A Spoken Language Translation System: SL-TRANS2

1. I n t r o d u c t i o n An automatic telephone interpreting system wil l u n d o u b t e d l y be u s e d to o v e r c o m e c o m m u n i c a t i o n b a r r i e r s b e t w e e n people speaking different languages. Recently, great interest has been growing in this area [Saitoh88], [Waibel-91l, [Kitano-91], [Roe-92]. SLTRANS2 .1~ is an experimental system developed at ATR, which t rans la tes Japanese speech to English speech. It is composed of three basic components: speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis . This paper in t roduces the s y s t e m wi th e m p h a s i s on the t r a n s l a t i o n component. The discourse domain is a dialogue c o n c e r n i n g an i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o n f e r e n c e registrat ion. The d is t inc t ive f ea tu re s of the system are as follows. (1) Japanese continuous speech input can be recognized with h igh accuracy . Moreover , speaker independent recognition using speaker adaptation technique has been developed. (2) Var ious express ions pecul ia r to spoken language can be accepted and translated properly into the target language. In Japanese, the style of spoken sentences is general ly quite different from that of written texts. Spoken utterances are f ragmentary and include the speaker's intention directly or indirectly. The system extracts the intent ion and then t ranscr ibes it to a proper expression in the target language. (3) Linguistic knowledge sources necessary for the translation are defined declaratively to the e x t e n t . Such d e f i n i t i o n i m p r o v e s h i g h modularity, readability and easy maintenance of knowledge description. In the next section, the system is overviewed and a brief description of the speech recognition