Method and Apparatus for Cross-Lingual Communication

• US 20130211815A1
• Filed: 08/06/2012
• Published: 08/15/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 09/05/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: ZAMA Innovations LLC
• Original Assignee: Barton Friedland, Gerald Richard Cain, Mark Seligman, Mike Dillinger
• Inventors: Dillinger, Mike, Friedland, Barton, Cain, Gerald Richard, Seligman, Mark
• Granted Patent: US 8,731,944 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/2
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/268 Morphological analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/58 Use of machine translation, e.g. for multi-lingual retrieval, for server-side translation for client devices or for real-time translation
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/00 Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/26 Speech to text systems G10L15/08 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/30 Distributed recognition, e.g. in client-server systems, for mobile phones or network applications

Abstract

A system and method for a highly interactive style of speech-to-speech translation is provided. The interactive procedures enable a user to recognize, and if necessary correct, errors in both speech recognition and translation, thus providing robust translation output than would otherwise be possible. The interactive techniques for monitoring and correcting word ambiguity errors during automatic translation, search, or other natural language processing tasks depend upon the correlation of Meaning Cues and their alignment with, or mapping into, the word senses of third party lexical resources, such as those of a machine translation or search lexicon. This correlation and mapping can be carried out through the creation and use of a database of Meaning Cues, i.e., SELECT. Embodiments described above permit the intelligent building and application of this database, which can be viewed as an interlingua, or language-neutral set of meaning symbols, applicable for many purposes. Innovative techniques for interactive correction of server-based speech recognition are also described.

Claims

1. A method enabling cross linguistic communication through speech and text machine translation, comprising method operations of:

receiving a first and a second language selection;

receiving an expression in the first language;

presenting the expression in the first language for verification;

translating the verified expression into an expression in the second language;

confirming the meaning of terms within the verified expression in the first language;

back-translating the expression in the second language to a back-translated expression in the first language; and

verifying the back-translated expression in the first language.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the method operation of confirming the meaning of terms within the verified expression in the first language includes,

receiving a selection of one of the terms;

accessing a database supplying Meaning Cues associated with the one of the terms, each of the Meaning Cues representing a sense of the one of the terms; and

selecting one of the Meaning Cues.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the method operation of selecting one of the multiple profiles includes,

determining if one of the Meaning Cues represents a preferred word sense;

and

if one of the Meaning Cues represents a preferred word sense then the method includes, selecting the preferred word sense via a relevant Meaning Cue.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the first and the second language selection are received as voice commands.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the expression in the first language and the expression in the second language are communicated as both a textual expression and an audio expression.

6. The method of claim 2, wherein each of the multiple profiles is a list of synonyms associated with the sense.