Domain portability in speech-to-speech translation

Speech-to-speech translation has made significant advances over the past decade, with several high-visibility projects (C-STAR, Verb-mobil, the Spoken Language Translator, and others) significantly advancing the state-of-the-art. While speech recognition can currently effectively deal with very large vocabularies and is fairly speaker independent, speech translation is currently still effective only in limited, albeit large, domains. The issue of domain portability is thus of significant importance, with several current research efforts designed to develop speech-translation systems that can be ported to new domains with significantly less time and effort than is currently possible.