JANUS III: Speech-to-speech Translation in Multiple Languages

Abstract

This paper describes JANUS-III, our most recent version of the JANUS speech-to-speech translation system. We present an overview of the system and focus on how system design facilitates speech translation between multiple languages, and allows for easy adaptation to new source and target languages. We also describe our methodology for evaluation of end-to-end system performance with a variety of source and target languages. For system development and evaluation, we have experimented with both push-to-talk as well as cross-talk recording conditions. To date, our system has achieved performance levels of over 80% acceptable translations on transcribed input, and over 70% acceptable translations on speech input recognized with a 75-90% word accuracy. Our current major research is concentrated on enhancing the capabilities of the system to deal with input in broad and general domains.