A MULTILINGUAL PROSODY MODULE IN A SPEECH-TO-SPEECH TRANSLATION SYSTEM

In our previous research, we have shown that prosody can be used to dramatically improve the performance of the automatic speech translation system VERBMOBIL [16]. The methods to classify prosodic events have been developed on the German subcorpus of the VERBMOBIL speech database. In this paper we describe how the methods that we developed on the German subcorpus can be applied to other languages. Experiments show that these methods are suited for English and Japanese, as well. Efficiency problems are addressed and a new set of features is presented. The new set of features facilitates a multilingual module for prosodic processing. We present an architecture for such a multilingual module and discuss the advantages of this approach compared to an approach that uses separate modules for different languages. This multilingual module and the new feature set are evaluated w.r.t. computation time, memory requirement, and classification performance. The results show that the memory requirement can be reduced by 78%, whereas the recognition accuracy does not decrease.