“Can you give me another word for hyperbaric?”: Improving speech translation using targeted clarification questions

Author

Ayan, Necip Fazil ; Mandal, Avirup ; Frandsen, Michael ; Jing Zheng ; Blasco, Pol ; Kathol, Andreas ; Bechet, Frederic ; Favre, Benoit ; Marin, A. ; Kwiatkowski, Tom ; Ostendorf, Mari ; Zettlemoyer, Luke ; Salletmayr, Philipp ; Hirschberg, Julia ; Stoyanc

Author_Institution

SRI Int., Menlo Park, CA, USA

fYear

2013

Firstpage

8391

Lastpage

8395

Abstract

We present a novel approach for improving communication success between users of speech-to-speech translation systems by automatically detecting errors in the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. Our approach initiates system-driven targeted clarification about errorful regions in user input and repairs them given user responses. Our system has been evaluated by unbiased subjects in live mode, and results show improved success of communication between users of the system.

Keywords

language translation; speech recognition; ASR; SMT systems; automatic speech recognition; automatically detecting errors; hyperbaric; speech-to-speech translation systems; statistical machine translation; system-driven targeted clarification; targeted clarification questions; Hidden Markov models; Lattices; Merging; Pragmatics; Speech; Speech recognition; Syntactics; Speech translation; error correction; error detection; spoken dialog systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2013 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Vancouver, BC

ISSN

1520-6149

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.2013.6639302

Filename

6639302