Verbmobil is a portable
simultaneous interpreter. Carry it to a meeting with speakers of
other languages and it will translate your spoken words for
them. Their Verbmobils, if they have them, will allow you to
understand what they are saying.
So far, Verbmobil exists only as a
research program of the Bundesministerium für Forschung und
Technologie, Germany's Federal Ministry of Research and
Technology. If the program's goals are met, the first experimental
prototypes, with restricted capabilities, will exist at CSLI to
assess the realistic chances of success for the Verbmobil
program.
The authors give an overview of the new discipline of
speech-based machine translation. They survey the state of the art
in the separate fields of machine translation and speech recognition
and evaluate the major obstacles to further progress in both
fields. A chapter is devoted to the special problems of integrating
speech recognition and natural language systems within the context
of machine translation. Their appraisals and recommendations of the
Verbmobil project are required reading for computer scientists and
linguists.
Martin Kay is a professor of linguistics at Stanford
University, a research fellow at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
and the permanent chair of the International Committee on
Computational Linguistics. Jean Mark Gawron is a research linguist at SRI
International. Peter Norvig is a senior computer scientist for Sun
Microsystems Labs.
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