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The article describes aspects of the development of a conversational natural language understanding (NLU) system done during the first year of the European research project CATCH-2004 (Converse in AThens Cologne and Helsinki) [http://www.catch2004.org]. The project is co-funded by the European Union in the scope of the IST programme (IST 1999-11103).Its objectives focus on multi-modal, multi-lingual conversational natural language access to information systems. The paper emphasises on architecture, and telephony-based speech and NLU components as well as aspects of the implementation of a city event information (CEI) system in English, Finnish, German and Greek. The CEI system accesses two different databases in Athens and Helsinki using a common retrieval interface. Furthermore the paper singles out methodologies involved for acoustic and language model of the speech recognition component, parsing techniques and dialog modelling for the conversational natural language subsystem. For the implementation it outlines an incremental system refinement methodology necessary to adapt the system components to real-life data. It addresses the implementation of language specific characteristics and a common dialog design for all four languages, but also deals with aspects towards a multilingual conversational system. Finally, it presents prospects for further developments of the project.