By MARI MAEDA & SAMUEL L. EARP

DARPA's TRANSTAC program is entering its second phase in July 2006.  The goal of the TRANSTAC program is to develop two-way speech-to-speech language translation systems that enable free-form communications in tactically relevant environments.  These systems will support languages of relevance to national security, be speaker independent, and be extremely easy to use for mobile end-users. 

The primary use cases involve US military personnel and local foreign language speakers.  While the military personnel will be trained to use the systems, the assumption is that the foreign language users will have little or no chance to become familiar with using the system.  The systems will be used outdoors with typical urban background sounds including voices and vehicular sounds, and will support conversational interactions at a natural pace.

In Phase I, TRANSTAC successfully demonstrated two-way systems for English-Iraqi Arabic speech-to-speech communication.  Various improvements are planned for Phase II, in order to make the systems perform more reliably in real-world tactical environments.  Furthermore, a specific program objective is to reduce the amount of time required to support new languages or domains to less than 100 days.  Advanced system development tools will be required to support new domains and languages quickly and in an efficient matter.  Hence, structured yet rich domain specification methodology, novel ways for collecting linguistic data, and new techniques for transferring capabilities developed for one language to others are among the goals for Phase II. 

The systems will be evaluated for system usability and the performance of the software components will be measured.  System usability testing will measure concept transfer rate, i.e., the number of concepts successfully transferred in n minutes.  Software component performance will be measured using BLEU scores and word error rate. The research is being performed by seven organizations: IBM, SRI, BBN Technologies, Cepstral, LLC, Marine Acoustics Incorporated, Sehda, Inc., and the University of Southern California. More information is available at: http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/solicitations/open/06-21_PIP.htm