How to Talk Like an Iraqi

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The algorithm works by chopping up input sentences into "phrasal units," says Kevin Knight, senior research scientist at ISI. For instance, the phrase "Show me your permit to carry that weapon" could be broken into "show me," "your permit," "to carry," and "that weapon." Then those units get translated and re-ordered, explains Knight, according to their likelihood of being positioned next to each other in an Iraqi Arabic sentence. The statistical algorithm quickly goes through "millions of possible translations and scores each one of them," he says.

In order to quickly access all possible sentence structures and words, the algorithm has numerous choices that it can assess at once, explains Knight. "It's similar to a chess program," he says, because it searches through many different paths to find the best one. The translation algorithm searches for the path that leads to the right sequence of words, and plays the most likely phrase on the laptop's speakers within seconds. Currently, IraqComm can draw from a vocabulary of 40,000 words in English and 50,000 in Iraqi Arabic -- not surprisingly, with a heavy emphasis on military and medical terminology.

IraqComm was developed under the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program. SRI is one of six organizations developing English-Iraqi Arabic translation systems that are mobile and can translate military- and medical-oriented conversations in the presence of ambient noise. Similar research projects are going on at USC, Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, BBN Technologies, and Sehda, Inc.

Whether or not IraqComm will be the most accurate system to come out of the DARPA initiative remains to be seen, says Craig Schlenoff, an electronics engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. He and a team of researchers will begin testing all the translation systems within the next year, so they can be measured against each other. SRI's system has an early start, though, and has garnered positive feedback from military officials who've already used it. Last week, according to SRI, the military ordered 21 more of its translation systems.

The goal of IraqComm is not to put human translators out of business, emphasizes SRI's Precoda. Language experts will still be needed to judge body language and colloquial subtleties that could reveal information not obvious to a computer, which is "not as smart as a human translator," she says.

Unlike human translators, however, IraqComm can be deployed anywhere and everywhere. Ultimately, then, says Precoda, it can give the military more translation options and help to mitigate the wartime hazard for Iraqi translators.