Japanese-to-Chinese spoken language translation based on the simple expression

Abstract

This paper describes a Japanese-to-Chinese spoken language translation (SLT) method based on simple expression and presents the experimental results. The method is aimed at developing a compact speech translation system, which is robust for spontaneous spoken language phenomena, including the recognition errors and different expression from various speakers. The idea of translation method based on simple expression is that the mechanism interprets speech-act rather than the direct translation of the speaker’s words. The method is realized by mapping the simple expression instead of deep parsing. In this method, only keywords in speech recognition results are extracted, and the corresponding target sentences are extracted from the database by selecting similar example sentences with the keywords. All training sentences in the bilingual corpus are rewritten into the simple expression and grouped by rules. The rules are specially designed to develop the compact size example database for translation. Comparing with other example-based approaches to SLT, the method based on simple expression is easy to realize, and especially it is practical to develop the SLT systems limited in specific domains.