Screenshots from Japanese CALL-SLT

The system shows a French prompt, "DEMANDER DE_MANIERE_POLIE EAU"

The student speaks a corresponding sentence in Japanese, here "omizu onegai shimasu". The system does speech recognition and understanding, and shows the recognised sentence to the student in both Japanese and Roman orthography.

If the students wishes, they can click the help button, to get an example of a Japanese native speaker saying something that will work.

A Scandinavian/English grammar, continued

More progress on the Scandinavian/English grammar:

• I've now got quite reasonable initial rules for negation and lexically passivized verbs, two of the largest holes in the Swedish. Negation, in Swedish, is just an adverb. I did however have to add a feature which distinguished main clauses from subordinate clauses, since the negation adverb occurs after the verb in a main clause, and before it in a subordinate clause. It turned out to be easy to adapt the existing rules for passives to handle lexical passives as well: the grammar now allows passive versions of the present, imperfect, supine and infinitive forms. Thus for example den kan inte köpas här, "it can not buy-INF-PASSIVE here" = "it can not be bought here".
• I've improved the coverage in the Swedish version of MedSLT. I can now translate 92% of the combined interlingua corpus into Swedish, and translate back 99% of the results. This mostly involved adding new lexical items and transfer rules, though I also had to make a couple of minor adjustments to the grammar.

Scandinavian/English grammar now used for English MedSLT

I've now changed the config files for English MedSLT so that they use the shared Scandinavian/English grammar rather than old English-only grammar. I found a couple of small bugs, but now everything seems to be working fine again.

Some time soon, Nikos and I should get together and figure out how to add Swedish to the MedSLT demo and the nightly build. It shouldn't be at all hard.

Swedish MedSLT, continued

I temporarily broke off working on Interlingua to Swedish, and spent a day concentrating on the opposite direction. I built the recognition grammar by training on a corpus which was the union of the original recognition corpus and the generation corpus (this ensures that everything you can generate will also get recognized); then I did PCFG tuning using the set of translations produced from the combined Interlingua corpus. I also used the set of translations as the initial Swedish corpus for translation testing. All the corpora concerned are created on-the-fly as part of the make process, so the correspondences will stay up to date.

It was easy to get things working in Swe -> Int direction, and 98% of the translation corpus now produces well-formed interlingua. I compiled a Swedish recognizer, and hooked everything together to get a speech-to-speech system for Swedish -> English. Anecdotally, it's not bad.

The most urgent thing now is probably to add more Swedish coverage. There are several very common constructions that currently aren't in the specialized Swedish grammar.

Swedish MedSLT, continued

A few more days of messing around, and I'm now translating about 80% of the 1200-item combined interlingua corpus into Swedish. Elisabeth (a native speaker) looked at about half of the material, and made some suggestions in the direction of improving quality. After implementing them, she thinks that over 90% of the translations are clearly good. To do this work, I have had to make a few more improvements in the combined Scandinavian/English grammar: the most important of these is an initial treatment of lexically reflexive verbs.

I'll see if I can improve the numbers a bit more, and will then start on the Swedish-to-Interlingua direction.

Swedish MedSLT, continued

Encouraging progress on Swedish MedSLT: I can now translate a third of the interlingua corpus into Swedish. The translations aren't very good yet, but they are nearly all grammatical. I think it will be fairly easy to improve things.

Swedish MedSLT

I have just started on a Swedish version of MedSLT; this will give the new Scandinavian/English grammar a much more thorough workout. After an hour or two of messing around, I can parse one sentence, var har du ont ("where is your pain", literally "where have you pain").

The first thing I notice is that we need rules for impersonal and lexically reflexive verbs, which are very important in this domain. In particular, an expression that occurs all the time is det gör ont; "it hurts", literally "it makes pain".

More soon.