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\begin{document}

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%{\large {\bf A Robust Language Understanding Interface Construction Tool Set 
%for Tutoring Systems}} \\
%Proposal for NSF KDI/LIS
%\end{center}

\heading{{\sc Nespole!}\footnote{{\it Nespole\/} ({\tt NES-po-lay})
means literally {\it loquat fruit\/} in Italian.  As an exclamation,
it means {\it Wow!\/}.}\\
         Negotiating through Spoken Language in E-commerce}

\section*{Executive Summary}

``E-world fuels U.S. economy'' reports USA Today of June 22, citing a
Department of Commerce Study, recently unveiled by Vice President Al Gore.
The technological leaps in computing and networking infrastructure in the last
decade have unquestionably 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.  Up to now, however, E-commerce interactions over the
web have mainly been menu based.  Current E-commerce technology thus
inherently does not support the identification of customer requirements or the
any negotiation between the participants.  The next generation of E-commerce
will need to overcome these limitations.  In order to enable E-commerce with
human negotiation, the underlying technology must be capable of dealing with
human-to-human communication.  Furthermore, the reach of electronic markets
naturally transcend national boundaries, thus requiring that linguistic
boundaries be also removed.

The proposed project - {\sc Nespole!} - will aim to remove the language
barriers and enable humans to do business with humans on the internet via an
effective cross-lingual human-to-human communication facility.  The challenge
of such a facility is to provide (1) effective, natural communication between
human participants, (2) effective, inobtrusive, and robust language
assistance, and (3) easy to use access to multimedia content in a multi-lingual
and multi-cultural setting.

Two major scientific obstacles toward this goal will be attacked under this
program: (1) the domain limitation of speech translation systems, and (2) the
use of advanced multimodal interfaces and their integration with language
assistance function in e-commerce, where language assistance must be placed in
the context of the (multimedia) content on the internet and evaluated in the
context of overall user effectiveness and satisfaction.  The former problem of
domain limitation is mostly caused by limitations in the machine translation
technology that must handle both the ill-formed input from speech and an
essentially unlimited world of discourse, making both syntactic and semantic
approaches alone difficult.  Our approach will be to exploit a mixture of
strengths in a multi-engine approach, while also expanding the basic
capabilities of these approaches to be robust and portable.  The second
problem will be addressed by configuring several prototype systems involving
actual service providers and by studying multimodal interfaces in the context
of extensive e-commerce use.

The project will be carried out by a consortium of six partners in the US and
in Europe over a time-frame of three years.  Four of the partners (CMU,
University of Karlsruhe, IRST, CLIPS) are scientific institutions who have
already worked together for many years under the Consortium for Speech
Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR) and have an elaborate and solid base of
state-of-the art speech translation technology at their disposal, without
which such an ambitious project could not be undertaken.  Two commercial
partners -- APT and AETHRA -- will provide Web-based and Video-Conferencing
infrastructure and a user/customer business community, based on which
extensive and realistic user studies will be carried out.  Carnegie Mellon's
emphasis will be focused predominantly on the machine translation challenges
above and (in cooperation with the European partners) on the multimodal
interface issues.

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