Multi-lingual Translation of Spontaneously Spoken Language in a Limited Domain

Multi-lingual Translation of Spontaneously Spoken Language in a Limited Domain Alon Lavie, Donna Gates, Marsal Gavaldh, Laura Mayfield, Alex Waibel and Lori Levin Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 email : lavie@cs.cmu.edu Abstract JANUS is a multi-lingual speech-to- speech translation system designed to facilitate communication between two parties engaged in a spontaneous con- versation in a limited domain. In an attempt to achieve both robustness and translation accuracy we use two (lifter- ent translation components: the GLR module, designed to be more accu- rate, and the Phoenix module, designed to be more robust. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each of the approaches and describe our work on combining them. Another recent focus has been on developing a detailed end- to-end evaluation procedure to measure the performance and effectiveness of the system. We present our most recent Spanish-to-English performance evalua- tion results. 1 Introduction JANUS is a multi-lingual speech-to-speech trans- lation system designed to facilitate communica- tion between two parties engaged in a sponta- neous conversation in a limited domain. In this paper we describe the current design and perfor- mance of the machine translation module of our system. The analysis of spontaneous speech re- quires dealing with problenls such as speech dis- fluencies, looser notions of grammaticality and the lack of clearly marked sentence boundaries. These problems are further exacerbated by errors of the speech recognizer. We describe how our machine translation system is designed to effectively han- dle these and other problems, hi an attempt to achieve both robustness and translation accu- racy we use two different translation components: the (JLlt. module, designed to be more accurate, and the Phoenix module, designed to be more ro- bust. Both modules follow an interlingua-based approach. The translation modules are designed to be language-independent in the sense that they each consist of a general processor that applies in- dependently specified knowledge about different languages. This facilitates the easy adaptation of the system to new languages and domains. We an- alyze the strengths and weaknesses of each of the translation approaches and describe our work on combining them. Our current system is designed to translate spontaneous dialogues in the Schedul- ing domain, with English, Spanish and German as both source and target languages. A recent focus has been on developing a detailed end-to-end eval- uation procedure to measure the performance and effectiveness of the system. We describe this pro- cedure in the latter part of the paper, and present our most recent Spanish-to-English performance evaluation results. 2 System Overview The JANUS System is a large scale multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system designed to facilitate communication between two parties en- gaged in a spontaneous conversation in a limited domain. A diagram of the architecture of the sys- tem is shown in Figure 1. The system is com- posed of three main components: a speech recog- nizer, a machine translation (MT) module and a speech synthesis module. The speech recognition component of the system is described elsewhere …

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