Towards better language models for spontaneous speech

In our effort to build a speech--to--speech translation system for spontaneous spoken dialogs we have developed several methods to improve the language models of the speech decoder of the system. We attempt to take advantage of natural equivalence word classes, frequently occuring word phrases, and discourse structure. Each of these methods was tested on spontaneous English, German and Spanish human--human dialogs. 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of the JANUS project is multi-lingual machine translation of spontaneously spoken dialogs in a limited domain: two people scheduling a meeting with each other. We are currently working with English, German, and Spanish as source languages and German, English, and Japanese as target languages. Table 1 shows the size of training and test set for the English, German and Spanish Spontaneous Scheduling Task databases (ESST, GSST, SSST) used for all experiments reported in this paper, and the coverage of the dictionary over the test set. 1 ESST GSST SSST...