NICT/ATR Asian Spoken Language Translation System for Multi-Party Travel Conversation

This paper presents the recent advances in the Asian spoken language translation system developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology/Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (NICT/ATR). The system was designed to translate the common spoken utterances of travel conversation from a certain source language into multi-target languages in order to facilitate a multi-party travel conversation between people speaking different Asian languages. All the system engines, including those of speech recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis, were developed using the corpusbased approach, which statistically studied from the collection of speech and language data. Currently, all the speech-to-speech translation engines have been successfully implemented into web-servers that can be accessed by client applications worldwide. Thus, the system realizes the objective of real-time, location-free speech-to-speech translation.