Incremental speech translation

"Humans understand while they are listening. They hear words that are not completely spoken, anticipate dialog contributions from others, interrupt a dialog partner, and, in the case of simultaneous interpreters, even produce the content of what they hear in a different language while they are still listening and the input is not yet complete." "This book describes a complete translation system for spontaneously spoken language constructed using the incremental paradigm. It first presents the theoretical and algorithmic basis necessary to cope with the complex endeavor of translating speech incrementally and in parallel. In particular, graph-theoretic foundations of natural language processing and feature-based descriptions of linguistic objects are covered. A thorough description of the system and its performance follows. The author covers syntactic and semantic processing as well as transfer and syntactic generation. Thus, this book can also be used as a broad-coverage introduction to the field of speech translation." "This book is essential reading for researchers and students working in the field of speech translation. It is also intended as a research tool for those interested in the architecture of general natural-language processing systems."--Jacket.