Development and evaluation of AnHitz, a prototype of a basque-speaking virtual 3D expert on science and technology

The aim of the AnHitz project, whose participants are research groups with very different backgrounds, is to carry out research on language, speech and visual technologies for Basque. Several resources, tools and applications have been developed in AnHitz, but we have also integrated many of these into a prototype of a 3D virtual expert on science and technology. It includes Question Answering and Cross Lingual Information Retrieval systems in those areas. The interaction with the system is carried out in Basque (the results of the CLIR module that are not in Basque are translated through Machine Translation) and is speech-based (using Speech Synthesis and Automatic Speech Recognition). The prototype has received ample media coverage and has been greatly welcomed by Basque society. The system has been evaluated by 50 users who have completed a total of 300 tests, showing good performance and acceptance.