1. Outlook for Speech to Speech Translation
Gianni Lazzari
ITC-irst – Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica
38050 Povo (Trento) - Italy
Roadmap for Language Resources and Evaluation in a Multilingual Environment:
Genova May

2. Machine Translation on rise!
Still very far from “perfect” translations, but there has been impressive progress and growing interest in the last 5 years.
See results and number of participants at:
NIST MT workshops ( )
IWSLT workshops ( )
TC-STAR workshop ( )
ACL/NAACL Shared Tasks ( ) 2

3. Why? To my opinion key factors are:
More powerful computers (PC clusters, lots of RAM)
Statistical and data-drive approaches
Adequate language resources
Performance driven development (error measures)
Gradual scaling up of task complexity 3

4. What to do next? Improve support /steering of research
Start applicative projects (field-tests, deployment)
Set ambitious long-term goals
Set intermediate research goals 4

5. Short-Term Agenda (5 Years)
Data Collection
We are missing LARGE affordable parallel corpora
LR collection should be a service to whole research community --> 100% funding ?
Goal: 50M-200M running words/language-pair
Cost and quality: comparable to LRs of LDC 5

6. Short-Term Agenda (5 Years)
Error Measures
BLEU/NIST will shortly fail to be adequate
Need new measures to account for language structure
Integration with other technologies
Interfacing with ASR, IR, TTS, ...
Advances in cross-language technologies: e.g. CLSDR 6

7. Short-Term Agenda (5 Years)
Evaluation Infrastructure
MT Evaluations like NIST (US) and CLEF (EU)
Measure progress of community
Attract new people in the field
Open Source Platforms
Reduce technology entry barrier
Widen community, more Phd thesis 7

8. Short-Term Agenda (5 Years)
High Quality Translation Services
Deployment of MT of last generation
Limited domains: e.g. emergency medicine, tourism
Efforts: make SMT more robust, user friendly
(similarly to what was done for ASR in the 90s) 8

9. Long-Term Agenda (5-10 Years)
Automatic Simultaneous Interpreting
Will challenge humans interpreters on EP speeches
More promising than consecutive or text translation
Time-response constraints favour machines
We should invest on EU Parliament + other domains
Do yearly competitions and check progress! 9

10. Long-Term Agenda (5-10 Years)
190 Language Pairs! (from 20 languages)
Explore EU linguistic treasure :-)
Start working on less known language-pairs
Look for affordable and hard translation directions
Find and work with pivot languages 10

11. A outlook on the future A TC-STAR publication
HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES FOR EUROPE
focus on written and spoken language translation
in the context of Europe.
human language technologies as enabling technologies.. 11

12. 12

13. Table of Contents
1. What are Human Language Technologies?
2. The Relevance of Human Language Technologies for Europe
2.1. A Critical Barrier for the European Internal Market
2.2. World Languages
Major World Languages
Endangered Languages
Size Matters: About Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Languages and Market Forces
2.3. A Closer Look at the European Union
2.4. Communication
2.5. The Next Step in Industrialization: Machines that Process the Written or Spoken Word
2.6. The Market
Translation as a Cost Factor
The Established Markets of Localization and Translation
From Human Translation to MT: Dramatic Cost Reduction and Accessibility Improvement
Sustaining and Disruptive Technological Innovations

14. Table of Contents
3. Asia, Europe and the United States: Similarities and Differences
3.1. European Union
3.2. United States of America
Strategic Role of HLT
Research Programs
3.3. Eastern Asia
English as a lingua franca in Eastern Asia
Asian Language Pairs and the Growing Importance of Chinese
Research Programs
3.4. India
3.5. Economic Boundary Conditions
3.6. An Action Point for Europe
4. Where We Stand Today
4.1. Translation Work Today
4.2. Technologies Used in Professional Translation
4.3. Research on Speech-to-Speech Translation and its Component Technologies
4.4. The TC-STAR Project
5. The Power of an Enabling Technology
5.1. Insatiable Human Needs
6. Conclusion
References and Other Supplementary Information

15. Preface ………………………………………… …………………………………………
Preface ………………………………………… ………………………………………….. The present document is a valuable record of the state-of-the-art and the challenges and opportunities waiting Europe in this important research field; it is equally an inspiring document for researchers, industrial players and policy makers, and will certainly contribute to make Europe more multilingual.
Viviane Reding
Member of the European Commission
Responsible for Information Society and Media
Ján Figel’
Responsible for Education, Training Culture and Multilingualism 15

16. …….Are machine translation and spoken language translation sustaining or disruptive innovations? In the case of spoken language translation, the innovation is disruptive: …………… Machine translation can be both a sustaining and a disruptive innovation, depending on which application is involved and the market in which it is introduced. 16

17. 17 Renato S. Beninatto Dr. Joseph Mariani
Chief Operations Officer and VP of Consulting Practice
Common Sense Advisory, Inc.
Boston, USA
Kevin Bolen
Chief Marketing Officer
Lionbridge
Waltham, MA, USA
Dr. Joseph Mariani
Director, Information and
Karl-Johan Lönnroth
Director-General
Directorate General for Translation
European Commission
Dimitris Sabatakakis
CEO of SYSTRAN
Paris, France
Michael Anobile
Managing Director
The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA)
Romainmôtier, Switzerland
Prof. Jun-ichi Tsujii
Director, National Centre for Text Mining, Manchester, UK
Dr. Joseph Olive
Program Manager
DARPA 17