Porting the galaxy system to mandarin chinese

GALAXY is a human-computer conversational system that provides a spoken lan-guage interface for accessing on-line information. It was initially implemented for En-glish in travel-related domains, including air travel, local city navigation, and weather. Efforts were started to develop multilingual systems within the framework of GALAXY several years ago. This thesis focuses on developing the Mandarin Chinese version of the GALAXY system, including speech recognition, language understanding and lan-guage generation components. Large amounts of Mandarin speech data have been collected from native speakers to derive linguistic rules, acoustic models, language models and vocabularies for Chinese. Comparisons between the Chinese and English languages have been made in the context of system implementation. Some issues that are specific for Chinese have been addressed, to make the system core more language independent. Overall, the system produced reasonable responses nearly 70 % of the time for spontaneous Mandarin test data collected in a "wizard " mode, a performance tha