Toward an Interagency Language Roundtable Based Assessment of Speech-to-Speech Translation Capabilities

Abstract • We present observations from three exer-cises designed to map the effective listen-ing and speaking skills of an operator of a speech-to-speech translation system (S2S) to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. Such a mapping is non-trivial, but will be useful for government and military decision makers in managing expectations of S2S technology. We ob-served domain-dependent S2S capabilities in the ILR range of Level 0+ to Level 1, and interactive text-based machine trans-lation in the Level 3 range. 1 Introduction We present observations of three exercises that we conducted at a three-day workshop in September • This work is sponsored by the Defense Language Institute under Air Force contract FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, inter-pretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government. * Dr. Herzog is working under Research Subcontract with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. * Dr. Granoien retired from DLI in April 2006 and continues to be active in language learning research.