Toward a broad-coverage bilingual corpus for speech translation of travel conversations in the real world

At ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories, we are building a broad-coverage bilingual corpus to study corpus-based speech translation technologies for the real world. There are three important points to consider in designing and constructing a corpus for future speech translation research. The first is to have a variety of speech samples, with a wide range of pronunciations and speakers. The second is to have data for a variety of situations. The third is to have a variety of expressions. This paper reports our trials and discusses the methodology. First, we introduce a bilingual travel conversation (TC) corpus of spoken languages and a broad-coverage bilingual basic expression (BE) corpus. TC and BE are designed to be complementary. TC is a collection of transcriptions of bilingual spoken dialogues, while BE is a collection of Japanese sentences and their English translations. Whereas TC covers a small domain, BE covers a wide variety of domains. We compare the characteristics of vocabulary and expressions between these two corpora and suggest that we need a much greater variety of expressions. One promising approach might be to collect paraphrases representing various different expressions generated by many people for similar concepts. 1