A PLATFORM FOR MULTILINGUAL RESEARCH IN SPOKEN DIAL OGUE SYSTEMS

Multilingual speech technology research would be greatly facilitated by an integrated and comprehens ive set of software tools that enable research and development of core language technologies and interactive language systems in any language. Such a multilingual platform has been one of our goals in developing the CSLU Toolkit. The Toolkit is composed of components that are essentially language-indepen dent, and support research and development of recognition , understanding, text-to-speech synthesis, facial ani mation, and spoken dialogue systems. Portions of the Toolk it have already been ported to Italian, German, and Vietnamese. In addition, a complete Mexican-Spanish version of the Toolkit has been created, and is in daily use at the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla (UDLA). In this paper we outline some of the issue s involved in porting the Toolkit to a new language, and describe why the Toolkit is well suited to multilin gual adaptation.