Janus: towards Multilingual Spoken Language Translation

In our effort to build spoken language translation systems we have extended our JANUS system to process spontaneous human–human dialogs in a new domain, two people trying to schedule a meeting. Trained on an initial database JANUS-2 is able to translate English and German spoken input in either English, German, Spanish, Japanese or Korean output. To tackle the difficulty of spontaneous human–human dialogs we improved the JANUS-2 recognizer along its three knowledgesourcesacousticmodels, dictionary and language models. We developed a robust translation system which performs semantic rather than syntactic analysis and thus is particulary suited to processing spontaneous speech. We describe repair methods to recover from recognition errors.