Table Of ContentArtificial Intelligence
Editors: S. Amarel A. Biermann L. Bole P. Hayes A. Joshi
D. Lenat D.W. Loveland A. Mackworth D. Nau R. Reiter
E. Sandewall S. Shafer Y. Shoham J. Siekmann W. Wahlster
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH
Wolfgang Wahlster (Ed.)
Verbmobil:
Foundations of
Speech-to-Speech
Translation
With 224 Figures and 88 Tables
, Springer
Editor
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Wahlster
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
and University of Saarland, Department of Computer Science
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 SaarbrUcken, Germany
wahlster@dtkLde
ISBN 978-3-642-08730-1 ISBN 978-3-662-04230-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-04230-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Verbmobil: foundations of speech to speech translation / Wolfgang Wahlster (ed.).
Berlin; Heidelberg; New York; Barcelona; Hong Kong; London; Milan; Paris;
Singapore; Tokyo: Springer, 2000
(Artificial intelligence)
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Foreword
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 spon
taneous 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, communi
cation 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 sit
uation 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 com
plexity of spontaneous speech with all its pertinent phenomena such as ambiguities,
self-corrections, hesitations and disfluencies took precedence over the intended lex
icon size. Another important aspect was that prosodic information was exploited at
all processing stages. In addition, symbolic and statistical processing was integrated
from the beginning, thereby including the world and domain knowledge necessary
for the translation task. This meant that a total of 23,000 rules for the translation
of 10,000 words for the language pair German-English and of 2,500 words for the
language pair German-Japanese had to be fed into the system.
A new operational approach was used in the Verbmobil project: an absolutely
decentralized, large-scale project with research groups from a wide range of dif
ferent disciplines was implemented by means of the most advanced communication
and telecooperation methods. Central scientific control was provided by the German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrticken. An important aspect was
that the software packages already existing in different programming languages or
developed in Verbmobil were integrated by a central system integration group with
out reimplementation.
The Verbmobil project received funds in the amount ofDM 116 million between
1993 and 2000. The project goal defined for Verbmobil in 1992, namely the devel
opment of a prototypical, portable translation system for the language pair German
English by the year 2000, has now been achieved on the basis of a notebook concept;
other objectives added later on, such as the development of a telephone translation
system and a remote maintenance system for PCs, have also been reached. During
the implementation of Verbmobil, 800 scientific publications and 20 spin-off prod-
VI Foreword
ucts were generated. Six start-up companies were established by the participating
universities and research centers. The Verbmobil application scenarios include dia
log translation for call centers, e-commerce, mobile travel assistance, international
telephone calls, multilingual information retrieval, multilingual speech-based Inter
net access, mobile multilingual systems and speech synthesis systems.
The present book "Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-To-Speech Translation"
provides a full description of the results of the Verbmobil research project.
Dr. Bernd Reuse
Head of Division for Information Processing Systems
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Acknowledgements
A book such as this one could obviously not be put together without the help and
cooperation of many people.
I am particularly indebted to the authors who graciously made their contributions
available in a timely fashion.
Gaby Paul, who ironed out many text formatting problems, Rose Burgard, and
Renato Orsini deserve special mention for the excellent editorial support that they
provided. I would like to thank Anthony Jameson for providing the original style
files and templates.
Special praise goes to Reinhard Karger, Andreas Kliiter, and Norbert Reithinger
for their assistance in copy-editing.
The Verbmobil project has been made possible by funding from the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). I would like to thank Bernd
Reuse, Head of the Division for Information Processing at BMBF, for his constant
and tireless support of the Verbmobil project.
