Automatic Speech Recognition and Translation for Low Resource Languages


Book Description

AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION and TRANSLATION for LOW-RESOURCE LANGUAGES This book is a comprehensive exploration into the cutting-edge research, methodologies, and advancements in addressing the unique challenges associated with ASR and translation for low-resource languages. Automatic Speech Recognition and Translation for Low Resource Languages contains groundbreaking research from experts and researchers sharing innovative solutions that address language challenges in low-resource environments. The book begins by delving into the fundamental concepts of ASR and translation, providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding the subsequent chapters. It then explores the intricacies of low-resource languages, analyzing the factors that contribute to their challenges and the significance of developing tailored solutions to overcome them. The chapters encompass a wide range of topics, ranging from both the theoretical and practical aspects of ASR and translation for low-resource languages. The book discusses data augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and multilingual training approaches that leverage the power of existing linguistic resources to improve accuracy and performance. Additionally, it investigates the possibilities offered by unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, as well as the benefits of active learning and crowdsourcing in enriching the training data. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on the importance of considering the cultural and linguistic context of low-resource languages, recognizing the unique nuances and intricacies that influence accurate ASR and translation. Furthermore, the book explores the potential impact of these technologies in various domains, such as healthcare, education, and commerce, empowering individuals and communities by breaking down language barriers. Audience The book targets researchers and professionals in the fields of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech technology. It will also be of interest to engineers, linguists, and individuals in industries and organizations working on cross-lingual communication, accessibility, and global connectivity.




Automatic Speech Translation


Book Description

Automatic Speech Translation introduces recent results of Japanese research and development in speech translation and speech recognition. Topics covered include: fundamental concepts of speech recognition; speech pattern representation; phoneme-based HMM phoneme recognition; continuous speech recognition; speaker adaptation; speaker-independent speech recognition; utterance analysis, utterance transfer, utterance generation; contextual process­ing; speech synthesis and an experimental system of speech translation. This book presents the complicated technological aspects of machine translation and speech recognition, and outlines the future directions of this rapidly developing area of technology.




Automatic Speech Translation


Book Description

Automatic Speech Translation introduces recent results of Japanese research and development in speech translation and speech recognition. Topics covered include: fundamental concepts of speech recognition; speech pattern representation; phoneme-based HMM phoneme recognition; continuous speech recognition; speaker adaptation; speaker-independent speech recognition; utterance analysis, utterance transfer, utterance generation; contextual processing; speech synthesis and an experimental system of speech translation. This book presents the complicated technological aspects of machine translation and speech recognition, and outlines the future directions of this rapidly developing area of technology.




Speech-to-Speech Translation


Book Description

Speech--to--Speech Translation: a Massively Parallel Memory-Based Approach describes one of the world's first successful speech--to--speech machine translation systems. This system accepts speaker-independent continuous speech, and produces translations as audio output. Subsequent versions of this machine translation system have been implemented on several massively parallel computers, and these systems have attained translation performance in the milliseconds range. The success of this project triggered several massively parallel projects, as well as other massively parallel artificial intelligence projects throughout the world. Dr. Hiroaki Kitano received the distinguished `Computers and Thought Award' from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in 1993 for his work in this area, and that work is reported in this book.




Speech-to-Speech Translation


Book Description

This book provides the readers with retrospective and prospective views with detailed explanations of component technologies, speech recognition, language translation and speech synthesis. Speech-to-speech translation system (S2S) enables to break language barriers, i.e., communicate each other between any pair of person on the glove, which is one of extreme dreams of humankind. People, society, and economy connected by S2S will demonstrate explosive growth without exception. In 1986, Japan initiated basic research of S2S, then the idea spread world-wide and were explored deeply by researchers during three decades. Now, we see S2S application on smartphone/tablet around the world. Computational resources such as processors, memories, wireless communication accelerate this computation-intensive systems and accumulation of digital data of speech and language encourage recent approaches based on machine learning. Through field experiments after long research in laboratories, S2S systems are being well-developed and now ready to utilized in daily life. Unique chapter of this book is end-2-end evaluation by comparing system’s performance and human competence. The effectiveness of the system would be understood by the score of this evaluation. The book will end with one of the next focus of S2S will be technology of simultaneous interpretation for lecture, broadcast news and so on.




Advantages of System Combination for Spoken Language Translation


Book Description

Automatic translation of spoken language is a challenging task that involves several natural language processing (NLP) software modules such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) systems. In recent years, statistical approaches to both ASR and MT were proven to be effective on a large number of translation tasks. Yet the systems involved in speech translation are often developed independently of each other. This work explains how a significant improvement of speech translation quality can be obtained by enhancing the interface between various statistical NLP systems involved in the task of translating human speech. The whole pipeline is considered: ASR, automatic sentence segmentation, machine translation using several systems which take single best or multiple ASR hypotheses as input and employ different translation models, combination of different MT systems. The coupling between the various components is reached through combination of model scores and/or hypotheses as well as through development of new and modifications of existing algorithms to handle ambiguous input or to meet the constraints of the downstream components.




Incremental Speech Translation


Book Description

Human language capabilities are based on mental proceduresthat are closely linked to the time domain. Listening, understanding,and reacting, on the one hand, as well as planning,formulating,and speaking,onthe other, are performedin a highlyover lapping manner, thus allowing inter human communication to proceed in a smooth and ?uent way. Although it happens to be the natural mode of human language interaction, in cremental processing is still far from becoming a common feature of today’s lan guage technology. Instead, it will certainly remain one of the big challenges for research activities in the years to come. Usually considered dif?cult to a degree that rendersit almost intractableforpracticalpurposes,incrementallanguageprocessing has recently been attracting a steadily growing interest in the spoken language pro cessing community. Its notorious dif?culty can be attributed mainly to two reasons: Due to the inaccessibility of the right context, global optimization criteria are no longer available. This loss must be compensated for by communicating larger search spaces between system components or by introducing appropriate repair mechanisms. In any case, the complexity of the task can easily grow by an order of magnitude or even more. Incrementality is an almost useless feature as long as it remains a local property of individual system components. The advantages of incremental processing can be effectiveonly if all the componentsof a producer consumerchain consistently adhere to the same pattern of temporal behavior.




Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions


Book Description

"Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions" presents the discussion of the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new study findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a subfield in sociology/sociolinguistics, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding. Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation natural language technologies for practical speech processing applications that serve the consumer’s need for well-functioning natural language-driven personal assistants and other mobile devices, while also addressing business’ need for better functioning IVR-driven call centers that yield a more satisfying experience for the caller. This anthology is aimed at two distinct audiences: one consisting of speech engineers and system developers; the other comprised of linguists and cognitive scientists. The text builds on the experience and knowledge of each of these audiences by exposing them to the work of the other.