Developing Non-European Translation Pairs in a Medium-Vocabulary Medical Speech Translation System

Pierrette Bouillon, Sonia Halimi, Yukie Nakao, Kyoko Kanzaki, Hitoshi Isahara, Nikos Tsourakis, Marianne Starlander, Beth Ann Hockey, Manny Rayner

Abstract
We describe recent work on MedSLT, a medium-vocabulary interlingua-based medical speech translation system, focussing on issues that arise when handling languages of which the grammar engineer has little or no knowledge. We show how we can systematically create and maintain multiple forms of grammars, lexica and interlingual representations, with some versions being used by language informants, and some by grammar engineers. In particular, we describe the advantages of structuring the interlingua definition as a simple semantic grammar, which includes a human-readable surface form. We show how this allows us to rationalise the process of evaluating translations between languages lacking common speakers, and also makes it possible to create a simple generic tool for debugging to-interlingua translation rules. Examples presented focus on the concrete case of translation between Japanese and Arabic in both directions.
Anthology ID:
L08-1488
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/443_paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Pierrette Bouillon, Sonia Halimi, Yukie Nakao, Kyoko Kanzaki, Hitoshi Isahara, Nikos Tsourakis, Marianne Starlander, Beth Ann Hockey, and Manny Rayner. 2008. Developing Non-European Translation Pairs in a Medium-Vocabulary Medical Speech Translation System. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Developing Non-European Translation Pairs in a Medium-Vocabulary Medical Speech Translation System (Bouillon et al., LREC 2008)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/443_paper.pdf
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