IraqComm is a speech

translation Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

system that performs two-way, speech-to-speech

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

between

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

and colloquial Iraqi Arabic.

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

Menlo Park, California Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south ...

led development of the IraqComm system under the

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

program Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use
TRANSTAC
.

Vocabulary

IraqComm has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words in English and in Iraqi Arabic. The system is designed to enable soldiers or medics to converse with civilians in settings such as military checkpoints, door-to-door searches, or first aid situations. The system is tailored to translate spoken interactions on topics on

force protection Force protection (FP) refers to the concept of protecting military personnel, family members, civilians, facilities, equipment and operations from threats or hazards in order to preserve operational effectiveness and contribute to mission succes ...

security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...

, and basic medical services, and can be customized to include other topics as needed. Conversations can be logged for later review or archiving.

Users

After IraqComm demonstrated leading performance in competitive laboratory tests under Phase 1 of TRANSTAC, in Spring 2006 the U.S. military selected the IraqComm system for evaluation in real tactical operations in Iraq.

Design

IraqComm integrates three

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

technologies: automatic

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...

(ASR),

(MT), and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). To start a dialog, the user speaks into the

microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...

and the system records his or her voice. The ASR module processes the recording and displays what it heard on the screen. The MT module translates the phrase into the target language (e.g., Iraqi Arabic). The TTS module then “speaks” this translation, which is also displayed on the screen. To simplify and speed up communication, the IraqComm interface provides a shortcut menu of frequently used phrases. The user can change the phrase to be translated by editing it with the keyboard or by selecting a similar-sounding phrase with a single press of a button. SRI's DynaSpeak speech recognition engine is embedded in the IraqComm system. DynaSpeak

is also used in the

Phraselator The Phraselator is a weatherproof handheld language translation device developed by Applied Data Systems and VoxTec, a former division of the military contractor Marine Acoustics, located in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. It was designed to serve as a ...

, a weatherproof handheld language translation device developed by VoxTec, a former division of the military contractor Marine Acoustics, located in Annapolis, MD.

References

External links

IraqComm official websiteSRI's DynaSpeak web pageSRI International official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Iraqcomm Translation SRI International