Computer-assisted translation using speech recognition

Current machine translation systems are far from being perfect. However, such systems can be used in computer-assisted translation to increase the productivity of the (human) translation process. The idea is to use a text-to-text translation system to produce portions of target language text that can be accepted or amended by a human translator using text or speech. These user-validated portions are then used by the text-to-text translation system to produce further, hopefully improved suggestions. There are different alternatives of using speech in a computer-assisted translation system: From pure dictated translation to simple determination of acceptable partial translations by reading parts of the suggestions made by the system. In all the cases, information from the text to be translated can be used to constrain the speech decoding search space. While pure dictation seems to be among the most attractive settings, unfortunately perfect speech decoding does not seem possible with the current speech processing technology and human error-correcting would still be required. Therefore, approaches that allow for higher speech recognition accuracy by using increasingly constrained models in the speech recognition process are explored here. All these approaches are presented under the statistical framework. Empirical results support the potential usefulness of using speech within the computer-assisted translation paradigm.