Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation (Artificial Intelligence) [Hardcover]

Wolfgang Wahlster (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Artificial Intelligence | Publication Date: September 6, 2000

Verbmobil is the result of eight years of intensive research in a large speech-to-speech translation project, executed by a consortium comprising nineteen academic and four industrial partners. The system that was developed by more than 100 researchers and engineers handles dialogs in three business-oriented domains, with translation between three languages: German, English, and Japanese. Verbmobil deals with spontaneous speech, which includes realistic repair phenomena, and uses deep semantic analysis to recognize a speaker's slips and to translate what he tried to say rather than what he actually said. - This book gives the first comprehensive overview of the results of this unique and seminal project in human language technology. Contributions by leading scientists in speech and language technology look at the component technologies that make Verbmobil the most advanced speech-to-speech translation system worldwide and a landmark project in the history of natural language processing.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Verbmobil is the result of eight years of intensive research in a large speech-to-speech translation project, executed by a consortium comprising nineteen academic and four industrial partners. The system that was developed by more than 100 researchers and engineers handles dialogs in three business-oriented domains, with translation between three languages: German, English, and Japanese. Verbmobil deals with spontaneous speech, which includes realistic repair phenomena, and uses deep semantic analysis to recognize a speaker's slips and to translate what he tried to say rather than what he actually said. After more than 400 single publications, this book gives the first comprehensive overview of the results of this unique and seminal project in human language technology. The theoretical and practical foundations from signal processing to language understanding are described in detail. The system anatomy is presented and the components for multilingual and robust speech processing, prosodic analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, discourse understanding, translation, generation and speech synthesis are discussed. Contributions by leading scientists in speech and language technology look at the component technologies that make Verbmobil the most advanced speech-to-speech translation system worldwide and a landmark project in the history of natural language processing.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 677 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (September 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540677836
• ISBN-13: 978-3540677833
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,197,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Verbmobil, November 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation (Artificial Intelligence) (Hardcover)

Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation

This exceptionally readable (in English) account of the German Verbmobil project (1992-2000) is comprised of 47 contributions from the principal participants in the project. These contributions cover all aspects of this major effort in natural language processing under the headings:

- Introduction (Overview by editor) - From Speech Input to Augmented Word Lattices - Lexical and Syntactic Processing - Semantic Processing - Dialogue Translation - Dialogue Processing and Context Evaluation - Language Generation and Speech Synthesis - Data Collection and Evaluation - System Architecture and Software Integration.

The project culminated in a working prototype which allows bi-directional telephone dialogues in three discourse domains: Appointment Scheduling, Travel Planning and Remote PC Maintenance,- between German, Japanese and American-English speakers.

The work reported,

- represents the state of the art in Speaker-Independent Spontaneous Dialogue Recognition, Translation and Speech Synthesis, - provides quantitative data which illustrate the strength and weaknesses of symbolic and statistical approaches to translation in this context. - illuminates the tradeoffs in various approaches to deep linguistic analysis - illustrates the important role of acoustical and lexical data collection and processing. - gives insight into the interaction between the many modules as reflected in the detailed End-to-End evaluation of the system and its components - demonstrates the role of the underlying system and software architecture in providing both, a test-bed development environment and the basis for a near-real-time demonstration system. - reflects upon some of the management issues encountered in a project of this scope

The reported work includes a number of advances, including

- a speech controlled telephone dialogue system including speaker-language identification - integration of deep and shallow processing: results from concurrent translation threads. - systematic use of (multilingual) prosodic information at all processing stages, - Parsing, Dialog Understanding, Translation, Generation and Speech Synthesis - understanding of spontaneous speech repair - generation of dialogue summaries

The people responsible for editing this volume have raised the bar for technical writing. The result is an unusually lucid, concise and consistent exposition of work from several disciplines, generally only accessible to the specialists. Limiting the length of the individual contributions, has confined the reporting to what was accomplished in the course of the project., without compromising scientific rigor. If I have any criticism at all, it is the lack of a subject and author index and the occasional use of abbreviations not spelled out, at first use, within an article.

To those interested in speech recognition and machine translation, this is essential reading; - they'll be surprised to find it satisfying as well.

Those concerned with large-scale, distributed software development will find several new benchmarks in this project.

See also <www.dfki.de/~wahlster/VM-final> for a project overview. .