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<Paper uid="A97-1007">
  <Title>Insights into the Dialogue Processing of VERBMOBIL</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The imPlemented research prototype of the speech-to-speech translation system VEaBMOBIL (Wahlster, 1993; Bub and Schwinn, 1996) consists of more than 40 modules for both speech and linguistic processing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The central storage for dialogue information within the overall system is the dialogue module that exchanges data with 15 of the other modules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Basic notions within VERBMOBIL are tu~8 and utterances. A turn is defined as one contribution of a dialogue participant. Each turn divides into utterances that sometimes resemble clauses as defined in a traditional grammar. However, since we deal exclusively with spoken, unconstrained contributions, utterances are sometimes just pieces of linguistic material. null For the dialogue module, the most important dialogue related information extracted for each utterance is the so called dialogue act (Jekat et al., 1995). Some dialogue acts describe solely the illocutionary force, while other more domain specific ones describe additionally aspects of the propositional content of an utterance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Prior to the selection of the dialogue acts, we analyzed dialogues from VERBMOBIL'S corpus of spoken and transliterated scheduling dialogues. More than 500 of them have been annotated with dialogue related information and serve as the empirical foundation of our work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Throughout this paper we will refer to the example dialogue partly shown in figure 1. The translations are as the deep processing line of VERBMOBIL provides them. We also annotated the utterances with the dialogue acts as determined by the semantic evaluation module. ' '//' ' shows where utterance boundaries were determined.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> We start with a brief introduction to dialogue processing in the VERBMOBIL setting. Section 3 introduces the basic data structures followed by two sections describing some of the tasks which are carried out within the dialogue module. Before the concluding remarks in section 8, we discuss aspects of robustness and compare our approach to other systems. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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