Rapid Portability among Domains in an Interactive Spoken Language Translation System

Spoken Language Translation systems have usually been produced for such specific domains as health care or military use. Ideally, such systems would be easily portable to other domains in which translation is mission critical, such as emergency response or law enforcement. However, porting has in practice proven difficult. This paper will comment on the sources of this difficulty and briefly present an approach to rapid inter-domain portability. Three aspects will be discussed: (1) large general-purpose lexicons for automatic speech recognition and machine translation, made reliable and usable through interactive facilities for monitoring and correcting errors; (2) easily modifiable facilities for instant translation of frequent phrases; and (3) quickly modifiable custom glossaries. As support for our approach, we apply our current SLT system, now optimized for the health care domain, to sample utterances from the military, emergency service, and law enforcement domains, with discussion of numerous specific sentences.