Limited-Domain Speech-to-Speech Translation between English and Pashto

Kristin Precoda, Horacio Franco, Ascander Dost, Michael Frandsen, John Fry, Andreas Kathol, Colleen Richey, Susanne Riehemann, Dimitra Vergyri, Jing Zheng, Christopher Culy

Abstract: This paper describes a prototype system for near-real-time spontaneous, bidirectional translation between spoken English and Pashto, a language presenting many technological challenges because of its lack of resources, including both data and expert knowledge. Development of the prototype is ongoing, and we propose to demonstrate a fully functional version which shows the basic capabilities, though not yet their final depth and breadth.