A-STAR: Toward translating Asian spoken languages ?
This paper outlines the first Asian network-based speech-to-speech translation system developed by the Asian Speech Translation Advanced Research (A-STAR) consortium. Eight research groups comprising the A-STAR members participated in the experiments, covering nine languages, i.e., eight Asian languages (Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese) and English. Each A-STAR member contributed one or more of the following spoken language technologies: automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech through Web servers. The system was designed to translate common spoken utterances of travel conversations from a given source language into multiple target languages in order to facilitate multiparty travel conversations between people speaking different Asian languages. It covers travel expressions including proper nouns that are names of famous places or attractions in Asian countries. In this paper, we describe the issues of developing spoken language technologies for Asian languages, and discuss the difficulties involved in connecting different heterogeneous spoken language translation systems through Web servers. This paper also presents speech-translation results including subjective evaluation, from the first A-STAR field testing which was carried out in July 2009.
speech-to-speech translation asian languages speech recognition machine translation text-to-speech