Design and evaluation of the 2006 BBN english/Iraqi two-way speech translation system

In this paper, we present a 2-way speech-to-speech translation system for English and Iraqi colloquial Arabic, the dialect of Arabic spoken by ordinary people in Iraq. The application domain of the system is military force protection, including municipal services surveys, detainee screening, and descriptions of people, houses, vehicles, etc. The system uses statistical speech recognition, and a combination of prerecorded questions and statistical machine translation with speech synthesis to translate the speech recognition output. We present evaluation results, along with an analysis of the gap between Iraqi-to-English and English-to-Iraqi translation performance.