NEC Develops World's First, Japanese-Chinese Automatic, Speech Translation Software Operable on PDA

Tokyo - Jan 6, 2006 (PRN): NEC Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in the development of the world's first, automatic, Japanese < - > Chinese speech translation software, capable of real-time, speech-to-speech translation of travel-related Chinese and Japanese conversation on a PDA (mobile information terminal).

Operable on a commercial PDA, the newly developed automatic translation software boasts a rich vocabulary of 50,000 Japanese and 36,000 Chinese words, and realizes automatic speech-to-speech interpretation of travel conversation. A wide range of travel conversation used in a variety of travel situations was taken into consideration during the development of the software, and it has principally been enabled by the realization of speech recognition of general conversation of standard spoken Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua). Although standard spoken Chinese is the same nationwide, accents differ according to region, making speech recognition complex. In order to combat this issue, data of spoken conversation was gathered from a large number of people from different regions in China, allowing the creation of a large-scale Chinese-conversation speech corpus (note*). This enabled the realization of speech recognition of general Chinese conversation, regardless of the origin of the accent of the person conversing.

The features of this software include:
(1) A parallel, large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition engine, which is built with a database consisting of a wide range of conversation sounds and words that enables accurate speech recognition of spoken words.
(2) A compact translation engine for translation of spoken words.
(3) An advanced wave-concatenative speech synthesis engine, which realizes high-performance reading through an advanced, wave-concatenative speech synthesis method based on a wide range of speech data.
(4) A total integration module that controls collaborative operation of the speech recognition engine, the machine translation engine and the speech synthesis engine, realizing real-time, automatic Japanese <-> Chinese speech translation on a PDA.

In recent years, with the advancement of an information society and increased freedom of movement across borders, the dynamic development of technology supporting automatic speech interpretation and translation to support communication between different languages is rapidly progressing. In particular, travel for business and leisure between China and Japan is increasing at a rapid pace and with it the need for Japanese <-> Chinese translation.

History of NEC's automatic speech translation software research and development:

1999: automatic Japanese <-> English translation software for notebook PCs
2002: PDA-operational Japanese <-> English travel conversation, automatic speech translation software
2005: speech-to-speech translation software capable of being processed on low-power-consumption multi-core processors, optimal for small devices such as mobile phones Although NEC's automatic speech translation software research has been focused on Japanese <-> English translation to date, NEC has been able to realize Japanese <-> Chinese speech translation software by installing a newly created large-scale Chinese language conversation speech corpus, a Chinese travel conversation text corpus, and an acoustic model and a language model that were developed based on both of these, in the compact, high speed speech recognition engine that NEC has been able to create owing to many years of research in this area.

NEC will continue to advance research of its speech recognition and language processing technologies toward the realization of a society where communication is possible anytime, anywhere.

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701)(NASDAQ: NIPNY)(UK: NEC.IL) is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network, and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. Ranked as one of the world's top patent-producing companies, NEC delivers tailored solutions in the key fields of computers, networking, and electron devices by integrating its technical strengths in IT and networks and by providing advanced semiconductor solutions through NEC Electronics Corporation. The NEC Group employs more than 140,000 people worldwide and had net sales of 4,855 billion yen (approx. $45.4 billion) in the fiscal year that ended in March 2005. For additional information, please visit the NEC website at: http://www.nec.com

EAMT 11th Annual Conference

19-20 June 2006, Oslo, Norway

First Call For Papers

The European Association for Machine Translation will hold a major conference in Oslo, Norway on 19-20 June, 2006. This meeting is the eleventh in a series of regular events acting as a forum for the exchange of ideas concerning all aspects of Machine Translation and computer-aids/tools for translator. The purpose of the EAMT events is to bring together users, developers and researchers to discuss the latest developments in the field.
The event will be held as a full-scale Conference, with a large diversity of topics, a large number of expected participants and papers, as well as the normal kind of services provided as part of the conference environment.
The conference will focus in particular but not exclusively on experiences and expectations of users of MT systems and translation aids, or CAT tools but contributions from developers, vendors, researchers and teachers will be welcomed, too. (For information about previous workshops and conferences see the EAMT website: http://www.eamt.org/)
The Special Theme for this Conference will be
Machine Translation/Translation Aids - tools to increase quality and to save money
including
user experiences, potential user expectations,
user applications incorporating MT modules,
evaluation of existing and new MT systems,
integration and synergy of CAT tools and MT,
new approaches in computer-assisted translation (CAT),
issues for developers and users of MT and translation aids,
quality and economic aspects of MT
Papers demonstrating real-life applications of MT and CAT technologies are particularly welcome. However, papers relating to other aspects of MT, and other multilingual applications, will also be considered
Papers will be presented in two different categories:
Oral session: papers are presented as 20-30 minute lectures, allowing for 5-10 minutes of Q&A.
Poster session: papers are presented as posters in the exhibition area near the conference room, with 2 or 3 poster sessions of 90 minutes each.
Submission of papers:
We invite submissions as short versions of full papers (6 pages). Submissions should be uploaded before 31st of January 2006 to the conference tool website: http://eamt.emmtee.net/submission in RTF or plain text
All papers will be considered for both the oral and poster sessions.
Notification of acceptance will be made on or before 31st of March 2006, together with any comments from reviewers for revision.
Final versions of papers:
Final versions of papers (maximum 10 pages, DOC, RTF or LaTeX files) should be sent for inclusion in the proceedings before 30th of April. Any papers received after that date will not be included in the printed proceedings and will be excluded from the conference programme. Also, only papers for which at least one author has registered for the conference by 30th of April will be accepted for the proceedings. A style sheet for accepted submissions will be available soon on the EAMT 2006 website.
It is anticipated that papers will be made available in electronic form on the EAMT website after the conference. Electronic versions (PDF or postscript) will be produced by the organizers.
Programme Committee:
Viggo Hansen (Chair, Zacco A/S, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Margaret King, (ISSCO, University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Anthony Clarke, (CLS, Switzerland)
Doris Marty-Albisser (CLS, Zürich, Switzerland)
Jan Tore Lønning (University of Oslo, Norway)
Andy Way (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Jeanette Ørsted, (Plougmann & Vingtoft, Denmark)
Wolfgang Täger (EPO, Munich, Germany)
Harold Somers (University of Manchester, United Kingdom)
Gregor Thurmair (Linguatec, Germany) (To be confirmed)
Venue and Registration:
The conference will take place 19-20 June, 2006 at the University of Oslo. Registration fees, hotel accommodation and other facilities will be announced at the latest 31st of January. Please consult the conference web site for further information: http://eamt.emmtee.net/.
Local organizer:
Local organiser is Local organiser is Jan Tore Lønning (j.t.lonning@iln.uio.no), who provides further details.
Important Dates:
Deadline for submissions: 31 January, 2006
Registration: from 15 February, 2006
Acceptance notification: 31 March, 2006
Final copies due: 30 April, 2006
Early registration deadline: 30 April, 2006
Conference date: 19-20 June, 2006