Interactive translation of conversational speech

Abstract

As communication becomes increasingly automated and transnational, the need for rapid, computer-aided speech translation grows. The Janus-II system uses paraphrasing and interactive error correction to boost performance. Janus-II operates on spontaneous conversational human dialogue in limited domains with vocabularies of 3,000 or more words. Current experiments involve 10,000 to 40,000 word vocabularies. It now accepts English, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Korean input, which it translates into any other of these languages. Beyond translating syntactically well-formed speech or carefully structured human-to-machine speech utterances, Janus-II research has focused on the more difficult task of translating spontaneous conversational speech between humans. This naturally requires a suitable database and task domain.