This paper gives an overview of the evaluation campaign results of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 20081. In this workshop, we focused on the translation of spontaneous speech recorded in a real situation and the feasability of pivot-language-based translation approaches. The translation directions were English into Chinese and vice versa for the Challenge Task...

We describe a machine translation approach being designed at HKUST to integrate semantic processing into statistical machine translation, beginning with entity and word sense disambiguation. We show how integrating the semantic modules consistently improves translation quality across several data sets. We report results on five different IWSLT 2006 speech translation tasks, representing HKUST’s...

In our eeort to build a speech{to{speech translation system for spontaneous spoken dialogs we have developed several methods to improve the language models of the speech decoder of the system. We attempt to take advantage of natural equivalence word classes, frequently occur-ing word phrases, and discourse structure. Each of these methods was tested on spontaneous English, German and Spanish hu...

This paper investigates a preliminary translation system from Chinese to English based on the statistical approach and tests its performance on a limited-domain spoken-language task: hotel reservation. A bilingual corpus is available for the task, which exhibits some typical phenomena of spontaneous speech. The experiments are performed on both the text transcription and the speech recognizer o...

This paper evaluates different approaches on speech to sign language machine translation. The framework of the application focuses on assisting deaf people to apply for the passport or related information. In this context, the main aim is to automatically translate the spontaneous speech, uttered by an officer, into Spanish Sign Language (SSL). In order to get the best translation quality, thre...

| In this paper we report on our eeorts to combine speech and language processing toward multilingual spontaneous speech translation. The ongoing work extends our JANUS system eeort toward handling spontaneous spoken discourse and multiple languages. After an overview of the task, databases, and the system architecture we will focus on how connectionist modules are integrated in the overall sys...

Janus is a multilingual speech translation system currently operating in the domain of meeting scheduling. Translating spontaneous speech requires a high degree of robustness to overcome the dissuencies of spoken language as well as errors in speech recognition. In this system description, we focus on the robust speech translation components in Janus|the skipping GLR* parser, the segmentation o...