International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2006 Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan November 27-28, 2006

Development of Client-Server Speech Translation System on a Multi-Lingual Speech Communication Platform

Tohru Shimizu, Yutaka Ashikari, Eiichiro Sumita, Hideki Kashioka, Satoshi Nakamura

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan

This paper describes a client-server speech-to-speech translation system developed on a multi-lingual speech communication platform. This platform enables easy assembly of speech communication system from the corresponding software modules (e.g. speech recognition, spoken language machine-translation, speech synthesis). This client-server speech translation system is designed for use at mobile terminals. Terminals and servers are connected via a 3G public mobile phone networks, and speech translation services are available at various places with thin client. This system realizes hands-free communication and robustness for real use of speech translation in noisy environments. A microphone array and new noise suppression technique improves speech recognition performance, and a corpus-based approach enables wide coverage, robustness and portability to new languages and domains. Recent evaluation of the overall system showed that the utterance correctness of speech recognition output achieved 83%, and more than 88% of the utterances are correctly translated for Japanse-English and Japanese- Chinese.

Index Terms. speech-to-speech translation system, corpus-based, client-server

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Bibliographic reference.  Shimizu, Tohru / Ashikari, Yutaka / Sumita, Eiichiro / Kashioka, Hideki / Nakamura, Satoshi (2006): "Development of client-server speech translation system on a multi-lingual speech communication platform", In IWSLT-2006, 213-216.