VERBMOBIL: the evolution of a complex large speech-to-speech translation system

The ambitious goal of the project Verbmobil is the development of a portable speech to speech translation system dealing with face to face dialogs. It constitutes a new generation of translation systems in which spontaneously spoken language, speaker independence and speaker adaptability are among the main features. Verbmobil brings together researchers from the fields of speech processing, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence and goes beyond the state of the art in these areas. Besides the speech and language processing issues, the specific constraints of the project represent an extreme challenge on the part of project management, software engineering and test and evaluation of the system: size and complexity-150 researchers from 29 organizations at different sites on three continents are involved in the software development; integration of heterogeneous software-in order to reuse existing software, hardware and know how, only a few restrictions were given to the partners. The article describes the Verbmobil scenario, the system architecture and the system evolution.