ALE for speech: a translation prototype

Gerald Penn, Bob Carpenter

Abstract: In this paper, we describe The Attribute Logic Engine (ALE) and enhancements to it that enable it to serve as a complete grammatical infrastructure for applications such as spoken language translation. We indicate howALE was expanded and combined with off-the-shelf speech com-ponents to develop an application that translates English speech to German speech. The translation operates by way of a semantic representation based on typed feature structures, with information on thematic roles ("who did what to whom") and agreement information that can be used to guide search in less restricted domains and map expressions to more felicitous (but semantically equivalent) constructions in the target language than a more literal, surface-oriented method would admit.