Publications

Software-defined cognitive radios (CRs) use voice as a primary input/output (I/O) modality and are expected to have substantial computational resources capable of supporting advanced speech- and audio-processing applications. This chapter extends previous work on speech applications (e.g., [1]) to cognitive services that enhance military mission capability by capitalizing on automatic...

This paper describes the construction of ASR and MT systems for translation of speech from Urdu into English. As both Urdu pronunciation lexicons and Urdu-English bitexts are sparse, we employ several techniques that make use of semi-supervised annotation to improve ASR and MT training. Specifically, we describe 1) the construction...

This paper describes advances in the use of confusion networks as interface between automatic speech recognition and machine translation. In particular, it presents a decoding algorithm for confusion networks which results as an extension of a state-of-the-art phrase-based text translation decoder. The confusion network decoder significantly improves both in efficiency...

The MIT-LL/AFRL MT system implements a standard phrase-based, statistical translation model. It incorporates a number of extensions that improve performance for speech-based translation. During this evaluation our efforts focused on the rapid porting of our SMT system to a new language (Arabic) and novel approaches to translation from speech input...

We present results from a new Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) based comprehension test. This new test design presents questions at multiple ILR difficulty levels within each document. We incorporated Arabic machine translation (MT) output from three independent research sites, arbitrarily merging these materials into one MT condition. We contrast the...

We describe the construction and use of a laboratory facility for testing the performance of speech-to-speech translation devices. Approximately 1500 English phrases from various military domains were recorded as spoken by each of 30 male and 12 female English speakers with variation in speaker accent, for a total of approximately...

In this paper we describe an efficient implementation of a graph search algorithm for phrase-based statistical machine translation. Our goal was to create a decoder that could be used for both our research system and a real-time speech-to-speech machine translation demonstration system. The search algorithm is based on a Viterbi...

The MIT-LL/AFRL MT system is a statistical phrase-based translation system that implements many modern SMT training and decoding techniques. Our system was designed with the long-term goal of dealing with corrupted ASR input and limited amounts of training data for speech-to-speech MT applications. This paper will discuss the architecture of...

This paper describes the SMT we built during the 2006 JHU Summer Workshop for the IWSLT 2006 evaluation. Our effort focuses on two parts of the speech translation problem: 1) efficient decoding of word lattices and 2) novel applications of factored translation models to IWSLT-specific problems. In this paper, we...

We present observations from three exercises designed to map the effective listening and speaking skills of an operator of a speech-to-speech translation system (S2S) to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. Such a mapping is nontrivial, but will be useful for government and military decision makers in managing expectations of...