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NESPOLE!’s Multilingual and Multimodal Corpus

NESPOLE! is a EU/NSF jointly funded project exploring multilingual (speech-to-speech translation) and multimodal communication in e-services. The current system allows users speaking different languages (English, French, German and Italian) to interact on the tourism domain through the Internet using thin terminals (PCs with sound and video cards  and H323 video-conferencing software). Web pages and maps can be shared among users, by means of a special White Board. NESPOLE! provides for multimodal communication by allowing users to perform gestures on displayed maps, by means of a tablet and a pen. To test the integration of multilinguality with multimodality, and the impact of the latter on the former, we designed and executed an experiment, involving 35 subjects, 28 playing the role of customers (English and German) and 7 playing the role of agents (Italian). Subjects communicated through the NESPOLE! system to accomplish an assigned task (booking an hotel), meeting specific constraints as to available budget, location, distance from relevant spots, etc. Two experimental conditions were considered and compared, differing as to whether multimodal resources were available: a speech-only condition (SO), and a multimodal condition (MM). This paper reports on the resulting corpus, and on the results of the experiment.