Verbmobil: the combination of deep and shallow processing for spontaneous speech translation

Verbmobil is a speech-to-speech translation system for spontaneously spoken negotiation dialogs. The actual system translates 74.2% of spontaneously spoken German input. We give an overview of the Verbmobil system. After the introduction of the Verbmobil scenario and the unique constraints of the project, we describe the underlying system architecture and its realization. The progress that was achieved on the end-to-end translation rate owes much to the increase of the word recognition rate from 45% in 1993 to 87% in 1996. In order to achieve the envisaged coverage on the uncertain speech recognizer output, deep and shallow approaches to the analysis and transfer problem had to be combined