Incremental Japanese Spoken Language Generation in Simultaneous Machine Interpretation

Towards smooth and natural multilingual speech communication, it is desired to develop simultaneous interpretation systems. This paper proposes a technique for incremental Japanese generation in EnglishJapanese simultaneous machine interpretation. Generally, the difference of word-order in both languages causes a fatal problem in incremental translation between English and Japanese. In our approach, the acceptable translation result can be generated as immediately as possible by positively utilizing inversions, repetitions, corrections, etc. The simultaneous interpretaion can be attained by synchronous execution of incremental dependency parsing, transfer and generation. The prototype system of Enligh-Japanese incremental translation was developed based on our technique. An experiment using ATIS corpus has shown our technique to be effective for improving the output-timing of translation results.