MUXING: a telephone-access Mandarin conversational system

MUXING is a telephone-based conversational system that allows users to access weather information in Mandarin Chinese over the telephone. Although MUXING utilizes the same architec- ture as well as most of the same human language technology components as its English predecessor, JUPITER, some modifi- cations to the system were necessary to account for differences between English and Mandarin Chinese. In addition, the weather database needed to be modified to reflect regions of greater in- terest to potential Chinese users. This paper describes our sys- tem development effort, paying particular attention to Mandarin- specific changes to the original JUPITER system.