A World without Barriers: Connecting the World across Languages, Distances and Media

Abstract

As our world becomes increasingly interdependent and globalization brings people together more than ever, we quickly discover that it is no longer the absence of connectivity (the "digital divide") that separates us, but that new and different forms of alienation still keep us apart, including language, culture, distance and interfaces. Can technology provide solutions to bring us closer to our fellow humans? In this talk, I will present multilingual and multimodal interface technology solutions that offer the best of both worlds: maintaining our cultural diversity and locale while providing for better communication, greater integration and collaboration. We explore: Smart phone based speech translators for everyday travelers and humanitarian missions Simultaneous translation systems and services to translate academic lectures and political speeches in real time (at Universities, the European Parliament and broadcasting services) Multimodal language-transparent interfaces and smartrooms to improve joint and distributed communication and interaction. We will first discuss the difficulties of language processing; review how the technology works today and what levels of performance are now possible. Key to today's systems is effective machine learning, without which scaling multilingual and multimodal systems to unlimited domains, modalities, accents, and more than 6,000 languages would be hopeless. Equally important are effective human-computer interfaces, so that language differences fade naturally into the background and communication and interaction become natural and engaging. I will present recent research results as well as examples from our field trials and deployments in educational, commercial, humanitarian and government settings.