The EuTrans Spoken Language Translation System

The EuTransAll project aims at using example-based approaches for the automatic development of Machine Translation systems accepting text and speech input for limited-domain applications. During the first phase of the project, a speech-translation system that is based on the use of automatically learned subsequential transducers has been built. This paper contains a detailed and mostly self-contained overview of the transducer-learning algorithms and system architecture, along with a new approach for using categories representing words or short phrases in both input and output languages. Experimental results using this approach are reported for a task involving the recognition and translation of sentences in the hotel-reception communication domain, with a vocabulary of 683 words in Spanish. A translation word-error rate of 1.97% is achieved in real-time factor 2.7 on a Personal Computer.