Statistical Machine Translation of European Parliamentary Speeches

In this paper we present the ongoing work at RWTH Aachen University for building a speech-to-speech translation system within the TC-Star project. The corpus we work on consists of parliamentary speeches held in the European Plenary Sessions. To our knowledge, this is the first project that focuses on speech-to-speech translation applied to a real-life task. We de-scribe the statistical approach used in the de-velopment of our system and analyze its perfor-mance under different conditions: dealing with syntactically correct input, dealing with the ex-act transcription of speech and dealing with the (noisy) output of an automatic speech recog-nition system. Experimental results show that our system is able to perform adequately in each of these conditions