Speaker
Satoshi NAKAMURA, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Title
Breaking Down Barriers in Automatic Speech Translation and interpretation: Achievements and Remaining Challenges
Abstract
Automatic speech-to-speech translation has long been a dream technology for humanity. Through numerous breakthroughs from years of research, we have now reached the stage where this service can be used on smartphones. However, there are still many challenges remaining before we can achieve translation quality comparable to that of a trained simultaneous interpreter. Key issues include how to translate across languages with different word orders, such as between English and Japanese, without waiting for the end of a sentence or utterance; how to balance latency and content fidelity in translation; and how to extract the speaker’s intent from their intonation. Having conducted research on speech translation over an extended period, I would like to reflect on some of the past progress and introduce ongoing research addressing these challenges.
About the speaker
Dr. Satoshi Nakamura is a full professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He is also a professor emeritus at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) and Honorarprofessor of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He received his B.S. from Kyoto Institute of Technology in 1981 and Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 1992. He was an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Information Science at NAIST from 1994-2000. He was Department head and Director of ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories in 2000-2004, and 2005-2008, respectively, and Vice president of ATR in 2007-2008. He was Director General of Keihanna Research Laboratories and the Executive Director of Knowledge Creating Communication Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan 2009-2010. He moved to Nara Institute of Science and Technology as a full professor in 2011. He is a full professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China. His research interests include modeling and systems of spoken language processing, speech processing, spoken language translation, spoken dialog systems, natural language processing, and data science. He is one of the world leaders in speech-to-speech translation research. He has been serving various speech-to-speech translation research projects, including C-Star, A-Star, and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation IWSLT. He is currently the chairperson of ISCA SIG SLT (Spoken Language Translation). He was a committee member of IEEE SLTC 2016-2018. He was an Elected Board Member of the International Speech Communication Association, ISCA, from 2012 to 2019. He received the Antonio Zampolli Prize in 2012 and retained the title of IEEE Fellow, ISCA Fellow, IPSJ Fellow, and ATR Fellow.