'96 Korea-china Joint Symposium on Oriental Language Computing a Multi-lingual Speech Translation System for Hotel Reservation

In this paper, we present a multilingual speech translation system for hotel reservation. This is an experimental speech-to-speech translation system which translates a spoken utterance in Korean into one in Japanese or English. The system can understand dialogues for hotel reservation between a Korean customer and a hotel reservation desk in Japan and countries using English. It consists of a Korean speech recognizer, a Korean to Japanese and English machine translators and three kinds of speech synthesizers. The Korean speech recognizer is an HMM(Hidden Markov Model)-based speaker-independent, continuous speech recognizer which can recognize about 300 word vocabularies. We have achieved the word recognition rate of 94.5% and the sentence recognition rate of 81.2%. In machine translation, direct transfer method is used for Korean to Japanese and example based translation method is used for Korean to English translation. Experimental results of machine translation gave us the success rate of 100% for Korean to Japanese or English translation. There are three kinds of speech synthesizers in this system, which are respectively for Korean, Japanese and English. The system runs in nearly real time on the SUN SPARC20 workstation with one TMS320C30 DSP(Digital Signal Processing) board.