A Modular Approach to Spoken Language Translation for Large Domains

. The MT engine of the Janus speech-to-speech translation system is designed around four main principles: 1) an interlingua approach that allows the efficient addition of new languages, 2) the use of semantic grammars that yield low cost high quality translations for limited domains, 3) modular grammars that support easy expansion into new domains, and 4) efficient integration of multiple grammars using multi-domain parse lattices and domain re-scoring. Within the framework of the C-STAR-II speech-to-speech translation effort, these principles are tested against the challenge of providing translation for a number of domains and language pairs with the additional restriction of a common interchange format. 1 Introduction Within the Janus project [9] we have been involved in an ongoing effort to develop a machine translation system specifically suited for spoken dialogue. Spoken language is characterized by highly disfluent utterances that are often fragmented and ungrammatical. Furthe..