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The Verbmobil prototype system – a software engineering perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

THOMAS BUB  and
JOHANNES SCHWINN
THOMAS BUB
Affiliation:
debis Systemhaus, Goebelstrasse 1-3, D - 64293 Darmstadt, Germany; e-mail: tbub@debis.com
JOHANNES SCHWINN
Affiliation:
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH (DFKI) Erwin-Schrödinger-Straße, D-67608 Kaiserslautern, Germany; e-mail: schwinn@dfki.de
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Abstract

Verbmobil represents a new generation of speech-to-speech translation systems in which spontaneously spoken language, speaker independence and adaptability as well as the combination of deep and shallow approaches to the analysis and transfer problems are the main features. The project brought together researchers from the fields of signal processing, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Verbmobil goes beyond the state-of-the-art in each of these areas, but its main achievement is the seamless integration of them. The first project phase (1993–1996) has been followed up by the second project phase (1997–2000), which aims at applying the results to further languages and at integrating innovative telecooperation techniques. Quite apart from the speech and language processing issues, the size and complexity of the project represent an extreme challenge on the areas of project management and software engineering:

[bull ] 50 researchers from 29 organizations at different sites in different countries are involved in the software development process,

[bull ] to reuse existing software, hardware, knowledge and experience, only a few technical restrictions could be given to the partners.

In this article we describe the Verbmobil prototype system from a software-engineering perspective. We discuss:

[bull ] the modularized functional architecture,

[bull ] the flexible and extensible software architecture which reflects that functional architecture,

[bull ] the evolutionary process of system integration,

[bull ] the communication-based organizational structure of the project,

[bull ] the evaluation of the system operational by the end of the first project phase.

Type
Research Article
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 95 - 112
Copyright
1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF) in the framework of the Vermobil Project under Grant 413-4001-01 IV 301 4. The responsibility for the contents of this paper lies with the authors.