An Automatic Interpretation System for Travel Conversation Takao Watanabe

We have developed an automatic interpretation system running on a mobile PC that helps oral communication between Japanese and English speakers in various situations during their travel abroad. In order to allow a wide range of expressions and topics in the applied domain, we adopted an approach which utilizes the general linguistic knowledge as well as the domain-specific linguistic knowledge. Speech recognition module performs speaker-independent large-vocabulary (50,000 Japanese words and 10,000 English words) continuous speech recognition. Translation module performs syntax directed translation based on a new lexicalized grammar rule formalism