U.S.-Germany Dissertation Enhancement: Predicting Hidden Structure and Punctuation in Speech for Machine Translation

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This project will send Dustin Hillard, a graduate student at the University of Washington, to RWTH Aachen University for three months to conduct research for his doctoral dissertation in the field of machine translation. Mr. Hillard will collaborate with Professor Hermann Ney in Aachen and he will also collaborate with Professor Alex Waibel at the University of Karlsruhe. Professor Mari Ostendorf, the PI on this award, is Mr. Hillard's thesis advisor at the University of Washington.This research addresses two primary questions dealing with punctuation in machine translation: What information beyond the words can be given to a speech translation system to improve the translation quality in terms of evaluation of the translated words? How is the punctuation for the target language output best predicted? The experimental results will provide comprehensive comparisons of how punctuation and hidden prosodic structure interact with machine translation. In addition, unsupervised learning algorithms will be investigated for detecting hidden prosodic structure in the source language using syntactic side information and for communicating that structure to translation and target language output. Intellectual MeritThe research supported by this award is challenging and could potentially advance fundamental knowledge in machine translation. It represents an intellectually well-founded partnership between researchers in the U.S and researchers in Germany.Broader ImpactsSupport is provided for one graduate student to conduct research in Germany, thus providing a U.S. student with an international research experience. In addition, advances in machine translation will help communication in a multi-lingual world and could have applications to the commercial and national security sectors.