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Abstract
I will introduce some of our research on improving speech translation, by reducing acoustic-phonetic confusions in accented speech, named entity recognition from speech, and semantics-based translation disambiguation. Accent is a major factor in causing acoustic-phonetic confusions for spontaneous Mandarin speech. Named entity extraction is needed to facilitate the understanding of “What, Who, When, Where, Why”‚ contained in the speech. Translation disambiguation is essential for translation accuracy. More importantly, translation disambiguation with frame semantics helps decode the meaning of a spoken query even if the recognition is not perfect. We believe our approach will bring marked improvement to speech translation performances.