A speech to speech translation system built from standard components

Abstract

This paper describes a speech to speech translation system using standard components and a suite of generalizable customization techniques. The system currently translates air travel planning queries from English to Swedish. The modular architecture is designed to be easy to port to new domains and languages, and consists of a pipelined series of processing phases. The output of each phase consists of multiple hypotheses; statistical preference mechanisms, the data for which is derived from automatic processing of domain corpora, are used between each pair of phases to filter hypotheses. Linguistic knowledge is represented throughout the system in declarative form. We summarize the architectures of the component systems and the interfaces between them, and present initial performance results.