Hervé Spechbach


2021

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A Speech-enabled Fixed-phrase Translator for Healthcare Accessibility
Pierrette Bouillon | Johanna Gerlach | Jonathan Mutal | Nikos Tsourakis | Hervé Spechbach
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact

In this overview article we describe an application designed to enable communication between health practitioners and patients who do not share a common language, in situations where professional interpreters are not available. Built on the principle of a fixed phrase translator, the application implements different natural language processing (NLP) technologies, such as speech recognition, neural machine translation and text-to-speech to improve usability. Its design allows easy portability to new domains and integration of different types of output for multiple target audiences. Even though BabelDr is far from solving the problem of miscommunication between patients and doctors, it is a clear example of NLP in a real world application designed to help minority groups to communicate in a medical context. It also gives some insights into the relevant criteria for the development of such an application.

2020

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Ellipsis Translation for a Medical Speech to Speech Translation System
Jonathan Mutal | Johanna Gerlach | Pierrette Bouillon | Hervé Spechbach
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

In diagnostic interviews, elliptical utterances allow doctors to question patients in a more efficient and economical way. However, literal translation of such incomplete utterances is rarely possible without affecting communication. Previous studies have focused on automatic ellipsis detection and resolution, but only few specifically address the problem of automatic translation of ellipsis. In this work, we evaluate four different approaches to translate ellipsis in medical dialogues in the context of the speech to speech translation system BabelDr. We also investigate the impact of training data, using an under-sampling method and data with elliptical utterances in context. Results show that the best model is able to translate 88% of elliptical utterances.

2019

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Monolingual backtranslation in a medical speech translation system for diagnostic interviews - a NMT approach
Jonathan Mutal | Pierrette Bouillon | Johanna Gerlach | Paula Estrella | Hervé Spechbach
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII: Translator, Project and User Tracks

2016

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BabelDr: a web platform for rapid construction of phrasebook-style medical speech translation applications
Pierrette Bouillon | Hervé Spechbach
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation: Projects/Products