Architectural Considerations for Conversational Systems -- The Verbmobil/INTARC Experience

The paper describes the speech to speech translation system INTARC, developed during the first phase of the Verbmobil project. The general design goals of the INTARC system architecture were time synchronous processing as well as incrementality and interactivity as a means to achieve a higher degree of robustness and scalability. Interactivity means that in addition to the bottom-up (in terms of processing levels) data flow the ability to process top-down restrictions considering the same signal segment for all processing levels. The construction of INTARC 2.0, which has been operational since fall 1996, followed an engineering approach focussing on the integration of symbolic (linguistic) and stochastic (recognition) techniques which led to a generalization of the concept of a ``one pass'' beam search.

Research on Architectures for Integrated Speech/Language Systems in Verbmobil

The German joint research project Verbmobil (VM) aims at the development of a speech to speech translation system. This paper reports on research done in our group which belongs to Verbmobil's subproject on system architectures (TP15). Our specific research areas are the construction of parsers for spontaneous speech, investigations in the parallelization of parsing and to contribute to the development of a flexible communication architecture with distributed control.