Representational and architectural issues in a limited-domain medical speech translator
Manny Rayner, Pierrette Bouillon, Marianne Santaholma, Yukie Nakao · Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) · 2005
We present an overview of MedSLT, a medium vocabulary medical speech translation system, focussing on the representational issues that arise when translating temporal and causal concepts. Although flat key/value structures are strongly preferred as semantic representations in speech understanding systems, we argue that it is infeasible to handle the necessary range of concepts using only flat structures. By exploiting the specific nature of the task, we show that it is possible to implement a solution which only slightly extends the representational complexity of the semantic representation language, by permitting an optional single nested level representing a subordinate clause construct. We sketch our solutions to the key problems of producing minimally nested representations using phrase-spotting methods, and writing cleanly structured rule-sets that map temporal and phrasal representations into a canonical interlingual form.