A Hand-Held Multimedia Translation and Interpretation System with Application to Diet Management

TL;DR

This paper presents a portable multimedia translation system for restaurant menus that improves translation accuracy and efficiency using context-specific corpora and multimedia cues, aiding diet management for travelers.

Contribution

A novel hand-held system combining machine translation, context-specific preprocessing, and multimedia data to enhance menu translation accuracy and reduce computational load.

Findings

Higher translation accuracy than Google Translate.

Real-time translation on a portable device.

Supports diet management with nutritional info.

Abstract

We propose a network independent, hand-held system to translate and disambiguate foreign restaurant menu items in real-time. The system is based on the use of a portable multimedia device, such as a smartphones or a PDA. An accurate and fast translation is obtained using a Machine Translation engine and a context-specific corpora to which we apply two pre-processing steps, called translation standardization and $n$-gram consolidation. The phrase-table generated is orders of magnitude lighter than the ones commonly used in market applications, thus making translations computationally less expensive, and decreasing the battery usage. Translation ambiguities are mitigated using multimedia information including images of dishes and ingredients, along with ingredient lists. We implemented a prototype of our system on an iPod Touch Second Generation for English speakers traveling in Spain. Our tests indicate that our translation method yields higher accuracy than translation engines such as Google Translate, and does so almost instantaneously. The memory requirements of the application, including the database of images, are also well within the limits of the device. By combining it with a database of nutritional information, our proposed system can be used to help individuals who follow a medical diet maintain this diet while traveling.