Rajeev Sangal

Anusha Prakash, Arun Kumar, Ashish Seth et al.

Cross-lingual dubbing of lecture videos requires the transcription of the original audio, correction and removal of disfluencies, domain term discovery, text-to-text translation into the target language, chunking of text using target language rhythm, text-to-speech synthesis followed by isochronous lipsyncing to the original video. This task becomes challenging when the source and target languages belong to different language families, resulting in differences in generated audio duration. This is further compounded by the original speaker's rhythm, especially for extempore speech. This paper describes the challenges in regenerating English lecture videos in Indian languages semi-automatically. A prototype is developed for dubbing lectures into 9 Indian languages. A mean-opinion-score (MOS) is obtained for two languages, Hindi and Tamil, on two different courses. The output video is compared with the original video in terms of MOS (1-5) and lip synchronisation with scores of 4.09 and 3.74, respectively. The human effort also reduces by 75%.

Rajeev Sangal

This paper outlines a theoretical framework using which different automatic metrics can be designed for evaluation of Machine Translation systems. It introduces the concept of {\em cognitive ease} which depends on {\em adequacy} and {\em lack of fluency}. Thus, cognitive ease becomes the main parameter to be measured rather than comprehensibility. The framework allows the components of cognitive ease to be broken up and computed based on different linguistic levels etc. Independence of dimensions and linearly combining them provides for a highly modular approach. The paper places the existing automatic methods in an overall framework, to understand them better and to improve upon them in future. It can also be used to evaluate the newer types of MT systems, such as speech to speech translation and discourse translation.