Interpreting Unit Segmentation of Conversational Speech in Simultaneous Interpretation Corpus

The speech-to-speech translation system is becoming an important research topic with the progress of the speech and language processing technology. Considering efficiency and the smoothness of the cross-lingual conversation, the simultaneity of the translation processing has a great influence on the performance of the system. This paper describes interpreting unit segmentation of conversational bilingual speech in simultaneous interpretation corpus which has been developed in Nagoya University. By finding the segmentation point of spoken utterances in the speech corpus manually, we identified a clause-unit as a practical interpreting unit. In this paper, we examined the availability of such unit, and segmented spoken dialogue sentences into interpreting units. A large-scale bilingual corpus for which the interpreting units are provided can be used for the simultaneous machine interpretation.