Towards simultaneous interpreting: the timing of incremental machine translation and speech synthesis

Timo Baumann, Srinivas Bangalore, Julia Hirschberg


Abstract
In simultaneous interpreting, human experts incrementally construct and extend partial hypotheses about the source speaker’s message, and start to verbalize a corresponding message in the target language, based on a partial translation – which may have to be corrected occasionally. They commence the target utterance in the hope that they will be able to finish understanding the source speaker’s message and determine its translation in time for the unfolding delivery. Of course, both incremental understanding and translation by humans can be garden-pathed, although experts are able to optimize their delivery so as to balance the goals of minimal latency, translation quality and high speech fluency with few corrections. We investigate the temporal properties of both translation input and output to evaluate the tradeoff between low latency and translation quality. In addition, we estimate the improvements that can be gained with a tempo-elastic speech synthesizer.
Anthology ID:
2014.iwslt-papers.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers
Month:
December 4-5
Year:
2014
Address:
Lake Tahoe, California
Editors:
Marcello Federico, Sebastian Stüker, François Yvon
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
163–168
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.iwslt-papers.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Timo Baumann, Srinivas Bangalore, and Julia Hirschberg. 2014. Towards simultaneous interpreting: the timing of incremental machine translation and speech synthesis. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers, pages 163–168, Lake Tahoe, California.
Cite (Informal):
Towards simultaneous interpreting: the timing of incremental machine translation and speech synthesis (Baumann et al., IWSLT 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2014.iwslt-papers.2.pdf