ECAI-2000 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Multilingual Generation for Translation in Speech-to-Speech Dialogues and its Realization in Verbmobil

Tilman Becker, Anne Kilger, Patrice Lopez, Peter Poller

This paper presents the generation module of the speech-to-speech dialogue translation system Verbmobil. Spontaneous speech, large multilingual vocabulary, difficulty of the translation task, robustness and real-time constraints make the design of such a module very challenging. In order to overcome these difficulties, we have developed a system based on a general kernel and the declarativity of the knowledge sources. This fully implemented system proves the practical relevance of several techniques such as constraint-solving for the microplanning task or HPSG-to-TAG compilation for syntactic realization. In addition to the successful deployment of our module into the Verbmobil system, the kernel has been adapted to other domains and tasks.

Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Human Language Technology, Constraint Satisfaction

Citation: Tilman Becker, Anne Kilger, Patrice Lopez, Peter Poller: Multilingual Generation for Translation in Speech-to-Speech Dialogues and its Realization in Verbmobil. In W.Horn (ed.): ECAI2000, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.401-405.