Donna Gates

Janus-III: speech-to-speech translation in multiple languages

This paper describes JANUS-III, our most recent version of the JANUS speech-to-speech translation system. We present an overview of the system and focus on how system design facilitates speech translation between multiple languages, and allows for easy adaptation to new source and target languages. We also describe our methodology for evaluation of end-to-end system performance with a variety of source and target languages. For system development and evaluation, we have experimented with both push-to-talk as well as cross-talk recording conditions. To date, our system has achieved performance levels of over 80% acceptable translations on transcribed input, and over 70% acceptable translations on speech input recognized with a 75-90% word accuracy. Our current major research is concentrated on enhancing the capabilities of the system to deal with input in broad and general domains.

The Janus-III Translation System: Speech-to-Speech Translation in Multiple Domains

The Janus-III system translates spoken languages in limiteddomains. The current research focus is on expanding beyond tasksinvolving a single limited semantic domain to significantly broaderand richer domains. To achieve this goal, The MT components of oursystem have been engineered to build and manipulate multi-domain parselattices that are based on modular grammars for multiple semanticdomains. This approach yields solutions to several problems includingmulti-domain disambiguation, segmentation of spoken utterances intosentence units, modularity of system design, and re-use of earliersystems with incompatible output.

From Language to Time: A Temporal Expression Anchorer

Understanding temporal expressions in natural language is a key step towards incorporating temporal information in many applications. In this paper we describe a system capable of anchoring such expressions in English: system TEA features a constraint-based calendar model and a compact representational language to capture the intensional meaning of temporal expressions. We also report favorable results from experiments conducted on several email datasets

Evaluation of a practical interlingua for task-oriented dialogue

IF (Interchange Format), the interlingua used by the C-STAR consortium, is a speech-act based interlingua for task-oriented dialogue. IF was designed as a practical interlingua that could strike a balance between expressivity and simplicity. If it is too simple, components of meaning will be lost and coverage of unseen data will be low. On the other hand, if it is too complex, it cannot be used with a high degree of consistency by collaborators on different continents. In this paper, we suggest methods for evaluating the coverage of IF and the consistency with which it was used in the C-STAR consortium.

End-to-End Evaluation in JANUS: A Speech-to-speech Translation System

JANUS is a multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system designed to facilitate communication between two parties engaged in a spontaneous conversation in a limited domain. In this paper we describe our methodology for evaluating translation performance. Our current focus is on end- to- end evaluations- the evaluation of the translation capabilities of the system as a whole. The main goal of our end-to-end evaluation procedure is to determine translation accuracy on a test set of previously unseen dialogues. Other goals include evaluating the effectiveness of the system in conveying domain-relevant information and in detecting and dealing appropriately with utterances (or portions of utterances) that are out-of-domain. End-to-end evaluations are performed in order to verify the general coverage of our knowledge sources, guide our development efforts, and to track our improvement over time. We discuss our evaluation procedures, the criteria used for assigning scores to translations produced by the system, and the tools developed for performing this task. Recent Spanish-to-English performance evaluation results are presented as an example.

Input Segmentation of Spontaneous Speech in JANUS: A Speech-to-speech Translation System

JANUS is a multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system designed to facilitate communication between two parties engaged in a spontaneous conversation in a limited domain. In this paper we describe how multi-level segmentation of single utterance turns improves translation quality and facilitates accurate translation in our system. We define the basic dialogue units that are handled by our system, and discuss the cues and methods employed by the system in segmenting the input utterance into such units. Utterance segmentation in our system is performed in a multi-level incremental fashion, partly prior and partly during analysis by the parser. The segmentation relies on a combination of acoustic, lexical, semantic and statistical knowledge sources, which are described in detail in the paper. We also discuss how our system is designed to disambiguate among alternative possible input segmentations.

A Modular Approach to Spoken Language Translation for Large Domains

The MT engine of the Janus speech-to-speech translation system is designed around four main principles: 1) an interlingua approach that allows the efficient addition of new languages, 2) the use of semantic grammars that yield low cost high quality translations for limited domains, 3) modular grammars that support easy expansion into new domains, and 4) efficient integration of multiple grammars using multi-domain parse lattices and domain re-scoring. Within the framework of the C-STAR-II speech-to-speech translation effort, these principles are tested against the challenge of providing translation for a number of domains and language pairs with the additional restriction of a common interchange format.

Speechalator: two-way speech-to-speech translation in your hand

This demonstration involves two-way automatic speech-to-speech translation on a consumer off-the-shelf PDA. This work was done as part of the DARPA-funded Babylon project, investigating better speech-to-speech translation systems for communication in the field. The development of the Speechalator software-based translation system required addressing a number of hard issues, including a new language for the team (Egyptian Arabic), close integration on a small device, computational efficiency on a limited platform, and scalable coverage for the domain.

Balancing Expressiveness and Simplicity in an Interlingua for Task Based Dialogue

In this paper we compare two interlingua representations for speech translation. The basis of this paper is a distributional analysis of the C-STAR II and NESPOLE databases tagged with interlingua representations. The C-STAR II database has been partially re-tagged with the NESPOLE interlingua, which enables us to make comparisons on the same data with two types of interlinguas and on two types of data (C-STAR II and NESPOLE) with the same interlingua. The distributional information presented in this paper show that the NESPOLE interlingua maintains the language-independence and simplicity of the C-STAR II speech-act-based approach, while increasing semantic expressiveness and scalability.

JANUS-II-translation of spontaneous conversational speech

JANUS-II is a research system to design and test components of speech-to-speech translation systems as well as a research prototype for such a system. We focus on two aspects of the system: (1) the new features of the speech recognition component JANUS-SR, and (2) the end-to-end performance of JANUS-II, including a comparison of two machine translation strategies used for JANUS-MT (PHOENIX and GLR*).