Wahlster W. (ed.) Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation

Springer, 2000. — 676 p.In 1992 it seemed very difficult to answer the question whether it would be possible to develop a portable system for the automatic recognition and translation of spontaneous speech. Previous research work on speech processing had focused on read speech only and international projects aimed at automated text translation had just been terminated without achieving their objectives. Within this context, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) made a careful analysis of all national and international research projects conducted in the field of speech and language technology before deciding to launch an eight-year basic-research lead project in which research groups were to cooperate in an interdisciplinary and international effort covering the disciplines of computer science, computational linguistics, translation science, signal processing, communication science and artificial intelligence. At some point, the project comprised up to 135 work packages with up to 33 research groups working on these packages. The project was controlled by means of a network plan. Every two years the project situation was assessed and the project goals were updated. An international scientific advisory board provided advice for BMBF. A new scientific approach was chosen for this project: coping with the complexity of spontaneous speech with all its pertinent phenomena such as ambiguities, self-corrections, hesitations and disfluencies took precedence over the intended lexicon size. Another important aspect was that prosodic information was exploited at all processing stages.Mobile Speech-to-Speech Translation of Spontaneous Dialogs: An Overview of the Final Verbmobil System
Facts and Figures about the Verbmobil Project
From Speech Input to Augmented Word Lattices
Multilingual Speech Recognition
Robust Recognition of Spontaneous Speech
Fast Search for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition
Capturing Long Range Correlations Using Log-Linear Language Models
Data Driven Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries
The Prosody Module
The Recognition of Emotion
Processing Self-Corrections in a Speech-to-Speech System
Lexical and Syntactic Processing
Integrated Shallow Linguistic Processing
Probabilistic LR-Parsing with Symbolic Postprocessing
Robust Chunk Parsing for Spontaneous Speech
Verbmobil Interface Terms (VlTs)
Semantic Construction
Deep Linguistic Analysis with HPSG
HPSG Analysis of German
HPSG Analysis of English
HPSG Analysis of Japanese
Efficient and Robust Parsing of Word Hypotheses Graphs
Speech Lexica and Consistent Multilingual Vocabularies
Semantic Processing
Combining Analyses from Various Parsers
Robust Semantic Processing of Spoken Language
Discourse and Dialog Semantics for Translation
Multilingual Semantic Databases
Dialog Translation
Semantic-Based Transfer
Statistical Methods for Machine Translation
Adapting a Large Scale MT System for Spoken Language
Example-Based Incremental Synchronous Interpretation
Example-Based Machine Translation with Templates
Robust Content Extraction for Translation and Dialog Processing
Dialog Processing and Context Evaluation
Modeling Negotiation Dialogs
Dialog Processing
Contextual Disambiguation
Language Generation and Speech Synthesis
The Verbmobil Generation Component VM-GECO
The Application of HPSG-to-TAG Compilation Techniques
Generating Multilingual Dialog Summaries and Minutes
Speech Synthesis Using Multilevel Selection and Concatenation of Units from Large Speech Corpora
Data Collection and Evaluation
Verbmobil Data Collection and Annotation
The Tübingen Treebanks for Spoken German, English, and Japanese
Multilingual Verbmobil-Dialogs: Experiments, Data Collection and Data Analysis
Speech Recognition Performance Assessment
Speech Synthesis Quality Assessment
From Off-line Evaluation to On-line Selection
Functional Validation of a Machine Interpretation System: Verbmobil
System Architecture and Software Integration
Verbmobil From a Software Engineering Point of View: System Design and Software Integration.
From a Stationary Prototype to Telephone Translation Services