In this paper, we propose an example-based decoder for a statistical machine translation (SMT) system, which is used for spoken language machine translation. In this way, it will help to solve the re-ordering problem and other problems for spoken language MT, such as lots of omissions, idioms etc. Through experiments, we show that this approach obtains improvements over the baseline on a Chines...

Subcategorization data has been crucial for various NLP tasks. Current method for automatic SCF acquisition usually proceeds in two steps: first, generate all SCF cues from a corpus using a parser, and then filter out spurious SCF cues with statistical tests. Previous studies on SCF acquisition have worked mainly with written texts; spoken corpora have received little attention. Transcripts of ...

While the field of summarizing written texts has been explored for many decades, gaining significantly increased attention in the last five to ten years, summarization of spoken language is a comparatively recent research area. As the amount of spoken audio databases is growing rapidly, however, we predict that the need for high quality summarization of information contained in this medium will...

The effect of using signed communication on the spoken language development of deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) is much debated. We report on two studies that investigated relationships between spoken word and sign processing in children with a CI who are exposed to signs in addition to spoken language. Study 1 assessed rapid word and sign learning in 13 children with a CI and found t...

Five- and six-year-old children (n = 160) participated in three studies designed to explore language discrimination. After an initial exposure period (during which children heard either an unfamiliar language, a familiar language, or music), children performed an ABX discrimination task involving two unfamiliar languages that were either similar (Spanish vs. Italian) or different (Spanish vs. M...

Robot assistants need to interact with people in a natural way in order to be accepted into people’s day-to-day lives. We have been researching robot assistants with capabilities that include visually tracking humans in the environment, identifying the context in which humans carry out their activities, understanding spoken language (with a fixed vocabulary), participating in spoken dialogs to ...

In this paper. we argue for a paradigm shift in spoken language technology, from transcription tasks to interactive systems. The current paradigm evaluates speech recognition technology in terms of word recognition accuracy on large vocabulary transcription tasks? such as telephone conversations or media broadcasts. Systems are evaluated in international competitions, with strict rules for part...

We have established a phonotactic language model as the solution to spoken language identification (LID). In this framework, we define a single set of acoustic tokens to represent the acoustic activities in the world’s spoken languages. A voice tokenizer converts a spoken document into a text-like document of acoustic tokens. Thus a spoken document can be represented by a count vector of acoust...

For telecommunications companies or banks, etc processing spontaneous lanaguage in helpdesk scenarios is important for automatic telephone interactions. However, the problem of understanding spontaneous spoken language is difficult. Learning techniques such as neural networks have the ability to learn in a robust manner. Recurrent networks have been used in neurocognitive or psycholinguisticall...