The Spoken Language Translator

This book describes the Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation.

Manny Rayner (Edited by), David Carter (Edited by), Pierrette Bouillon (Edited by), Vassilis Digalakis (Edited by), Mats Wirén (Edited by)

9780521770774, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 August 2000

356 pages, 25 b/w illus. 33 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.61 kg

'… a very accessible account of a mainly rule-based system for translating spoken language. … the book is very well written and structured. There are many lessons here for subsequent generations of speech and language researchers. … it would be a good primer for anyone wishing to develop a serious speech or language processing system.' Journal of Natural Language Processing

This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75 per cent. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.

Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Part I. Language Processing and Corpora: 2. Translation using the core language engine
3. Grammar specialisation
4. Choosing among interpretations
5. The TreeBanker
6. Acquisition of lexical entries
7. Spelling and morphology
8. Corpora and data collection
Part II. Linguistic Coverage: 9. English coverage
10. French coverage
11. Swedish coverage
12. Transfer coverage
13. Rational reuse of linguistic data
Part III. Speech Processing: 14. Speech recognition
15. Acoustic modelling
16. Language modelling for multilingual speech translation
17. Porting a recogniser to a new language
18. Multiple dialects and languages
19. Common speech/language issues
Part IV. Evaluation and Conclusions: 20. Evaluation
21. Conclusions
Appendix A: the mathematics of discriminant scores
Appendix B: notation for QLF-based processing
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Audio processing [UYU]