Abstract

Despite the increasing interest in Speech-to-speech (S2S) translation, research and development has focused almost exclusively on the lexical aspects of translation. The importance of transferring prosodic and other paralinguistic information through S2S devices and evaluating its impact on the translation quality are yet to be well established. The novelty in this work is a large scale human evaluation study to test the hypothesis that cross-lingual prosodic emphasis transfer is directly related to the perceived quality of speech translation. This hypothesis is validated at the 0.53-0.54 correlation level on the data sets considered with results significant at p-value=0.01. The second contribution of this work is an evaluation methodology based on crowd sourcing using English-Spanish language bilingual data from two distinct domains and evaluated with over 200 bilingual speakers. We also present lessons learned on …

Date

2013

Authors

Andreas Tsiartas, Panayiotis G Georgiou, Shrikanth S Narayanan

Conference

2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

Pages

8396-8400

Publisher

IEEE