A Grammar-Based Chinese to English Speech Translation System for Portable Devices

摘要

Portable devices such as PDA phones and smart phones are increasingly popular. Many of these devices already have voice dialing capability. The next step is to offer more powerful personal-assistant features such as speech translation. In this paper, we propose a system that can translate speech commands in Chinese into English, in realtime, on small, portable devices with limited memory and computational power. We address the various computational and platform issues of speech recognition and translation on portable devices. We propose fixed-point computation, discrete front-end speech features, bi-phone acoustic models, grammar-based speech decoding, and unambiguous inversion transduction grammars for transfer-based translation. As a result, our speech translation system requires only 500k memory and a 200MHz CPU.