We’re three years into the LUNA Project, designed to bring better man-to-machine communications to Italy, France and Poland. As described in this article in the European Research Headlines Web the LUNA project has received government grants amountoing to EUR 2.61 million in funding, all aimed at providing a more pleasant customer experience when people have to talk to machines over the telephone.

The partnership, which is led by Loquendo’s Silvia Mosso aims to develop a robust toolkit to support multi-lingual natural language understanding. They have been compiling a broad array of ‘spontaneous’ utterances – both people-to-people and people-to-machine – which are then annotated by speech scientists and subjected to statistical language modelling (SLM) in order to promote better understanding of the meaning of spoken words in context.

The LUNA project was conceived by Loquendo in late 2006 to support SLU development in French, Italian and Polish. It is an undertaking of the academic/research world, with participation from RWTH Aachen University (Germany), The Universite d’Avignon et des Pays di Vaucluse (France), the University of Trento (Italy), the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology and the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences (both in Poland). LUNA claims to have already developed “the most advanced” spoken language understanding systems available in Italian and Polish.

Private industries (and their customers) will be direct beneficiaries. Both France Telecom and Italy’s CSI Piemonte (the Piedmont Consortium for Information Systems) have plans to deploy the fruits of the LUNA project to support better user interfaces for speech-enabled customer care and voice portal services.

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