Solutions to Problems Inherent in Spoken-language Translation: The ATR-MATRIX Approach

ATR has built a multi-language speech translation system called ATR-MATRIX. It consists of a spoken-language translation subsystem, which is the focus of this paper, together with a highly accurate speech recognition subsystem and a high-definition speech synthesis subsystem. This paper gives a road map of solutions to the problems inherent in spoken-language translation. Spokenlanguage translation systems need to tackle difficult problems such as ungrammaticality. contextual phenomena, speech recognition errors, and the high-speeds required for real-time use. We have made great strides towards solving these problems in recent years. Our approach mainly uses an example-based translation model called TDMT. We have added the use of extralinguistic information, a decision tree learning mechanism, and methods dealing with recognition errors.