Name aware speech-to-speech translation for English/Iraqi

In this paper, we describe a novel approach that exploits intra-sentence and dialog-level context for improving translation performance on spoken Iraqi utterances that contain named entities (NEs). Dialog-level context is used to predict whether the Iraqi response is likely to contain names and the intra-sentence context is used to determine words that are named entities. While we do not address the problem of translating out-of-vocabulary (OOV) NEs in spoken utterances, we show that our approach is capable of translating OOV names in text input. To demonstrate efficacy of our approach, we present results on internal test set as well as the 2008 June DARPA TRANSTAC name evaluation set.