Objective :

The objective of TC-STAR_P project is to prepare a future integrated project named "Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation" (TC-STAR), which will be proposed under the 6th Framework Programme and will aim at making speech to speech translation real.
TC-STAR_P will be driven by industrial requirements and will involve industry key actors active in the development of SST systems and components, academic research institutions active in SST systems and components research, infrastructure centres active in the development of language resources for SST components and SMEs using the provided technologies.
Roadmaps for the development of SST will be prepared, and further key actors from the industrial, research and infrastructure groups, as well as SMEs working with SST applications, will be involved.
A new organisational model will be developed.

Description :

The TC-STAR_P project will prepare for the 6th Framework Programme by elaborating roadmaps on SST and strengthening the R&D community.
Moreover, a cornerstone of the future TC-STAR integrated project will be the management structure.
The consortium is composed of different R&D communities : industrial, academics, and infrastructure entities. All these organizations will contribute to develop common visions and analyze research requirements for SST systems.
As a result of these tasks, industrial partners will prepare roadmaps for technical implementations and services ; the scientific and academic groups will prepare roadmaps for technology improvements ; and the infrastructure group will provide roadmaps for LR-production and evaluation campaigns.

The work will include a case study where industrial partners and research partners will provide application-oriented and research input respectively. The case study will be developed as a means to testing the future collaboration of partners under the future TC-STAR project, that is, the suitability of the organisational model that will be defined under TC-STAR_P. The infrastructure group will focus on preparatory tasks for setting up production, evaluation and validation centers for the needed LR. One of the TC-STAR_P objectives is to attract further key actors from the industrial, research and infrastructure groups, as well as SMEs working with SST applications and related fields. Thus, all groups will be completed with relevant actors in their field, who will form part of the future project TC-STAR, and will work out how to implement the envisaged activities in an efficient and cost-effective way. The infrastructure group will contact national agencies for funding LR-production within the future FP6 project, and entities for evaluation and validation of language resources.

ELDA :

ELDA,in cooperation with TNO and SPEX, is in charge of the infrastructure group and is responsible for making language resources available to the consortium. In addition, it will provide evaluation resources ie statisically balanced test data, evaluation protocols, methodologies and scoring software. ELDA’s tasks within the TC-STAR_P project include :

  Creating roadmaps for the production of LRs and/or making existing LRs available to the TC-STAR consortium
  Setting up networks of centres for LRs production, validation and evaluation
  Evaluation package specifications
  Case study in which 10 hours of transcribed and annotated non-native English broadcast news is to be produced.