Spoken Language Translation With Mid-90's Technology: A Case Study

1993

This paper I describes a speech to speech translation system using standard components and a suite of generalizable customization techniques. The system currently translates air travel planning queries from English to Swedish. The modulax architecture is designed to be easy to port to new domains and languages, and consists of a pipelined series of processing phases. The output of each phase consists of multiple hypotheses; statistical preference mechanisms, the data for which is derived from automatic processing of domain corpora, are used between each pair of phases to filter hypotheses. Linguistic knowledge is represented throughout the system in declarative form. We summarize the architectures of the component systems and the interfaces between them, and present initial performance results.

ArXiv, 1994

The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to spoken Swedish and to French. It is constructed, with as few modifications as possible, from existing pieces of speech and language processing software. The speech recognizer and language understander are connected by a fairly conventional pipelined N-best interface. This paper focuses on the ways in which the language processor makes intelligent use of the sentence hypotheses delivered by the recognizer. These ways include (1) producing modified hypotheses to reflect the possible presence of repairs in the uttered word sequence; (2) fast parsing with a version of the grammar automatically specialized to the more frequent constructions in the training corpus; and (3) allowing syntactic and semantic factors to interact with acoustic ones in the choice o...

Proc. Translating and the Computer, 1995

The paper describes the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system, a prototype automatic speech translator. SLT is currently capable of translating spoken English queries in the domain of air travel planning into either Swedish or French, using a vocabulary of about 1200 words. We present an overview of the system's architecture, concentrating on how rationally constructed balanced corpora are used to allow rapid development of high-quality limited-domain translation systems.

Proceedings of the …, 2001

In this paper we describe how the translation methodology adopted for the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) addresses the characteristics of the speech translation task in a context where it is essential to achieve easy customization to new languages and new domains. We then discuss the issues that arise in any attempt to evaluate a speech translator, and present the results of such an evaluation carried out on SLT for several language pairs.

2000

The EUTRANS project aims at using example-based approaches for the automatic development of Machine Translation systems accepting text and speech input for limited-domain applications. During the first phase of the project, a speech-translation system that is based on the use of automatically learned subsequential transducers has been built. This paper contains a detailed and mostly self-contained overview of the transducer-learning algorithms and system architecture, along with a new approach for using categories representing words or short phrases in both input and output languages. Experimental results using this approach are reported for a task involving the recognition and translation of sentences in the hotel-reception communication domain, with a vocabulary of 683 words in Spanish. A translation word-error rate of 1.97% is achieved in real-time factor 2.7 on a Personal Computer.

2007

This paper is part of an extended study on system architectures, the long term aim being to determine if a unidirectional, a bidirectional or a fixed-phrase architecture is more suitable in the context of the spoken language translator in the medical domain (MedSLT). Our aim here is to compare data collected during a Wizard of Oz (WOz) experiment with data collected using a beta bidirectional version of our system.

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1993

Speech Technology, 2010

Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics -, 1992