Investigating multiple approaches for SLU portability to a new language

The challenge with language portability of a spoken language understanding module is to be able to reuse the knowledge and the data available in a source language to produce knowledge in the target language. In this paper several approaches are proposed, motivated by the availability of the MEDIA French dialogue corpus and its manual translation into Italian. The three portability methods investigated are based on statistical machine translation or automatic word alignment techniques and differ in the level of the system development at which the translation is performed. The first experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed portability methods in general for a fast and low-cost SLU porting from French to Italian and the best performance are obtained by using translation only at the test level.