February 1, 2021 Results of Third Multilingual Speech Translation Contest

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, headed by Dr. TOKUDA Hideyuki, President) co-held the third Multilingual Speech Translation Contest. Both agencies appealed for ideas and prototypes (PoCs) of new ways to use multilingual speech translation technology to eliminate language barriers. Outstanding submissions were awarded as the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications Award and NICT Award.

1. Overview

MIC and NICT co-held the third Multilingual Speech Translation Contest to call for ideas and PoCs of new ways to use multilingual speech translation technology and accelerate the further spread of multilingual voice translation technology and the creation of a wide variety of translation services and eliminate the world’s language barriers.

MIC and NICT received 233 applications for the idea section, which seeks new ideas to eliminate the language barrier in the world. Eight applications were submitted for prototypes (PoCs) section. Of these, for ideas and PoCs that passed the judges’ first screening, the final contest was held on Saturday, January 30, 2021. The award-winning works have been decided as shown below.

The final contest was held in a remote meeting style using a web conferencing system. This style was taken under the basic policy for countermeasures against novel coronavirus diseases (March 28, 2021 (revised on January 7, 2021)) decided by the Novel Coronavirus Response Headquarters and MIC’s policy for novel coronavirus diseases (March 28, 2021 (revised on January 7, 2021)) decided by MIC’s Countermeasures Headquarters for Novel Coronavirus Diseases.

2. Results of third Multilingual Speech Translation Contest

1. Idea section

2. PoC section