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<Paper uid="E95-1026">
  <Title>A Robust and Efficient Three-Layered Dialogue Component for a Speech-to-Speech Translation System*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> VERBMOBIL combines the two key technologies speech processing and machine translation. The long-term goal of this project is the development of a prototype for the translation of spoken dialogues between two persons who want to find a date for a business meeting (for more detail on the objectives of VERBMOBIL see (Wahlster, 1993)). A special characteristic of VERBMOBIL is that both participants are assumed to have at least a passive knowledge of English which is used as intermediate language. Translations are produced on demand so that only parts of the dialogue are processed. If VERBMOBIL is inactive, shallow processing by a keyword spotter takes place which allows the system to follow the dialogue at least partially.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper focus is on the description of the dialogue component, which processes the interaction of the two dialogue partners and builds a representation of the discourse. Dialogue processing in VERBMOBIL differs from systems,like SUNDIAL (Andry, 1992) in two important points: (1) VERBMOBIL mediates the dialogue between two human dialogue participants; the system is not a participant of its own, i.e. it does not control the dialogue as it happens in the flight scheduling scenario of SUNDIAL; (2) VERBMOBIL processes maximally 50% of the dialogue contributions in depth, *The research within VERBMOBIL presented here is funded by the German Ministry of Research and Technology under grant 011V101K/1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> i.e. when the 'owner' of VERBMOBIL speaks German only. The rest of the dialogue can only be followed by a keyword spotter.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In the remainder of this paper first the requirements of the VERBMOBIL setting with respect to functionality and design of the dialogue component section are introduced. Then a hybrid architecture for the dialogue component and its embedding into the VERBMOBIL prototype are discussed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Finally, results from our implemented system are presented. We conclude with an outline of future extensions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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