The goal of this work is to improve current translation models by taking into account additional knowledge sources such as semantically motivated segmentation or statistical categorization. Specifically, two different approaches are discussed. On the one hand, phrase-based approach, and on the other hand, categorization. For both approaches, both statistical and linguistic alternatives are explored. As for translation framework, finite-state transducers are considered. These are versatile models that can be easily integrated on-the-fly with acoustic models for speech translation purposes. In what the experimental framework concerns, all the models presented were evaluated and compared taking confidence intervals into account.

In the framework of the DIHANA project, we present the acquisitionprocess of a spontaneous speech dialogue corpus in Spanish. Theselected application consists of information retrieval by telephone for nationwide trains. A total of 900 dialogues from 225 users were acquired using the “Wizard of Oz” technique. In this work, we present the design and planning of the dialogue scenes and the wizard strategy used for the acquisition of the corpus. Then, we also present the acquisition tools and a description of the acquisition process.