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

Abstract

JANUS is a multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system designed to facilitate communication between two parties engaged in a spontaneous conversation in a limited domain. In an attempt to achieve both robustness and translation accuracy we use two different translation components: the GLR module, designed to be more accurate, 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 evaluation results.