Experimental facility for measuring the impact of environmental noise and speaker variation on speech-to-speech translation devices

Author

Jones, D.A. ; Jairam, A. ; Shen, W. ; Gatewood, P. ; Tardelli, J. ; Emonts, M.

Author_Institution

Lincoln Lab., MIT, Lexington, MA

fYear

2006

fDate

10-13 Dec. 2006

Firstpage

250

Lastpage

253

Abstract

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 60,000 phrases available for experimentation. We describe an initial experiment using the facility which shows the impact of environmental noise and speaker variability on phrase recognition accuracy for two commercially available one-way speech-to-speech translation devices configured for English-to-Arabic.

Keywords

language translation; noise (working environment); speaker recognition; speech recognition equipment; English-to-Arabic; environmental noise; laboratory facility; phrase recognition accuracy; speaker variation; speech-to-speech translation devices; Acoustic noise; Loudspeakers; Microphones; Natural languages; Noise level; Noise measurement; Speech analysis; Speech enhancement; Testing; Working environment noise;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Spoken Language Technology Workshop, 2006. IEEE

Conference_Location

Palm Beach

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0872-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SLT.2006.326802

Filename

4123409