The Asian network-based speech-to-speech translation system

This paper outlines the first Asian network-based speech-to-speech translation system developed by the Asian Speech Translation Advanced Research (A-STAR) consortium. The system was designed to translate common spoken utterances of travel conversations from a certain source language into multiple target languages in order to facilitate multiparty travel conversations between people speaking different Asian languages. Each A-STAR member contributes one or more of the following spoken language technologies: automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech through Web servers. Currently, the system has successfully covered 9 languages— namely, 8 Asian languages (Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese) and additionally, the English language. The system's domain covers about 20,000 travel expressions, including proper nouns that are names of famous places or attractions in Asian countries. In this paper, we discuss the difficulties involved in connecting various different spoken language translation systems through Web servers. We also present speech-translation results on the first A-STAR demo experiments carried out in July 2009.