Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog

Martin Kay, Jean Mark Gawron, and Peter Norvig

verbmobil is a portable simultaneous interpreter. Carry it to a meeting with speakers of other languages and it will translate your spoken words for them. Thier Verbmobils, of they have them, will alow you to understand what they are saying. So far, Verbmobil exists only as a research program of the Bundesministerium fur Forschung und Technologie, Germany's Federal Ministry of Research and Techonlogy. If the program's goals are met, the first experimental prototypes, with restricted capabilites, will exist at CSLI to assess the realistic chances of success for the Verbmobil program.

The authors give an overview of the new discipline of speech-based machine translation. They survey the state of the art in the seperate fields of machine translation and speech recognition and evaluate the major obstacles to further progress in both fields. A chapter is devoted to the specail problems of integrating speech recognition and natural language systems within the context of machine translation. Their appraisals and recommendations or the Verbmobil project are required reading for computer scientists and linguists.

Martin Kay is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, a research fellow at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and the permanent chair of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics. Mark Gawron is a research linguist at SRI International. Peter Norvig is a senoir computer scientist for Sun Microsystems Labs.

Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 33

1/1/94

ISBN (Paperback): 0937073954

ISBN (Cloth): 0937073962

Subject: Linguistics; Machine Translating; Automatic Speech Recognition