This paper presents the generation module of the speech-to-speech dialogue translation system Verbmobil. Spontaneous speech, large multilingual vocabulary, difficulty of the translation task, robustness and real-time constraints make the design of such a module very challenging. In order to overcome these difficulties, we have developed a system based on a general kernel and the declarativity o...

We are going to present an architecture for natural language processing systems especially designed for spontaneous speech. We introduce the notion of a layered chart for information separation and information hiding. Complex distributed systems can be built using this approach which do not rely on a central data structure or control model. We describe a typed feature formalism with appropriate...

During resting conditions the brain remains functionally and metabolically active. One manifestation of this activity that has become an important research tool is spontaneous fluctuations in the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The identification of correlation patterns in these spontaneous fluctuations has been termed resting state fu...

We demonstrate the applications of Markov Chains and HMMs to modeling of the underlying structure in spontaneous spoken language. Experiments with supervised training cover the detection of the current dialog state and identi cation of the speech act as used by the speech translation component in our JANUS Speech-to-Speech Translation System. HMM training with hidden states is used to uncover o...

Translation of the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, also known as speech translation, has received a lot of research interest recently. This is especially true for programs such as DARPA BOLT which focus on improving spontaneous human-human conversation across languages. However, this research is hindered by the dearth of datasets developed for this explicit purpose. For Eg...

In this paper we will present our ongoing work on a plan-based discourse processor developed in the context of the Enthusiast Spanish to English translation system as part of the JANUS multilingual speech-to-speech translation system. We will demonstrate that theories of discourse which postulate a strict tree structure of discourse on either the intentional or attentional level are not totally...

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is an essential cellular compartment responsible for Ca(2+) sequestration, signaling, protein translation, folding as well as transport. Several acute and chronic disease conditions impair ER function leading to ER stress. To study the impact of ER stress on synaptic transmission we applied tunicamycin (TM) or thapsigargin (TG) to hippocampal neurons, which trigge...

This paper describes a system, based on statistical machine translation, that tries to remove from the output of an automatic audio transcription system non relevant words, such as: erroneously inserted functional words, filled pauses, interjections, word fragments, etc, as well as to repair, at a certain extent, ungrammatical pieces of sentences. For this work we decided to concentrate on a po...

This paper deals with the task of statistical machine translation of spontaneous speech using a limited amount of training data. We propose a method for selecting relevant additional training data from other sources that may come from other domains. We present two ways to solve the data sparseness problem by including morphological information into the EM training of word alignments. We show th...

Verbmobil is a speaker-independent and bidirectional speech-to-speech translation system for spontaneous dialogs that can be accessed via GSM mobile phones. It handles dialogs in three business-oriented domains, with context-sensitive translation between four languages (English, German, Japanese, and Chinese). We show that in Verbmobil's multi-blackboard and multi-engine architecture the result...