Translation of conversational speech with JANUS-II

In this paper we investigate the possibility of translating continuous spoken conversations in a cross-talk environment. This is a task known to be difficult for human translators due to several factors. It is characterized by rapid and even overlapping turn-taking, a high degree of co-articulation, and fragmentary language. We describe experiments using both push-to-talk as well as cross-talk recording conditions. Our results indicate that conversational speech recognition and translation is possible, even in a free crosstalk environment. To date, our system has achieved performances of over 80% acceptable translations on transcribed input, and over 70% acceptable translations on speech input recognized with a 70-80% word accuracy. The system's performance on spontaneous conversations recorded in a cross-talk environment is shown to be as good and even slightly superior to the simpler and easier push-to-talk scenario.