Janus II - Advances in Spontaneous Speech Translation

JANUS II is a research system to design and test components of speech to speech translation systems as well as a research prototype for such a system. We will focus on two aspects of the system: 1) new features and recognition performance of the speech recognition component JANUS-SR and 2) the end-to-end performance of JANUS II, including a comparison of two machine translation strategies used for JANUS-MT (PHOENIX and GLR*). 1. INTRODUCTION Currently JANUS II components for English, German, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish speech input and translation are under development; though not all language pairs can always be kept at the same performance level, multilinguality is required to ensure generality in the recognition and translation approaches. A multitude of smaller and larger scale research projects contribute to the JANUS II system[1], including robust speech recognition[2], noise modeling[3], speaker and channel adaptation, strategies for porting recognition and translation to new..