On the use of prosody in a speech-to-speech translator.

Abstract

In this paper a speech-to-speech translator from German to English is presented. Beside the traditional processing steps it takes advantage of acoustically detected prosodic phrase boundaries and focus. The prosodic phrase boundaries reduce search space during syntactic parsing and rule out analysis trees during semantic parsing. The prosodic focus faciliates a ``shallow'' translation based on the best word chain in cases where the deep analysis fails.