Clarification dialogues in VERBMOBIL

Clarification Dialogues as Measure to Increase Robustness in a Spoken Dialogue System

A number of methods are implemented in the face-to-face translation system VERBMOBIL to improve its robustness. In this paper, we describe clarification dialogues as one method to deal with incomplete or inconsistent information. Currently, three • types of clarification dialogues are realized: subdialogues concerning phonological ambiguities, unknown words and semantic inconsistencies. For eac...

VERBMOBIL dialogues: multifaced analysis

This paper describes the outline of collecting and transcribing spontaneous spoken dialogues for VERBMOBIL, the German research project on mult ilingual processing of spontaneous speech. The method and conditions of data collection performed using the same scenario and the transliteration convention of spontaneous speech were described. The characteristics of VERBMOBIL corpus were presented in ...

Statistical Translation of Spoken Dialogues in the Verbmobil System

The RWTH System for Statistical Translation of Spoken Dialogues

This paper gives an overview of our work on statistical machine translation of spoken dialogues, in particular in the framework of the Verbmobil project. The goal of the Verbmobil project is the translation of spoken dialogues in the domains of appointment scheduling and travel planning. Starting with the Bayes decision rule as in speech recognition, we show how the required probability distrib...

Commitments to Preferences in Dialogue

We propose a method for modelling how dialogue moves influence and are influenced by the agents’ preferences. We extract constraints on preferences and dependencies among them, even when they are expressed indirectly, by exploiting discourse structure. Our method relies on a study of 20 dialogues chosen at random from the Verbmobil corpus. We then test the algorithms predictions against the jud...