The Role of Semantics in Spoken Dialogue Translation Systems

In this paper, we consider the role of semantics in the spoken dialogue translation systems. We begin by looking at some of the key properties of an existing spoken dialogue system, namely the sundial system which provides ight and train information over the telephone, and how these properties aaect the design methodology and functionality of spoken translation systems. These properties include the eeects of speech processing, designing the system to meet the needs of users, and an analysis model which clearly separates the linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic and task levels. In this model many task functionalities are dependent upon, and sometimes realizable by, the semantic and pragmatic analysis components. Central to this approach, is the use of underspeciied semantic representations which are further speciied as and when required by domain and/or task analysis. This model can be applied in the development of spoken translation systems with two important eeects: monolingual semantic and pragmatic analysis can be carried out by processes independent of, but correlated with, the (translation) function of the system; and the main functions of the transfer processes is to further specifying the representations for the target language and to deal with mismatches between source and target language representations. We illustrate this approach with semantic analyses of German utterances required for translation in the verbmobil spoken dialogue translation system.