Discourse Processing in Enthusiast 3-Year Report

This document summarizes the major work on discourse processing in the Enthusiast Spanish-English speech translation project. Traditionally machine translation systems have processed sentences in isolation. Recently, there has been an interest in making use of discourse information in machine translation. In [15, 20], researchers at ATR advocate an illocutionary act based machine translation, arguing that equivalent sentence forms do not necessarily carry the same illocutionary forces across languages. In addition to speech act recognition, discourse information can be used for ellipsis and anaphora resolution to provide more accurate translation. Discourse processing has been shown to be useful in other natural language processing applications as well. For example, [45] reports that a discourse state can be used to select an appropriate language model for speech recognition and parsing to reduce the perplexity and improve recognition and parsing accuracy. Our work on discourse processing has been done in four major directions