ELDA has been involved in the activities related to LRs and to evaluation, for all components of a speech to speech translation system (speech recognition, machine translation, speech synthesis).

Visit the TC-Star Evaluation Campaigns webspace for detailed information on evaluation run by ELDA.

  Check the ELRA Catalogue to find all the TC-START Evaluation Packages

Description

The TC-STAR project, financed by European Commission within the Sixth Program represents a long-term effort focused on advanced research in core language technologies : speech recognition, speech translation, and speech synthesis. The project focused on research in Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST) in a multilingual context. SST technology is a combination of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Translation (SLT) and Text to Speech (TTS) (speech synthesis).

Objective

The project targeted a selection of unconstrained conversational speech domains-speeches and broadcast news-and three languages : European English, European Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. Accurate translation of unrestricted speech is well beyond the capability of today’s state-of-the-art research systems. Therefore, advances are needed to improve the state-of the-art technologies for speech recognition and speech translation.

The main objective of the project was ambitious : making a breakthrough in SST that significantly reduces the gap between human and machine translation performance.

A number of events have been organized throughout the duration of the project, amon which:

TC-STAR Workshops

• The TC-STAR Speech to Speech Translation Workshop took place Aachen (Germany) on March 28, 29 and 30, 2007.
• The TC-STAR Speech to Speech Translation Workshop took place in Barcelona on June 19, 20 and 21, 2006.

Consortium

The TC-STAR Consortium brought together prominent European players in the speech and language technology field, including both basic research institutes and universities, as well as large companies with years of experience in the field. The Consortium itself was a first step towards reinforcing the European Research Area, and offered a unique opportunity to place Europe in a position of leadership in speech-to-speech translation technologies.

The project participants were :

• Istituto Trentino di Cultura - Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (ITC)
• Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH-AACHEN)
• Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS-LIMSI)
• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
• Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH) (UKA)
• IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH (IBM)
• Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (SIEMENS)
• Nokia Corporation (NOKIA)
• Sony International (Europe) GmbH (SONY)
• Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA)
• Stichting Katholieke Universiteit/ Speech Processing Expertise Centre (KUN-SPEX).

Contact: Khalid Choukri - [javascript protected email address]

Djamel Mostefa, Project Manager