: communicative goals misalignments, misunderstandings among the
parties, problems due to the limitations of the system itself (e.g.,
HLT modules), or of the underlying networking, etc.

We identify the following facets of communication robustness: tolerance to
noise; adaptability and learning; detection of communication failure; seamless
integration of fall-back modalities for repair; seamless integration of
services using different modalities (e.g., human-human translation and
machine-human navigation assistance); and absorbing information from more
modalities (e.g., prosody and emotion).  Also, we are moving from evaluations
of translation accuracy to evaluations of system usability.  Each of the new
scientific challenges of \spectrum addresses one of these desiderata.

It is our belief that the investigation of these core research questions
identified above can be carried out to a large extent independently, in case
European funding is not secured.  We believe the research described clearly
fits under the ITR focus area of ``Augmenting Individuals and Transforming
Society'', particularly as it aims to design and develop a multi-lingual
system ``to serve the needs of multi-national industry, collaborating science
teams, or virtual cultural exchanges''.


\end{document}
