Splitting Long or Ill-formed Input for Robust Spoken-language Translation.pdf

Splitting Long or Ill-formed Input for Robust Spoken-language Translation O s a m u F U R U S E t, S e t s u o Y A M A D A , K a z u h i d e Y A M A M O T O ATR Interpret ing Telecommunications Research Laboratories 2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0288, Japan furuse~cslab, kecl. ntt. co. jp, {syamada, yamamoto}@itl, atr. co. jp A b s t r a c t This paper proposes an input-splitting method for translating spoken-language which includes many long or ill-formed expressions. The pro- posed method splits input into well-balanced translation units based on a semantic distance calculation. The splitting is performed dur- ing left-to-right parsing, and does not degrade translation efficiency. The complete translation result is formed by concatenating the partial translation results of each split unit. The pro- posed method can be incorporated into frame- works like TDMT, which utilize left-to-right parsing and a score for a substructure. Experi- mental results show that the proposed method gives TDMT the following advantages: (1) elim- ination of null outputs, (2) splitting of utter- ances into sentences, and (3) robust translation of erroneous speech recognition results. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n A spoken-language translation system requires the ability to treat long or ill-formed input. An utterance as input of a spoken-language trans- lation system, is not always one well-formed sentence. Also, when treating an utterance in speech translation, the speech recognition result which is the input of the translation component, might be corrupted even though the input utter- ance is well-formed. Such a misrecognized result can cause a parsing failure, and consequently, no translation output would be produced. Further- more, we cannot expect that a speech recogni- tion result includes punctuation marks such as a comma or a period between words, which are useful information for parsing. 1 As a solution for treatin