From interface to content: translingual access and delivery of on-line information

This paper describes our initial implementation of a system to provide world-wide weather information over the telephone. The information is gathered from several different sites on the Web, preprocessed, and cached locally into a relational database to make access both fast and selective. Our natural language tools, originally developed for processing user queries, are used here for understanding content, and for subsequently translating it into languages other than English. The system is operational, and we have been collecting data from real users via a toll-free number. We report here on an initial evaluation both of the full system in English and of the quality of the responses in German.