Amharic-English Speech Translation in Tourism Domain

This paper describes speech translation from Amharic-to-English, particularly Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with post-editing feature and AmharicEnglish Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). ASR experiment is conducted using morpheme language model (LM) and phoneme acoustic model (AM). Likewise, SMT conducted using word and morpheme as unit. Morpheme based translation shows a 6.29 BLEU score at a 76.4% of recognition accuracy while word based translation shows a 12.83 BLEU score using 77.4% word recognition accuracy. Further, after post-edit on Amharic ASR using corpus based n-gram, the word recognition accuracy increased by 1.42%. Since post-edit approach reduces error propagation, the word based translation accuracy improved by 0.25 (1.95%) BLEU score. We are now working towards further improving propagated errors through different algorithms at each unit of speech translation cascading component.