Research on Architectures for Integrated Speech/Language Systems in Verbmobil

Research on Architectures for Integrated Speech/Language Systems in Verbmobil Gfinther GSrz~ Marcus Kesseler, JSrg Spilker, Hans Weber University of Erbmgen-Nfirnberg IMMD (Computer Science) VIII --- Artificial Inl0elligence Am Weichselgarten 9 D-91058 ERLAN(]EN Emaih {goerz, kesseler, spilker, weber}Oinformat ik. uni-erl angen, de Abstract The German joint research project Verb- mobil (VM) aims at the deveh)pment of a speech to speech translation sys- tem. This paper reports on research done in our group which belongs to Verb- mobil's subprojeet on system architec- tures (TP15). Our specific research areas are the construction of parsers for spon- taneous speech, investigations in the par- allelization of parsing and to contribute to the development of a flexible com- munication architecture with distributed control. 1 Introduction The German joint research project Verbmobil (VM) 1 aims at the development of a speech to speech translation system. This paper reports on research done in our group which belongs to Vcrbmobil's subproject on system architectures (TP15). The task of this subproject is to provide basic research results on incremental and inter- active system architectures for the VM research prototype and to demonstrate their feasibility in the prototypical INTARC system. Our specific research areas are the construction of parsers for spontaneous speech, investigations in the paral- lelization of parsing and to contribute to the de- velopment of a flexible communication architec- ture with distributed control. The paper is or- ganized as follows: Section 2 reports on the de- sign and implementation of an incremental in- teractive speech parser which integrates statistics i 1This work was flmded by the German Federal Mirfistry for Researdl and Tedmology (BMFT) in the framework of the Verbmobil Project under Grant BMFT 01 IV 101 H / 9. The responsibility for the contents of this study lies with the authors. with a chart-parser einploying a unification gram- mar (UG) formalism. Furthermore, results of ex- periments on the interaction between the parser and a speech recognizer using expectations, are re- ported. In section 3 we present experiences with a parallel version of the parser. Section 4 deals with distributed control in modular Natural Lan- guage/Speech (NLSP) systems. 2 Design and Implementation of Incremental Interactive Speech Parsers In a Left Right Incremental architecture (LRI), higher level modules can work in parallel with lower level modules. The obvious benefits of such an arrangement are twofold: The system does not have to wait for a speaker to stop talking and top- down constraints from higher level to lower level modules can be used easily. 'lb achieve LR! behav- ior the singular modules must fulfil] the following requirements: Processing proceeds incrementally along the time axis ("left to right"). Pieces of output have to be transferred to the next module as soon as possible. So far in INTARC-1.3 we have achieved an LRI style coupling of ibur different modules: Word recognition module, syntactic parser, semantic module and prosodic boundary module. Our word recognition module is a modified Viterbi decoder, where two changes in the algorithm design were made: We use only the forward …

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