EUTRANS project: FUB activity in Spoken Machine Translation

In this paper we report on the ongoing activity for the project ESPRIT LTR EuTrans during the first year. Issues for the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni (FUB) have been the prototype implementation, the text and speech data collection and the usability assessment. The corpus has two main objectives: to provide training material for recognition and translation training; to contain speech material for acoustic modelling, and textual material for language modelling and translation modelling. The main aim of the project is to show the potentialities of an Example Based approach to the Machine Translation for a speech-to-speech application in the domain of hotel reservation. The speech application envisaged is a telephone communication media between two human beings (the customer and the receptionist) with translation abilities: the customer call, from inside or outside, a special number of the hotel, speak in his/her own language in order to make a reservation, to cancel a reservation, to ask information for services, to claim for services; the receptionist will receive the customer request in his/her own language and will answer in his/her language through the same media. The application has been simulated through the technique of Wizard of Oz; the current prototype is based on a two-machine architecture: a recognition/translation server and client supporting the telephone interface towards the user and the GUI towards the receptionist. The WoZ plays the role of the receptionist.