Verbmobil
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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).
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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)