The Spoken Language Translator

This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75 per cent. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Part I. Language Processing and Corpora: 2. Translation using the core language engine; 3. Grammar specialisation; 4. Choosing among interpretations; 5. The TreeBanker; 6. Acquisition of lexical entries; 7. Spelling and morphology; 8. Corpora and data collection; Part II. Linguistic Coverage: 9. English coverage; 10. French coverage; 11. Swedish coverage; 12. Transfer coverage; 13. Rational reuse of linguistic data; Part III. Speech Processing: 14. Speech recognition; 15. Acoustic modelling; 16. Language modelling for multilingual speech translation; 17. Porting a recogniser to a new language; 18. Multiple dialects and languages; 19. Common speech/language issues; Part IV. Evaluation and Conclusions: 20. Evaluation; 21. Conclusions; Appendix A: the mathematics of discriminant scores; Appendix B: notation for QLF-based processing; References; Index.

This book, which should be of interest to anyone working in computational linguistics, speech recognition, cognitive science, artificial intelligence or machine translation, describes the Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The book explains in detail how the SLT system works and presents an objective evaluation of its performance.