Aaron Challenner


2012

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Active error detection and resolution for speech-to-speech translation
Rohit Prasad | Rohit Kumar | Sankaranarayanan Ananthakrishnan | Wei Chen | Sanjika Hewavitharana | Matthew Roy | Frederick Choi | Aaron Challenner | Enoch Kan | Arvid Neelakantan | Prem Natarajan
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

We describe a novel two-way speech-to-speech (S2S) translation system that actively detects a wide variety of common error types and resolves them through user-friendly dialog with the user(s). We present algorithms for detecting out-of-vocabulary (OOV) named entities and terms, sense ambiguities, homophones, idioms, ill-formed input, etc. and discuss novel, interactive strategies for recovering from such errors. We also describe our approach for prioritizing different error types and an extensible architecture for implementing these decisions. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system by presenting analysis on live interactions in the English-to-Iraqi Arabic direction that are designed to invoke different error types for spoken language translation. Our analysis shows that the system can successfully resolve 47% of the errors, resulting in a dramatic improvement in the transfer of problematic concepts.