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| PlainBabel |
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Simultaneous Machine Translation PlainBabel translates spoken languages simultaneously. It therefore enables a phone- based dialogue of two parties to overcome language barriers. It combines high-quality, continuous automatic speech recognition with statistical machine translation. The system is able to recognize speaker-independent naturally spoken sentences, translate them in nearly real time, and synthesize the translation result in the foreign language. PlainBabel was presented successfully at CeBit2002 and DoDIIS 2006. Until now machine speech-to-speech translation was merely a vision for the future that wasn’t realizable with adequate quality. However, researchers at the Aachen University of Technology and AppTek, Inc. have now combined intelligent individual modules for speech recognition, translation, and synthesis to create a system that realizes this vision. PlainBabel is a dialogue-driven speech-to-speech translation system that allows for a bilingual natural dialogue between two parties who don’t speak each other’s language. The system can be used with different types of output devices, from an ISDN telephone to a 3G mobile phone. The experts from AppTek use intelligent systems based on statistical methods for speech recognition and translation. Unlike classical speech recognition and translation systems, AppTek’s linguistic innovations do not rely on narrowly defined rules and vocabularies. Rather, the system is trained with bilingual materials from the domain for which it will be deployed. Depending on the scope and specification of the training materials, the system can deliver a level of quality that was unattainable with previous systems. The statistical approach minimizes the increase in the number of errors from combining speech recognition and machine translation, allowing a speaker-independent dialogue between two parties within a defined domain. Communication is supported and guided by a dialogue management system developed specifically for this purpose. Through the modular design and the simple interfaces of PlainBabel, it is possible to easily transfer or expand the simultaneous translation capabilities to other output devices (e.g., PDAs) or integrate them into existing systems. The high degree of scalability of the individual modules allows for sufficient speed even with more complex applications and multiple users. Characteristics:
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