The International Macintosh Users Group presents:

IraqComm Speech-to-Speech Translation System

Group: International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG)
(A Forum for Multilingual / Multiscript Computing)
Date: November 16, 2006, 7-9 p.m.
Speaker: Susanne Riehemann, Ph.D. (SRI International)
Topic: IraqComm Speech-to-Speech Translation System
Location: Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
Take Saratoga/Sunnyvale exit off 280, turn South into
Cupertino, turn left onto Mariani Avenue, left into
Infinite Loop. Meeting is held in the Singapore Room.
Please arrive by 7:10, as the door is not monitored
after this time.
Admission: $4; free for IMUG members
Contact: Roger Sherman, (650) 859-5981
roger [dot] sherman [at] sri [dot] com
Website: http://www.imug.org

SRI International's IraqComm translation system performs
bidirectional, speech-to-speech machine translation between English
and Iraqi Arabic. It was developed under the DARPA TRANSTAC program.
In the spring of 2006 the U.S. military started evaluating the system
in Iraq, where trained human translators are scarce.

There will be an extensive demo and discussion of the system,
including:

-the speaker independence and noise robustness of the automatic speech
recognition (ASR) component
-the statistical and rule based machine translation (MT) components
used in the system
-the text-to-speech synthesis (TTS)
-various features of the user interface (selecting or editing the MT
input, storing frequently used phrases, saving the conversation
history, etc.)
-the implications of training on particular domains (currently
force protection, security, and basic medical services, with about
40,000 English and 50,000 Iraqi Arabic words)
-the special challenges posed by the Arabic writing system
-evaluating the quality of the system output

Dr. Susanne Riehemann has been working at SRI International since
2002, after getting her PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University.
She was a very early adopter of Mac OS X, having been a NeXTSTEP/
OPENSTEP holdout until then. IraqComm, however, currently runs only
on Windows XP.

URLs:

http://www.iraqcomm.com/
http://www.ai.sri.com/people/riehemann/


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