Research project

Verbmobil is a long-term, interdisciplinary project in the field of language technology. The Verbmobil system recognizes spontaneous speech, analyses its content, translates into another language, generates a sentence, and synthesises the appropriate utterance. For travel planning, appointment scheduling, and remote maintenance, Verbmobil intends to help with conversation with foreign partners. IT companies, universities, and research centers are partners in Verbmobil, which is sponsored by the German ministry of education, science, research, and technology (BMBF) in two phases: 1993-1996, and 1997-2000.

In the first phase, the focus has been on appointment scheduling dialogues between a German and a Japanese partner, with English as interlingua. In the second phase, the project concentrates on the robust and bi-directional translation of spontaneous dialogues in the domain of travel planning and hotel reservation for German - English (approx. 10.000 words) and German - Japanese (approx. 2.500 words). At the Chair for Pattern Recognition (Informatik 5), modules are implemented for segmentation of spontaneous speech, prosody, dialogue, and for the recognition of emotional user states.