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Abstract:

is a large German joint research project in the area spontaneous speech-to-speech translation sytems which is sponsored by the German Federal Ministery for Research and Education. In its first phase (1992--1996) ca. 30 research groups in universities, research institutes and industry were involved, and it entered its second phase in January 1997. The overall goal is develop a system which supports face-to-face negotiation dialogues about the scheduling of meetings as its first domain, which will be enlarged to more general scenarios during the second project phase. For the dialogue situation it is assumed that two speakers with different mother tongues (German and Japanese) have some common knowledge of English. Whenever a speaker's knowledge of English is not sufficient, the Verbmobil system will serve him as a speech translation device to which he can talk in his native language. So, Verbmobil is a system providing assistance in conversations as opposed to fully automatic conversational systems. Of course, it can be used to translate complete dialogue turns. Both types of conversational systems share a lot of common goals, in particular utterance understanding--- at least as much as is required to produce a satisfacory translation---, processing of spontaneous speech phenomena, speech generation, and robustness in general. A difference can be seen in

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