An Automatic Speech Translation System for Travel Conversation

We present a speech-to-speech translation system for notebook PC's that helps oral communication between Japanese and English speakers in the various situations in the travel abroad. Due to the high accuracy of the compact continuous speech recognition engine and our lexicalized grammar approach to machine translation that utilizes corpus but is oriented to model general linguistic phenomena as well as word-specific ones, a versatile speech-to-speech translation system for travel abroad is achieved, which is with much larger vocabulary (50,000 Japanese words and 10,000 English words) and capable of translating spoken conversations in more situations compared to previous work [1]. Keywords automatic interpretation system, speech recognition, machine translation. 1