An automatic speech translation system for travel conversation

Abstract

We present a speech-to-speech translation system for notebook PC's that helps oral communication between Japanese and English-speaking persons in various situations when traveling abroad. We have especially tried to solve the problem of limitations in the variety of acceptable expressions and situations in conventional approaches to speech-to-speech translation. A solution of this problem is very important since it leads to the realization of a practical speech-to-speech translation system for travelers who encounter various situations during travel abroad, such as hotel and air reservations, ordering in a restaurant and so on. Due to the high accuracy of the compact speech recognition engine and our lexicalized grammar approach to machine translation that utilizes corpus but is oriented to model general linguistic phenomena as well as word-specific ones, a versatile speech-to-speech translation system for travel abroad has been achieved that has a much larger vocabulary and is capable of translating spoken conversations in more situations compared to previous work.