Multilingual Speech Recognition

Abstract

The speech-to-speech translation system Verbmobil requires a multilin- gual setting. This consists of recognition engines in the three languages German, English and Japanese that run in one common framework together with a language identification component which is able to switch between these recognizers. This article describes the challenges of multilingual speech recognition and presents dif- ferent solutions to the problem of the automatic language identification task. The combination ofthe described components results in a flexible and user-friendly mul- tilingual spoken dialog system.