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Collecting and Sharing Bilingual Spontaneous Speech Corpora: the ChinFaDial Experiment

We describe here the three main platforms in the ERIM family of Web-based environments for human interpreting, two of them in more details – ERIM-Interp and ERIM-Collect –, then ERIM-Aid. Each platform supports an aspect of the collecting or study of spontaneous bilingual dialogues, translated by an interpreter. ERIM-Interp is the core environment, providing mediated communication between speakers and human interpreters over the network. Using ERIM-Collect, French-Chinese interpreting data have been collected within the three-year "ChinFaDial" project supported by LIAMA, a French-Chinese laboratory in Beijing. These "raw" speech data will be made available in the spring of 2004 on an open-access basis, using the DistribDial server, on a CLIPS-GETA website. Our goal is to extend such corpora, on a collaborative scheme, to allow other research groups to contribute to the site whatever annotations they may have created, and to share them under the same conditions (GPL). An ERIM-Aid variant is intended to provide focused machine aids to human interpreters working over the Web, or possibly to distant monolingual speakers conversing in different languges.