The ITC-irst Speech Translation System

The C-STAR consortium recently demonstrated the results achieved in speech-to-speech machine translation by means of a public demo. ITC-irst participated hosting its own demo, playing the role of a tourist who aims at organizing a travel to New York and Hiedelberg. For this purpose, he contacts, via a video-conference, two tourism agencies, the first in the United States (played by the CMU lab) and the other in Germany (Karlsruhe University). In other occasions, ITC-irst also played the role of the agent. Moreover, another demo was played with ETRI, in Korea. The system performs speech-to-speech translation via a kind of (simple) inter-lingua, the Interchange Format (IF): this allowed us to use the same systems while considering different partner laguages (such as English, German, Korean). In fact, each partner in the Consortium provides the translation chains from its own language to the IF and from the IF to its language. In the following, the two chains for Italian are describe