Mandarin Learning Using Speech and Language Technologies: A Translation Game in the Travel Domain

Abstract

This paper describes a new Web-based translation game we have designed to help a student learn spoken Chinese. The student talks to the system in Chinese and the system compares the recognized sentence against a set of English prompts to judge whether it is a suitable translation of any one of them. The game can also provide translation assistance upon request. The game was developed using the IWSLT corpus of utterances in the tourist domain, and is oriented towards helping the student communicate effectively during foreign travel. In a preliminary evaluation, the system performed correctly on over 90% of test utterances. The system received positive feedback from the subjects.