Citybrowser II: A Multimodal Restaurant Guide in Mandarin

Abstract

In this paper we present a conversational dialogue system, CityBrowser II, which allows users to inquire about information about restaurants in Mandarin. Developed in the Galaxy infrastructure with a common, language-independent semantic representation, CityBrowser integrates portability and scalability. By inheriting the infrastructure and main language understanding/generation components from its English predecessor, CityBrowser can easily be transformed to a Mandarin language environment. This paper describes our system implementation, focusing on the languagespecific modifications to the original English system. We show that our language-independent yet scalable system infrastructure makes multilingualism a promising task.