Abstract

Spoken communication across a language barrier is of increasing importance in both civilian and military applications. In this paper, we present an English/Iraqi Arabic speech-to-speech translation system for the military force protection domain (checkpoints, municipal services surveys, basic descriptions of people, houses, vehicles, etc). The system combines statistical N-gram speech recognition, statistical machine translation, hand-crafted rules, and speech synthesis in order to translate between the two languages. The system is designed for “eyes-free”, or “displayless” use. That is, it does not make use of a screen, mouse, or keyboard, but is instead operated by a handheld microphone with just two push buttons: one for English, and the other for Arabic.

Date

2007

Authors

David Stallard, Fred Choi, Chia-lin Kao, Kriste Krstovski, Premkumar Natarajan, Rohit Prasad, Shirin Saleem, Krishna Subramanian

Conference

INTERSPEECH

Pages

2817-2820