Simulating Multiple Translations and ASR Transcripts for Applications in Multilingual Spoken Document Classification

Title: Simulating Multiple Translations and ASR Transcripts for Applications in Multilingual Spoken Document Classification

Speaker: Wei-Hao Lin from the Informedia group


Abstract:
We propose a statistical model to simulate multiple documents and
their translations (e.g. Chinese documents and their English
translations), and apply the model in the task of classifying
multilingual documents. The model, based on a frequency matching
principle, predicts that previous approaches to building classifiers
from a common language (e.g., English) are not optimal for
multilingual collections with unbalanced numbers of documents, and a
proposed multilingual representation can outperform the mono-lingual
bag-of-words representation. We also investigate the possibility of
combining multiple ASR transcripts and translations through
re-weighting. The validity of our model is strongly supported by
the close match between predictions of the simulation model and the
empirical results of classifying multilingual spoken documents from
broadcast news in three languages.

Coupling of ASR+MT: Initial Experiments & Future Directions

Speaker: Ian Lane

Title: Tighter Coupling of ASR+MT: Initial Experiments & Future Directions

Abstract:
In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of my PhD work entitled "Flexible Spoken Language Understanding based on Topic Classification and Domain Detection", and describe how the proposed approaches can be applied to applications other than speech-to-speech translation. I will
then describe my current work which focuses on improving coupling between ASR and Machine-Translation Systems, specifically, when applied to conversational speech. Finally, I will propose future directions for which I hope to receive a large amount of feedback.

Anchor-Based Symmetric Probabilistic Alignment

Date: May 23, 2006

Presenter: Jae Dong Kim,

Title: Anchor-Based Symmetric Probabilistic Alignment

Can the Internet help improve Machine Translation?

Date: April 18, 2006

Presenter: Ari Font-Llitjos

Title: Can the Internet help improve Machine Translation?

The MILE Corpus for Less Commonly Taught Languages

Date: February 21, 2006

Presenter: Alison Alvarez,

Title: The MILE (Minor Language Elicitation) Corpus for Less Commonly Taught Languages