Wolfgang Wahlster
Scientific Director of the Verbmobil Project
Table of Contents
Foreword .................................................... V
Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. VII
Introduction
Mobile Speech-to-Speech Translation of Spontaneous Dialogs:
An Overview ofthe Final Verbmobil System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Wolfgang Wahlster
Facts and Figures about the Verbmobil Project ......................... 22
Reinhard Karger, Wolfgang Wahlster
From Speech Input to Augmented Word Lattices
Multilingual Speech Recognition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 33
Alex Waibel, Hagen Soltau, Tanja Schultz, Thomas Schaaf, Florian Metze
Robust Recognition of Spontaneous Speech ........................... 46
Udo Haiber, Helmut Mangold, Thilo Piau, Peter Regel-Brietzmann,
Gunther Ruske, Volker Schlej3
Fast Search for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 63
Stephan Kanthak, Achim Sixtus, Sirko Molau, Ralf Schliiter,
HermannNey
Capturing Long Range Correlations Using Log-Linear Language Models. . .. 79
Jochen Peters, Dietrich Klakow
Data Driven Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 95
Matthias Eichner, Matthias Wolff, Rudiger Hoffmann
The Prosody Module. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 106
Anton Batliner,Jan Buckow, Heinrich Niemann, Elmar N6th,
Volker Warnke
The Recognition of Emotion ........................................ 122
Anton Batliner, Richard Huber, Heinrich Niemann, Elmar N6th,
Jorg Spilker, Kerstin Fischer
Processing Self-Corrections in a Speech-to-Speech System ............... 131
Jorg Spilker, Martin Klamer, Gunther Gorz
X Table of Contents
Lexical and Syntactic Processing
Integrated Shallow Linguistic Processing .............................. 143
Hans Ulrich Block, Tobias Ruland
Probabilistic LR-Parsing with Symbolic Postprocessing .................. 147
Tobias Ruland
Robust Chunk Parsing for Spontaneous Speech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 163
Erhard W. Hinrichs, Sandra Kabler, Valia Kordoni, Frank H. Maller
Verbmobil Interface Terms (VlTs) ................................... 183
Michael Schiehlen, Johan Bos, Michael Doma
Semantic Construction ............................................ 200
Michael Schiehlen
Deep Linguistic Analysis with HPSG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Hans Uszkoreit, Dan Flickinger, Walter Kasper, Ivan A. Sag
HPSG Analysis of German ......................................... 238
Stefan Maller, Walter Kasper
HPSG Analysis of English ......................................... 254
Dan Flickinger, Ann Copestake, Ivan A. Sag
HPSG Analysis of Japanese ........................................ 264
Melanie Siegel
Efficient and Robust Parsing of Word Hypotheses Graphs ................. 280
Bernd Kiefer, Hans-Ulrich Krieger, Mark-Jan Nederhof
Speech Lexica and Consistent Multilingual Vocabularies ................. 296
Dafydd Gibbon, Harald Langen
Semantic Processing
Combining Analyses from Various Parsers ............................ 311
c.J. Rupp, Jorg Spilker, Martin Klamer, Karsten L. Worm
Robust Semantic Processing of Spoken Language. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
Manfred Pinkal, c.J. Rupp, Karsten Worm
Discourse and Dialog Semantics for Translation ........................ 336
Johan Bos, Julia Heine
Multilingual Semantic Databases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
Walter Kasper
Table of Contents XI
Dialog Translation
Semantic-Based Transfer .......................................... 359
Martin C. Emele, Michael Doma, Anke Ladeling, Heike Zinsmeister,
Christian Rohrer
Statistical Methods for Machine Translation ........................... 377
Stephan Vogel, Franz JosefOch, ChristofTillmann, Sonja Niefien,
Hassan Sawa/, Hermann Ney
Adapting a Large Scale MT System for Spoken Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
Hans Ulrich Block, Stefanie Schachtl, Manfred Gehrke
Example-Based Incremental Synchronous Interpretation ................. 411
Hans Ulrich Block
Example-Based Machine Translation with Templates .................... 418
Marko Auerswald
Robust Content Extraction for Translation and Dialog Processing .......... 428
Norbert Reithinger, Ralf Engel
Dialog Processing and Context Evaluation
Modeling Negotiation Dialogs ...................................... 441
Jan Alexandersson, Ralf Engel, Michael Kipp, Stephan Koch,
Uwe Kassner, Norbert Reithinger, Manfred Stede
Dialog Processing ................................................ 452
Michael Kipp, Jan Alexandersson, Ralf Engel, Norbert Reithinger
Contextual Disambiguation ........................................ 466
Stephan Koch, Uwe Kassner, Manfred Stede
Language Generation and Speech Synthesis
The Verbmobil Generation Component VM-GECO ..................... 481
Tilman Becker, Anne Kilger, Patrice Lopez, Peter Poller
The Application of HPSG-to-TAG Compilation Techniques ............... 497
Tilman Becker, Patrice Lopez
Generating Multilingual Dialog Summaries and Minutes ................. 507
Jan Alexandersson, Peter Poller, Michael Kipp
