This chapter contains the final report on Phase One of the first year of the Artwork project. The initial phase of the Artwork feasibility study has been to perform a comparative analysis of language usage in spoken dialog, the modality of speech-to-speech translation, and in written text, the modality assumed for the development of most current MT systems including the CRL's. The objective was to establish a range of structural, functional and interpersonal characteristics for each modality which can be taken as processing requirements, to see which are associated with both modalities and which are associated with just one of the modalities, and, finally, to identify the relative importance of the different characteristics to successfully processing utterances produced under each modality.
The tasks involved in carrying out the comparative analysis
included: (1) the collection and transcription of the spoken data
for the analysis (approximately an hour of taped interviews) and
the preparation of the written data (EFE newswire articles), (2)
the quantitative analysis of the transcriptions and texts with
respect to a number of relevant linguistic characteristics, and
(3) the comparison of the resultant analyses for differences
between dialogs and text. In addition, approximately midway
through the project it was decided that (4) the impact of
protocol on dialog was to be analyzed. This chapter contains
the results of tasks 1, 2, 3. Chapter 3, which contains the
results of Phase Three of the project, contains the results
of task 4.