Interactive Speech Translation in the Diplomat Project

  • Authors:
  • Robert Frederking;Alexander Rudnicky;Christopher Hogan;Kevin Lenzo

  • Affiliations:
  • Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

  • Venue:
  • Machine Translation
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The Diplomat rapid-deployment speech-translation systemis intended to allow naï ve users to communicate across a languagebarrier, without strong domain restrictions, despite the error-pronenature of current speech and translation technologies. In addition,it should be deployable for new languages an order of magnitude morequickly than traditional technologies. Achieving this ambitious setof goals depends in large part on allowing the users to correct recognition and translation errors interactively. We present the Multi-Engine Machine Translation (MEMT) architecture, describing how it is well suited for such an application. We then discuss ourapproaches to rapid-deployment speech recognition and synthesis.Finally we describe our incorporation of interactive error correctionthroughout the system design. We have already developed workingbidirectional Croatian &lrarr2; English and Spanish&lrarr2; English systems, and have Haitian Creole &lrarr2; English and Korean &lrarr2; English versions under development.