Architecture and design considerations in NESPOLE!
Arnon Lavie, Chad Langley, Alex Waibel, Fabio Pianesi, Gianni Lazzari, Paolo Coletti, Loredana Taddei, Franco Balducci · 2001
NESPOLE! is a speech-to-speech machine translation research project funded jointly by the European Commission and the US NSF. The main goal of the NESPOLE! project is to advance the state-of-the-art of speech-to-speech translation in a real-world setting of common users involved in e-commerce applications. The project is a collaboration between three European research labs (IRST in Trento Italy, ISL at University of Karlsruhe in Germany, CLIPS at UJF in Grenoble France), a US research group (ISL at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh) and two industrial partners (APT - the Trentino provincial tourism bureau, and Aethra - an Italian tele-communications commercial company). The speech-to-speech translation approach taken by the project builds upon previous work that the research partners conducted within the context of the C-STAR consortium (see http://www.c-star.org). The prototype system developed in NESPOLE! is intended to provide effective multi-lingual speech-to-speech communication between all pairs of four languages (Italian, German, French and English) within broad, but yet restricted domains. The first showcase currently under development is in the domain of tourism and travel information.