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Hop, Skip, and a Jump to understanding my French teacher
By Clay Breshears (Intel) (79 posts) on May 7, 2008 at 2:18 pm
In my last post I highlighted efforts to construct an automatic language translator. Now, I've found that there is a similar project being funded in the European Union (EU). TC-STAR is focused on being able to automatically translate speech in one of the 23 official EU languages to speech in one of the others. Over a billion euros are being spent in translating services (documents and speech) every year by EU institutions.
The interesting feature is how the system is designed to work. The input spoken word is first translated to text with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software, the text is translated with Spoken Language Translation (SLT) software to the target language, and this text is used to generate spoken output with Text to Speech (TTS) software. Over the course of the TC-STAR project, translation performance has improved from 40 percent to 60 percent.
A quad-core processor should be able to handle three applications running in cooperation. Use of a single processor might even give a performance boost (over three single-core chips) by being able to pipeline results more efficiently. No details were given in the article on what kind of processors were utilized, but there was mention of using several ASR and SLT systems to improve the translations. This combination by itself would be a good use of multiple cores.
It will require the cooperation of aliens offering us their SLT and TTS pieces if we're going to be able to build a universal translator based on this technique. I'm skeptical that dolphins would be able to give us any transcription software. However, even without opposable thumbs, if we could give them access to water-proof laptops and C++ manuals, who knows what they might come up with.
Categories: Multicore
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