Integrating different learning approaches into a multilingual spoken language translation system

Abstract

Building multilingual spoken language translation systems requires knowledge about both acoustic models and language models of each language to be translated. Our multilingual translation system JANUS-2 is able to translate English and German spoken input into either English, German, Spanish, Japanese or Korean output. Getting optimal acoustic and language models as well as developing adequate dictionaries for all these languages requires a lot of hand-tuning and is time-consuming and labor intensive. In this paper we will present learning techniques that improve acoustic models by automatically adapting codebook sizes, a learning algorithm that increases and adapts phonetic dictionaries for the recognition process and also a statistically based language model with some linguistic knowledge that increases recognition performance. To ensure a robust translation system, semantic rather than syntactic analysis is done. Concept based speech translation and a connectionist parser that learns to parse into feature structures are introduced. Furthermore, different repair mechanisms to recover from recognition errors will be described.