Speech Recognition for Machine Translation in Quaero

This paper describes the speech-to-text systems used to provide automatic transcriptions used in the Quaero 2010 evaluation of Machine Translation from speech. Quaero (www.quaero.org) is a large research and industrial innovation program focusing on technologies for automatic analysis and classification of multimedia and multilingual documents. The ASR transcript is the result of a Rover combination of systems from three teams ( KIT, RWTH, LIMSI+VR) for the French and German languages. The casesensitive word error rates (WER) of the combined systems were respectively 20.8% and 18.1% on the 2010 evaluation data, relative WER reductions of 14.6% and 17.4% respectively over the best component system.