The Spoken Language Translator

This original volume describes the Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major automatic speech translation projects. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The authors detail the language processing components, largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains. They base speech recognition on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and use versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of SLT is an essential resource for researchers interested in knowing what is achievable in spoken-language translation today.

This book, which should be of interest to anyone working in computational linguistics, speech recognition, cognitive science, artificial intelligence or machine translation, describes the Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The book explains in detail how the SLT system works and presents an objective evaluation of its performance.