Are you ready for a call? - Spontaneous conversations in tourism for speech-to-speech translation systems
Darinka Verdonik, Matej Rojc · 2006
The paper represents the Turdis database of spontaneous conversations in tourist domain in Slovenian language.Database was built for use in developing speech-to-speech translation components, however it can be used also for developing dialog systems or used for linguistic researches.The idea was to record a database of telephone conversations in tourism where the naturalness of conversations is affected as little as possible while we still obtain a permission for recording from all the speakers.When recording in studio environment there can be many problems.It is especially difficult to imitate a tourist agent if a speaker does not have such experiences and therefore lacks the background knowledge that a tourist agent has.Therefore the Turdis database was recorded with professional tourist agents.The agreement with local tourist companies enabled that we recorded a tourist agent while he was at his working place in his working time answering the telephone.Callers were contacted individually and asked to use the Turdis system and make a call to selected tourist company.Technically the recording was done using PC ISDN card.Database was orthographically transcribed with Transcriber tool.At the present it includes cca.43.000 words.