Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XII

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2. Introduction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Mobile Speech-to-Speech Translation of Spontaneous Dialogs: An Overview of the Final Verbmobil System

      • Wolfgang Wahlster

      Pages 3-21

   3. Facts and Figures about the Verbmobil Project

      • Reinhard Karger, Wolfgang Wahlster

      Pages 22-30

3. From Speech Input to Augmented Word Lattices

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 31-31

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   2. Multilingual Speech Recognition

      • Alex Waibel, Hagen Soltau, Tanja Schultz, Thomas Schaaf, Florian Metze

      Pages 33-45

   3. Robust Recognition of Spontaneous Speech

      • Udo Haiber, Helmut Mangold, Thilo Pfau, Peter Regel-Brietzmann, Günther Ruske, Volker Schleß

      Pages 46-62

   4. Fast Search for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition

      • Stephan Kanthak, Achim Sixtus, Sirko Molau, Ralf Schlüter, Hermann Ney

      Pages 63-78

   5. Capturing Long Range Correlations Using Log-Linear Language Models

      • Jochen Peters, Dietrich Klakow

      Pages 79-94

   6. Data Driven Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries

      • Matthias Eichner, Matthias Wolff, Rüdiger Hoffmann

      Pages 95-105

   7. The Prosody Module

      • Anton Batliner, Jan Buckow, Heinrich Niemann, Elmar Nöth, Volker Warnke

      Pages 106-121

   8. The Recognition of Emotion

      • Anton Batliner, Richard Huber, Heinrich Niemann, Elmar Nöth, Jörg Spilker, Kerstin Fischer

      Pages 122-130

   9. Processing Self-Corrections in a Speech-to-Speech System

      • Jörg Spilker, Martin Klarner, Günther Görz

      Pages 131-140

4. Lexical and Syntactic Processing

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 141-141

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   2. Integrated Shallow Linguistic Processing

      • Hans Ulrich Block, Tobias Ruland

      Pages 143-146

   3. Probabilistic LR-Parsing with Symbolic Postprocessing

      • Tobias Ruland

      Pages 147-162

   4. Robust Chunk Parsing for Spontaneous Speech

      • Erhard W. Hinrichs, Sandra Kübler, Valia Kordoni, Frank H. Müller

      Pages 163-182

   5. Verbmobil Interface Terms (VITs)

      • Michael Schiehlen, Johan Bos, Michael Dorna

      Pages 183-199

   6. Semantic Construction

      • Michael Schiehlen

      Pages 200-215

   7. Deep Linguistic Analysis with HPSG

      • Hans Uszkoreit, Dan Flickinger, Walter Kasper, Ivan A. Sag

      Pages 216-237

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.

• Dialogverstehen
• English
• Sprachtechnologie
• Sprachübersetzung
• Verbmobil
• cognition
• german
• machine translation
• modeling
• natural language
• natural language processing
• semantic analysis
• speech recognition
• translation
• Übersetzen

• German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany

  Wolfgang Wahlster

• Department of Computer Science, University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany

  Wolfgang Wahlster

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. In 2000, he was coopted as a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the same university. In addition, he is the Head of the Intelligent User Interfaces Lab at DFKI.

He was the Scientific Director of the Verbmobil consortium on spontaneous speech translation (1993-2000), the SmartKom consortium on multimodal dialog systems (1999-2003), and the SmartWeb consortium on mobile multimodal access to semantic web services (2004-2008).

He has authored more than 150 technical papers and 6 books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces, and edited many books, among them the Springer titles "Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation", "SmartKom: Foundations of Multimodal Dialogue Systems", and "SemProM: Foundations of Semantic Product Memories for the Internet of Things". His research includes multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, smart navigation systems, semantic web services, and resource-adaptive cognitive technologies.

He was awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Award) in 2001 and he received the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006.

He is the Chief Academic Advisor for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the Research Union of the German Government, he is a member or chair of many key international scientific advisory and governance boards, including the National Institute of Informatics (NII) of Japan, the jury for the European ICT Prize of the European Commission, the SingaporeAgency for Science, Technology and Research, the SAP Next Business & Technology Advisory Board, the Center for Advanced Security Research in Darmstadt, the Intel Visual Computing Institute, the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership of the European Commission.

He is a member of many academies, including the German Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Acatech, the Council for Engineering Sciences of the Union of German Academies of Science and Humanities, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

He has chaired and given invited talks at the key international conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, he is a board member of the key AI journals, and he is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), and the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).

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