Stochastic Finite-State Models for Spoken Language Machine Translation

The problem of machine translation can be viewed as consisting of twosubproblems (a) lexical selection and (b) lexical reordering. In thispaper, we propose stochastic finite-state models for these two subproblems. Stochastic finite-state models are efficiently learnablefrom data, effective for decoding and are associated with a calculusfor composing models which allows for tight integration of constraintsfrom various levels of language processing. We present a method forlearning stochastic finite-state models for lexical selection andlexical reordering that are trained automatically from pairs of sourceand target utterances. We use this method to develop models forEnglish–Japanese and English–SPANISH translation and present the performance of these models for translation on speech and text. We also evaluate the efficacy of such a translation model in the context of a call routing task of unconstrained speech utterances.