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Acceptance Testing of a Spoken Language Translation System

This paper describes an acceptance test procedure for evaluating a spoken language translation system between Catalan and Spanish. The procedure consists of two independent tests. The first test was an utterance-oriented evaluation for determining how the use of speech benefits communication. This test allowed for comparing relative performance of the different system components, explicitly: source text to target text, source text to target speech, source speech to target text, and source speech to target speech. The second test was a task-oriented experiment for evaluating if users could achieve some predefined goals for a given task with the state of the technology. Eight subjects familiar with the technology and four subjects not familiar with the technology participated in the tests. From the results we can conclude that state of technology is getting closer to provide effective speech-to-speech translation systems but there is still lot of work to be done in this area. No significant differences in performance between users that are familiar with the technology and users that are not familiar with the technology were evidenced. This constitutes, as far as we know, the first evaluation of a Spoken Translation System that considers performance at both, the utterance level and the task level.