The VI framework program in Europe: some thoughts about speech to speech translation research

Significant progress has been made in the field of human language technologies. Various tasks like continuous speech recognition for large vocabulary, speaker and language identification, spoken information inquiry, information extraction and cross-language retrieval in restricted domains are today feasible and different prototypes and systems are running. The spoken translation problem on the other hand is still a significant challenge: "Good text translation was hard enough to pull off. Speech to speech MT was beyond going to the Moon - it was Mars..." [Steve Silbermann, Wired Magazine].Considering the major achievements of the last years obtained in the field and the related challenges, a question arise: what next? Is it possible to foresee in the next decade real services and applications? How can we reach this goal? Shall we re-think the approach? Shall we need much more critical mass? How about data? To answer to these questions a new preparatory action, TC_STAR_P, funded in the V framework, has been settled in Europe. Goals, objective and activities of this preparatory action will also be discussed in this paper