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<Paper uid="W97-0406">
  <Title>Dealing with Multilinguality in a Spoken Language Query &amp;quot; Translator</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Robustness is an important issue for multilingual speech interfaces for spoken language translation systems. We have studied three aspects of robustness in such a system: accent differences, mixed language input, and the use of common feature sets for HMM-based speech recognizers for English and Cantonese. The results of our preliminary experiments show that accent differences cause recognizer performance to degrade. A rather surprising finding is that for mixed language input, a straight forward implementation of a mixed language model-based speech recognizer performs less well than the concatenation of pure language recognizers. Our experimental results also show that a common feature set, parameter set, and common algorithm lead to different performance output for Cantonese and English speech recognition modules.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>