We demonstrate the portability of a stochastic method for understanding natural language from a setting of human-machine interactions (ATIS - Air Travel Information Services and MASK - Multimodal Multimedia Automated Service Kiosk) into the more open one of human-to-human interactions. The applicationwe use is the English Spontaneous Speech Task (ESST) for multilingual appointment scheduling. Spoken language systems developed for this task translate spontaneous conversational speech among different languages.