Experimental facility for measuring the impact of environmental noise and speaker variation on speech-to-speech translation devices

• Published in: 2006 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop pp. 250 - 253
• Main Authors: Jones, D.A., Jairam, A., Shen, W., Gatewood, P., Tardelli, J., Emonts, M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 01-12-2006
• Subjects: Acoustic noise; Loudspeakers; Microphones; Natural languages; Noise level; Noise measurement; Speech analysis; Speech enhancement; Testing; Working environment noise
• ISBN: 1424408725; 9781424408726
• DOI: 10.1109/SLT.2006.326802

We describe the construction and use of a laboratory facility for testing the performance of speech-to-speech translation devices. Approximately 1500 English phrases from various military domains were recorded as spoken by each of 30 male and 12 female English speakers with variation in speaker accent, for a total of approximately 60,000 phrases available for experimentation. We describe an initial experiment using the facility which shows the impact of environmental noise and speaker variability on phrase recognition accuracy for two commercially available one-way speech-to-speech translation devices configured for English-to-Arabic.