Victoria Arranz

The “FAME” interactive space

This paper describes the FAME multi-modal demonstrator, which integrates multiple communication modes - vision, speech and object manipulation - by combining the physical and virtual worlds to provide support for multi-cultural or multi-lingual communication and problem solving. The major challenges are automatic perception of human actions and understanding of dialogs between people from different cultural or linguistic backgrounds. The system acts as an information butler, which demonstrates context awareness using computer vision, speech and dialog modeling. The integrated computer-enhanced human-to-human communication has been publicly demonstrated at the FORUM2004 in Barcelona and at IST2004 in The Hague. Specifically, the Interactive Space described features an Augmented Table for multi-cultural interaction, which allows several users at the same time to perform multi-modal, cross-lingual document retrieval of audio-visual documents previously recorded by an Intelligent Cameraman during a week-long seminar.

Multiwords and word sense disambiguation

This paper studies the impact of multiword expressions on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Several identification strategies of the multiwords in WordNet2.0 are tested in a real Senseval-3 task: the disambiguation of WordNet glosses. Although we have focused on Word Sense Disambiguation, the same techniques could be applied in more complex tasks, such as Information Retrieval or Question Answering.

Guiding automatic MT evaluation by means of linguistic features

Machine translation (MT) has become increasingly important and popular in the past decade, leading to the development of MT evaluation metrics aiming at automatically assessing MT output. Most of these metrics use reference translations to compare systems output, therefore, they should not only detect MT errors but also be able to identify correct equivalent expressions so as not to penalize them when those are not displayed in the reference translations. With the aim of improving MT evaluation metrics a study has been carried out of a wide panorama of linguistic features and their implications. For that purpose a Spanish and an English corpora containing hypothesis and reference translations have been analysed from a linguistic point of view, so that common errors can be detected and positive equivalencies highlighted. This article focuses on this qualitative analysis describing the linguistic phenomena that should be considered when developing an automatic MT evaluation metric. The results of this analysis have been used to develop an automatic MT evaluation metric that takes into account different dimensions of language. A brief review of the metric and its evaluation are also provided.

Speech-to-Speech translation services for the olympic games 2008

In 2008 the Olympics Games will be held in Beijing. For this purpose the city government of Beijing has launched the Special Programme for Construction of Digital Olympics. One of the objectives of the program is the use of artificial intelligence technology to overcome language barriers during the games. In order to demonstrate the contribution that speech-to-speech translation technology (SST) can make to solving this problem and in order to prove the feasibility of deploying such technology in the environment of the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing, we have developed the Digital Olympics Speech-to-Speech Translation System that addresses a general touristic domain with a special focus on pre-arrival hotel reservation. The system allows for rapid development of SST prototypes, the study of different user-interfaces and the on-the-fly comparison of alternative approaches to the individual problems involved in this task.

Linguistic Data Resources

This chapter provides an overview of available language resources, from both U.S. and European perspectives. Multilingual data repositories as well as large ongoing and planned collection efforts are introduced, along with a description of the major challenges of collection efforts, such as transcription issues due to inconsistent writing standards, subject recruitment, recording equipment, legal aspects, and costs in terms of time and money. The overview of multilingual resources comprises multilingual audio and text data, pronunciation dictionaries, and parallel bilingual/multilingual corpora. This chapter provides an overview of existing language resources in Europe. A number of projects in Europe have been working toward the production of multilingual speech and language resources, many of which have become key databases for the human language technology (HLT) community. The SpeechDat projects are a set of speech data-collection efforts funded by the European Commission with the aim of establishing databases for the development of voice-operated teleservices and speech interfaces. The resulting databases are available via European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

A Speech-to-Speech Translation System for Catalan, Spanish, and English

In this paper we describe the FAME interlingual speech-to- speech translation System for Spanish, Catalan and English which is intended to assist users in the reservation of a hotel room when calling or visiting abroad. The System has been developed as an extension of the existing NESPOLE! translation system [4] which translates between English, German, Italian and French. After a brief introduction we describe the Spanish and Catalan System components including speech recognition, transcription to IF mapping, IF to text generation and speech synthesis. We also present a task-oriented evaluation method used to inform about system development and some preliminary results.

Linguistic and Logical Tools for an Advanced Interactive Speech System in Spanish

This paper focuses on the increasing need for a more natural and sophisticated human-machine interaction (HMI). The research here presented shows work on the development of a restricted-domain spontaneous speech dialogue system in Spanish. This human-machine interface is oriented towards a semantically restricted domain: Spanish railway information. The paper focuses on the description of the understanding module, which performs the language processing once the dialogue moves have been recognised and transcribed into text. Following the morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis, the module generates a structured representation with the content of the users intervention. This representation is passed on to the dialogue manager, which generates the systems answer. The dialogue manager keeps the dialogue history and decides what the reaction of the system should be, expressed by a new structured representation. This is sent to the natural language generator, which then builds the sentence to be synthesised.

Strategies to Overcome Problematic Input in a Spanish Dialogue System

This paper focuses on the strategies adopted to tackle problematic input and ease communication between modules in a Spanish railway information dialogue system for spontaneous speech. The paper describes the design and tuning considerations followed by the understanding module, both from a language processing and semantic information extraction point of view. Such strategies aim to handle the problematic input received from the speech recogniser, which is due to spontaneous speech as well as recognition errors.