We present the PASSAGE project, which aims at automatic Standard German subtitling of Swiss German TV content. This is achieved in a two step process, beginning with ASR to produce a normalised transcription, followed by translation into Standard German. We focus on the second step, for which we explore different approaches and contribute aligned corpora for future research.

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.

Particularly considering the requirement of high reliability, we argue that the most appropriate architecture for a medical speech translator that can be realised using today’s technology combines unidirectional (doctor to patient) translation, medium-vocabulary controlled language coverage, interlingua-based translation, an embedded help component, and deployability on a hand-held hardware platform. We present an overview of the Open Source MedSLT prototype, which has been developed in accordance with these design principles. The system is implemented on top of the Regulus and Nuance 8.5 platforms, translates patient examination questions for all language pairs in the set {English, French, Japanese, Arabic, Catalan}, using vocabularies of about 400 to 1 100 words, and can be run in a distributed client/server environment, where the client application is hosted on a Nokia Internet Tablet device.

Dans tout dialogue, les phrases elliptiques sont très nombreuses. Dans cet article, nous évaluons leur impact sur la reconnaissance et la traduction dans le système de traduction automatique de la parole MedSLT. La résolution des ellipses y est effectuée par une méthode robuste et portable, empruntée aux systèmes de dialogue homme-machine. Cette dernière exploite une représentation sémantique plate et combine des techniques linguistiques (pour construire la représentation) et basées sur les exemples (pour apprendre sur la base d’un corpus ce qu’est une ellipse bien formée dans un sous-domaine donné et comment la résoudre).

Aujourd’hui, l’approche la plus courante en traitement de la parole consiste à combiner un reconnaisseur statistique avec un analyseur robuste. Pour beaucoup d’applications cependant, les reconnaisseurs linguistiques basés sur les grammaires offrent de nombreux avantages. Dans cet article, nous présentons une méthodologie et un ensemble de logiciels libres (appelé Regulus) pour dériver rapidement des reconnaisseurs linguistiquement motivés à partir d’une grammaire générale partagée pour le catalan et le français.

In this paper, we present evidence that providing users of a speech to speech translation system for emergency diagnosis (MedSLT) with a tool that helps them to learn the coverage greatly improves their success in using the system. In MedSLT, the system uses a grammar-based recogniser that provides more predictable results to the translation component. The help module aims at addressing the lack of robustness inherent in this type of approach. It takes as input the result of a robust statistical recogniser that performs better for out-of-coverage data and produces a list of in-coverage example sentences. These examples are selected from a defined list using a heuristic that prioritises sentences maximising the number of N-grams shared with those extracted from the recognition result.