Verbmobil

• The goal: a portable device that follows a simple business dialogue and translates, when called upon, from one language to another. (See (Malouf and Riehemann's slides on Verbmobil) for more information.)
  • The dialogues actually used focus on setting a time and place for a meeting.
  • The languages involved are German, Japanese, and English, with English assumed to be the particpants' common language (but which they may know imperfectly).
• The technology: a wide range of NLP techniques, including:
  • speech recognition
  • informal continous speech, with false starts, unfinished sentences, etc.
  • multilingual
  • parsing
  • informal speech, as described above
  • multilingual (different grammatical formalisms were used for the different languages)
  • semantic analysis
  • representations of time, place and motion expressions
  • representations of participants' goals, constraints, and plans
  • representation of dialogue structure
  • portions of dialogue (initiation, suggestion/response pairs, agreement, conclusion)
  • generation
  • speech synthesis
• A feasible project (perhaps!) only because the domain is fairly restricted.
  • Participants have a mutual goal of scheduling a meeting
  • Relevant facts about meetings aren't too difficult to represent
  • Consequently, dialogues tend to follow a pattern

(10)

(Rob Malouf and Susanne Riehemann's slides on Verbmobil)

(on to summary and review)

(return to syllabus)