The language components in Verbmobil

This paper gives an overview of the main problems and their solutions in the language components of the Verbmobil speech translation system. Interpretation of spontaneously spoken language has to take into account that syntax and semantics differ from written language, that punctuation is missing, that accent and intonation have effects on the meaning and the translation, that the output of the speech recognizer may be noisy and that speakers produce errors due to distraction. The Verbmobil interpretation and translation components try to attack these problems by means of a grammar for spoken language, heavy use of prosodic information, a syntactic search on word hypothesis graphs and a shallow robust fall back translation device that is used in case the "deep" translation fails.