MaTrEx: the DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2007

In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation system developed at DCU that was used for our second participation in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2007). In this participation, we focus on some new methods to improve system quality. Specifically, we try our word packing technique for different language pairs, we smooth our translation tables with out-of-domain word translations for the Arabic–English and Chinese–English tasks in order to solve the high number of out of vocabulary items, and finally we deploy a translation-based model for case and punctuation restoration

Speech to sign language translation system for Spanish

This paper describes the development of and the first experiments in a Spanish to sign language translation system in a real domain. The developed system focuses on the sentences spoken by an official when assisting people applying for, or renewing their Identity Card. The system translates official explanations into Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Espan¿ola) for Deaf people. The translation system is made up of a speech recognizer (for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence), a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs belonging to the sign language), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the hand movements). Two proposals for natural language translation have been evaluated: a rule-based translation module (that computes sign confidence measures from the word confidence measures obtained in the speech recognition module) and a statistical translation module (in this case, parallel corpora were used for training the statistical model). The best configuration reported 31.6% SER (Sign Error Rate) and 0.5780 BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy). The paper also describes the eSIGN 3D avatar animation module (considering the sign confidence), and the limitations found when implementing a strategy for reducing the delay between the spoken utterance and the sign sequence animation

The role of semantics in spoken dialogue translation systems

In this paper, we consider the role of semantics in the spoken dialogue translation systems. We begin by looking at some of the key properties of an existing spoken dialogue system, namely the sundial system which provides flight and train information over the telephone, and how these properties affect the design methodology and functionality of spoken translation systems. These properties include the effects of speech processing, designing the system to meet the needs of users, and an analysis model which clearly separates the linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic and task levels. In this model many task functionalities are dependent upon, and sometimes realizable by, the semantic and pragmatic analysis components. Central to this approach, is the use of underspecified semantic representations which are further specified as and when required by domain and/or task analysis. This model can be applied in the development of spoken translation systems with two important effects: monolingual semantic and pragmatic analysis can be carried out by processes independent of, but correlated with, the (translation) function of the system; and the main functions of the transfer processes is to further specifying the representations for the target language and to deal with mismatches between source and target language representations. We illustrate this approach with semantic analyses of German utterances required for translation in the verbmobil spoken dialogue translation system