Research on Architectures for Integrated Speech/Language Systems in Verbmobil

The German joint research project Verbmobil (VM) aims at the development of a speech to speech translation system. This paper reports on research done in our group which belongs to Verbmobil's subproject on system architectures (TP15). Our specific research areas are the construction of parsers for spontaneous speech, investigations in the parallelization of parsing and to contribute to the development of a flexible communication architecture with distributed control.Comment: 6 pages, 2 Postscript figure

Anytime algorithms for speech parsing?

This paper discusses to which extent the concept of "anytime algorithms" can be applied [o parsing algo- rithms wih featnre unification. We tirst try to giw more precise definition of what an anytime Mgori[hnt is. We arque that parsing algorithms have to be classifted as contract algorithms as opposed te, rruptible algorithms. With the res[ricLio, that the transaction being active at the time sued has to be coraltiered belbrc the interrupt can l>e executed, it is possible to provide a parser with limited anytime behavior, which is in fact being realized in ore' research prototype

An Anytime Protocol for Speech Parsing

This paper presents a protocol that allows for the easy implementation of "anytime algorithms". After giving a more precise definition of what an anytime algorithm is, we shortly discuss how anytime algorithms can be applied to parsing algorithms with feature unification. 1 Introduction The idea of "anytime algorithms", which has been around in the field of planning for some time, has recently been suggested for application in natural language and speech processing (NL/SP). An anytime algorithm is an algorithm "whose quality of results degrades gracefully as computation time decreases" [Russell and Zilberstein 1991, p. 212]. In the following we will first give a more specific definition of which properties allow an algorithm to be implemented and used as an anytime algorithm. After shortly discussing its application to speech parsing we present the protocol. The APC protocol was developed in the framework of the Verbmobil joint research project 1 , where we are working on the imple..