Verbmobil is a long-term project on the translation of spontaneous language in negotiation dialogs. We describe the goals of the project, the chosen discourse domains and the initial project schedule. We discuss some of the distinguishing features of Verbmobil and introduce the notion of translation on demand and variable depth of processing in speech translation. Finally, the role of anytime modules for efficient dialog translation in close to real time is described. The long-term vision behind the project Verbmobil is a portable translation device that you can carry to a meeting with speakers of other foreign languages and it will translate what you say for them. Figure 1. English as the Common Dialog Language in Verbmobil This very ambitious scientific goal will be pursued in a series of well-defined project phases. The first versions of Verbmobil will provide translation on demand for the two participants who have a passive knowledge of English but of which neither is a fluent speaker. We assume that most of the dialog will be conducted in English as a common dialog language. This is a realistic assumption for

We describe minimal recursion semantics (MRS), a framework for semantics within HPSG, which considerably simplies transfer and generation. We discuss why, in general, a semantic representation with minimal structure is desirable for transfer and illustrate how a descriptively adequate representation with a non-recursive structure may be achieved. The paper illustrates the application of MRS to transfer with a series of examples and compares the approach to others which have been previously adopted within unication based frameworks. Our account involves the use of both language-specic and interlingual predicates or relations and we illustrate how this may be exploited to allow MRS to be used to investigate dierent lexical semantic approaches. 1 Semantic representation and transfer In this paper we describe a semantic representation for HPSG known as minimal recursion semantics (MRS), which is being utilized in the English grammar being developed for the Verbmobil project. Verbmobil...

This article presents a new semanticbased transfer approach developed and applied within the Verbmobil Machine Translation project. We give an overview of the declarative transfer fo,'malism to- gether with its procedural realization. Our approach is discussed and compared with several other approaches f,'om the MT literature. The results presented in this article have been implemented and integrated into the Verbmobil system.

Abstract. This article gives an overview of a new semantic-based transfer approach developed and applied within the Verbmobil Machine Translation project [22]. We present the declarative transfer formalism and discuss its implementation. The results presented in this paper have been integrated successfully in the Verbmobil system. 1

The resolution of ambiguities is one of the central problems for Machine Translation. In this paper we propose a knowledge-based approach to disambiguation which uses Description Logics (DL) as representation formalism. We present the process of anaphora resolution implemented in the Machine Translation system FAST and show how the DL system BACK is used to support disambiguation. The disambiguation strategy uses factors representing syntactic, semantic, and conceptual constraints with different weights to choose the most adequate antecedent candidate. We show how these factors can be declaratively represented as defaults in BACK. Disambiguation is then achieved by determining the interpretation that yields a qualitatively minimal number of exceptions to the defaults, and can thus be formalized as exception minimization.

We present two approaches for syntactic and semantic transfer based on LFG f-structures and compare the results with existing co-description and restriction operator based approaches, focusing on aspects of ambiguity preserving transfer, complex cases of syntactic structural mismatches as well as on modularity and reusability. The two transfer approaches are interfaced with an existing, implemented transfer component (Verbmobil), by translating f-structures into a term language, and by interfacing f-structure representations with an existing semantic based transfer approach, respectively.

NLP researchers face a dilemma: on one side, it is unarguably accepted that languages have internal structure rather than strings of words. On the other side, they find it very difficult and expensive to write grammars that have good coverage of language structures. Statistical machine translation tries to cope with this problem by ignoring language structures and using a statistical models to depict the translation process. Most of the translation models are word-based. While the approach has achieved surprisingly good performance comparable to the best commercial systems, many questions remain in the machine translation community. Can the statistical word-based translation still perform well on language pairs with radically different linguistic structures? How would it function with less training data or with spoken languages? The thesis work investigated these questions. In summary, word-based alignment model is a major cause of errors in German-English statistical spoken language...

This thesis proposes a strongly lexicalist approach to machine translation and applies it to the translation of spatial prepositions and prepositional expressions between English and Spanish. Bilingual contrastive knowledge resides solely in the bilingual lexicon and is structured in the form of correspondences between sets of source and target language lexemes related through indices. The resulting architecture maximizes the independence of the monolingual and bilingual components. This independence is demonstrated by developing a grammar of Spanish which is significantly different in its constructions from its analogous English grammar. In particular, relative clauses are analysed through a single rule that allows gaps in subject position, while clitic climbing and doubling are handled through mechanisms not normally found in grammatical descriptions of English. Bilingual lexical rules, in conjunction with the bilingual lexicon, constitute a single, motivated and well defined mechani...

In this paper we present a methodology for extracting information about lexical translation equivalences from the machine readable versions of conventional dictionaries (MRDs), and describe a series of experiments on semi-automatic construction of a linked multilingual lexical knowledge base for English, Dutch, and Spanish. We discuss the advantages and limitations of using MRDs that this has revealed, and some strategies we have developed to cover gaps where no direct translation can be found.

processes involved in language learning, production, and comprehension. Computational linguists believe that the essence of these processes (in humans and machines) is a computational manipulation of information. Computational psycholinguistics studies psychological aspects of human