Towards Multilingual Conversations in the Medical Domain: Development of Multilingual Medical Data and A Network-based ASR System

This paper outlines the recent development on multilingual medical data and multilingual speech recognition system for network-based speech-to-speech translation in the medical domain. The overall speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system was designed to translate spoken utterances from a given source language into a target language in order to facilitate multilingual conversations and reduce the problems caused by language barriers in medical situations. Our final system utilizes a weighted finite-state transducers with n-gram language models. Currently, the system successfully covers three languages: Japanese, English, and Chinese. The difficulties involved in connecting Japanese, English and Chinese speech recognition systems through Web servers will be discussed, and the experimental results in simulated medical conversation will also be presented.