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\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.  This reflects an underlying concept of E-commerce 
as a service primarily driven by the supplier side.  Current E-commerce
technology thus inherently does not support the identification of customer 
requirements, negotiation between the participants, tailoring of existing
products to client needs, or the ongoing maintenance of the products/services
and the relationship between supplier and client.

The next generation of E-commerce will need to overcome these limitations.
Similar to today's ``traditional'' commerce, E-commerce should develop into a
collaborative activity that is bi-directional and involves interaction between
buyer(s) and seller(s).  In such a scenario, the customer and the provider
interact directly, human to human.  They are involved in collaborative
processes 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.
Humans can fully and naturally understand other humans' motivations and
desires, can respond to their needs in creative ways, possibly without fully
matching the customer's requests, but always trying to find solutions that
anticipate and maximise the customer's needs vis a vis concrete possibilities.

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.
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.

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 as well
as various other national and international research projects (such as C-STAR,
and Verbmobil), and yet is a major departure from these more traditional
efforts.  Rather than focusing on automatic recognition and translation
problems alone, we now focus on multi-lingual communication between humans.
NESPOLE! will not only address accuracy of translation, but will extend the
investigation to the ability of humans to communicate ideas, concepts and
thoughts and to jointly solve problems.  NESPOLE! will provide a pallet of
features by which this can be achieved.  It will feature multiple synergistic
interpretation assistants (using a multi-engine approach) that range from
concept driven analysis, interlingua based translation modules, to simple
dictionary and phrase-book lookup to statistical direct translation schemes.
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.  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.

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 14 months of the project, will support multilingual negotiation and
discussion between a tourist information/service provider (a so-called
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.  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.

