| 1. |
- Alshawi, Hiyan, et al.
(författare)
-
Bilingual conversation interpreter : a prototype interactive message translator. Final report
- 1991. - 1
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This document is the final report for a research project aimed at producing a prototype system for on-line translation of typed dialogues between speakers of different natural languages. The work was carried out jointly by SICS and SRI Cambridge. The resulting prototype system (called Billingual Conversation Interpreter, or BCI) translates between english and Swedish in both directions.The Major components of the BCI are two copies of the SRI Core Language Engine, equipped with English and Swedish grammars respectively. These are linked by the transfer and disambiguation components. Translation takes place by analyzing the source-language sentence into Quasi Logical Form ( QLF), a linguistically motivated logical representation, transferring this into a target-language QLF, and generating a target-language sentence. When ambiguities occur that cannot be resolved automatically, they are clarified by Querying the appropriate user. The clarification dialogue presupposes no knowledge of either linguistics or the other language. The prototype system has a broad grammatical coverage, a initial vocabulary of about 1000 words together with vocabulary expansion tools, and a set of English-Swedish transfer rules. The formalism developed for coding this linguistic information make it relatively easy to extend the system. We believe that the project was successful in demonstrating the feasibility of using these techniques for interactive translation applications, and provides a sound basis for development of a large scale message translator system with potential for commercial exploitation.The main sections of this report are the following: * A non-technical introduction, summarizing the BCI's design , and containing a sample session. * An overview of the Swedish version of the CLE. * A detailed discussion of the theory and practice of QLF transfer. * A description of the interactive disambiguation method. * Suggestions for possible follow-on projects aimed in the direction of practically usable commercial systems.
|
|
| 2. |
- Alshawi, Hiyan, et al.
(författare)
-
Transfer through quasi logical form - A new approach to machine translation
- 1991. - 1
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This Document is an introduction to a research project aimed at producing a prototype system for on-line translation of typed dialogues between speakers of different natural languages. The work was carried out jointly by SICS and SRI Cambridge. The resulting prototype system (called Billingual Conversation Interpreter, or BCI) translates between English and Swedish in both Directions. The major components of the BCI are two copies of the SRI Core Language Engine, equipped with English and Swedish grammars respectively. These are linked by the transfer and disambiguation components. Translation takes place by analyzing the source-language sentence into Quasi Logical Form (QLF), a linguistically motivated logical representation, transferring this onto a target-language QLF, and generating a target-language sentence. We believe that the project was successful in demonstrating the feasibility of using these techniques for interactive translation applications, and provides a sound basis for development of a large scale message translator system. The final section of the paper points to several possible follow-on projects aimed in the direction of practically usable commercial systems.
|
|
| 3. |
- Becket, Ralph, et al.
(författare)
-
Spoken Language Translator: Phase Two Report
- 1997
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Spoken Language Translator (SLT) is a project whose long-term goal is the construction of practically useful systems capable of translating human speech from one language into another. The current SLT prototype, described in detail in this report, is capable of speech-to-speech translation between English and Swedish in either direction within the domain of airline flight inquiries, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words. Translation from English and Swedish into French is also possible, with slightly poorer performance.A good English-language speech recognizer existed before the start of the project, and has since been improved in several ways. During the project, we have constructed a Swedish-language recognizer, arguably the best system of its kind so far built. This has involved among other things collection of a large amount of Swedish training data. The recognizer is essentially domain-independent, but has been tuned to give high performance in the air travel inquiry domain.The main version of the Swedish recognizer is trained on the Stockholm dialect of Swedish, and achieves near-real-time performance with a word error rate of about 7%. Techniques developed partly under this project make it possible to port the recognizer to other Swedish dialects using only modest quantities of training data.On the language-processing side, we had at the start of the project a substantial domain-independent language-processing system for English, a preliminary Swedish version, and a sketchy set of rules to permit English to Swedish translation. We now have good versions of the language-processing system for English, Swedish and French, and fair to good support for translation in five of the six possible language- pairs. Translation is carried out using a novel robust architecture developed under the project. In essence, this translates as much of the input utterance as possible using a sophisticated grammar-based method, and then employs a much simpler set of word- to-word translation rules to fill in the gaps.The language-processing modules are all generic in nature, are based on large, linguistically motivated grammars, and can fairly easily be tuned to give good performance in new domains. Much of the work involved in the domain adaptation process can be carried out by non-experts using tools developed under the project.Formal comparisons are problematic, in view of the different domains and languages used and the lack of accepted evaluation criteria. None the less, the evidence at our disposal suggests that the current SLT prototype is no worse than the German Verbmobil demonstrator, in spite of a difference in project budget of more than an order of magnitude.
|
|
| 4. |
- Boye, Johan, et al.
(författare)
-
Language-Processing Strategies and Mixed-Initiative Dialogues
- 1999
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We describe an implemented spoken-language dialogue system for a travel-planning domain, which accesses a commercially available travel-information web-server and supports a flexible mixed-initiative dialogue strategy. We argue, based on data from initial Wizard-of-Oz experiments, that mixed-initiative strategies are appropriate for many types of user, but require more sophisticated architectures for processing of language and dialogue; we then use these observations to motivate an architecture which combines parallel deep and shallow natural language analysis engines and an agenda-driven dialogue manager. We outline the top-level processing strategy used by the dialogue manager, and also a novel formalism, which we call Flat Utterance Description, that allows us to reduce the output of the deep and shallow language-processing engines to a common representation.
|
|
| 5. |
- Bretan, Ivan, et al.
(författare)
-
Corpora and Data Collection
- 2000
-
Ingår i: The Spoken Language Translator. - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. - 0521770777 - 9780521770774 ; , s. 131-144
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.
|
|
| 6. |
- Carter, David, et al.
(författare)
-
Common speech/language issues
- 2000
-
Ingår i: The spoken language translator. - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. - 0521770777 - 9780521038829 ; , s. 284-294
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
|
|
| 7. |
- Carter, David, et al.
(författare)
-
Common Speech–Language Issues
- 2000
-
Ingår i: The Spoken Language Translator. - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. - 0521770777 - 9780521038829 ; , s. 284-294
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.
|
|
| 8. |
- Carter, David, et al.
(författare)
-
Evaluation
- 2000
-
Ingår i: The Spoken Language Translator. - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. - 0521770777 - 9780521770774 ; , s. 297-312
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.
|
|
| 9. |
- Carter, David, et al.
(författare)
-
Evaluation
- 2000
-
Ingår i: The spoken language translator. - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. - 0521770777 - 9780521038829 ; , s. 297-312
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
|
|
| 10. |
- Carter, David, et al.
(författare)
-
Translation Methodology in the Spoken Language Translator: An Evaluation
- 1997
-
Ingår i: Proceedings of ACL/EACL workshop Spoken Language Translation. ; , s. 73-81
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we describe how the translation methodology adopted fro the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) addresses the characteristics of the speech translation task in a context where it is essential to achieve easy customization to new languages and new domains. We then discuss the issues that arise in any attempt to evaluate a speech translator, and present results of such an evaluation carried out on SLT for several language pairs.
|
|
