Translations of the Callhome Egyptian Arabic corpus for conversational speech translation.

Abstract

Translation of the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, also known as speech translation, has re-ceived a lot of research interest recently. This is espe-cially true for programs such as DARPA BOLT which fo-cus on improving spontaneous human-human conversation across languages. However, this research is hindered by the dearth of datasets developed for this explicit purpose. For Egyptian Arabic-English, in particular, no parallel speech-transcription-translation dataset exists in the same domain. In order to support research in speech translation, we introduce the Callhome Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Translation Corpus. This supplements the existing LDC corpus with four reference translations for each utterance in the transcripts. The result is a three-way parallel dataset of Egyptian Arabic Speech, transcriptions and English translations.