The Fyntour Multilingual Weather and Sea Dialogue System

The Fyntour multilingual weather and sea dialogue system provides pervasive access to weather, wind and water conditions for domestic and international tourists who come to fish for seatrout along the coasts of the Danish island of Funen. Callers access information about high and low waters, wind direction etc. via spoken dialogues in Danish, English or German. We describe the solutions we have implemented to deal with number format data in a multi-language environment. We also show how the translation of free text data from Danish to English is handled through a newly developed machine translation system. In contrast with most current, statistically-based MT systems, we make use of a rule-based apporach, exploiting a full parser and context-senstitive lexical transfer rules, as well as target language generation and movement rules. Finally, we evaluate the usability of the system through a qualitative assessment based on the analysis of recorded calls and user feedback.