Concept-based speech translation

As part of the JANUS speech-to-speech translation project, the authors have developed a robust translation system based on the information structures inherent to the task being performed. The basic premise is that the structure of the information to be transmitted is largely independent of the language used to encode it. The system performs no syntactic analysis; speaker utterances are parsed into semantic chunks, which can be strung together without grammatical rules, and passed through a simple template-based translation module. The authors have achieved encouraging coverage rates on English, German and Spanish input with English, German and Spanish output