Multilingual generation for translation in speech-to-speech dialogues and its realization in verbmobil

This paper presents the generation module of the speech-to-speech dialogue translation system Verbmobil. Spontaneous speech, large multilingual vocabulary, difficulty of the translation task, robustness and real-time constraints make the design of such a module very challenging. In order to overcome these difficulties, we have developed a system based on a general kernel and the declarativity of the knowledge sources. This fully implemented system proves the practical relevance of several techniques such as constraint-solving for the microplanning task or HPSG-to-TAG compilation for syntactic realization. In addition to the successful deployment of our module into the Verbmobil system, the kernel has been adapted to other domains and tasks.