Verbmobil

Verbmobil was a project for speaker-independent machine translation of spontaneous speech between German, Japanese and English. The project was led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence ( DFKI) carried out in the years 1993-2000 in two phases and funded with a total of 116 million DM by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology ( as a pilot project ).

To narrow the ambitious task, one concentrated in Verbmobil on the translation of dialogues in certain domains such as scheduling, travel planning and hotel reservations. As scientific innovations of the Leitvorhabens apply, inter alia, the use of intonation, the sentence melody to the understanding of the content and the links shallow and deep analysis components in a multi- blackboard architecture.

Verbmobil ended as a project with the presentation and the successful evaluation of the research prototype on the Verbmobil Symposium, July 30, in Saarbrücken. The system itself was not further developed the product, however, many other innovations have emerged from it now. These include a largely voice-controlled car, the reading of e- mails by the computer and an automatic music search for language terms on the internet. The Verbmobil research prototype is now exhibit in the demonstration center for language technology in the DFKI in Saarbrücken, another exhibit is the only software system in the Hall of Fame of the Deutsches Museum in Munich as a permanent exhibit about the new technologies.

At the University of Tübingen II project semi- automatically annotated treebanks ( syntactically annotated corpora ) for the German, Japanese and English language were created as part of the Verbmobil. The TüBa -D / S includes about 38,000 sentences and 360,000 words. The TüBa I / S contains about 30,000 sentences and 310,000 words. The TüBa -J / S comprises approximately 18,000 sentences and 160,000 words.