Dialog Processing

This chapter explains the major functionality of the dialog module in Verbmobil. Dialog knowledge is needed for context sensitive speech translation as well as for the automatic generation of dialog result summaries. Our component produces necessary structures for both purposes and stores them in a centrally accessible data repository — the dialog memory. The structures are based on robustly extracted shallow data which are corrected, extended and structured by our dialog processor. We use time and object completion algorithms to collect context data and compute inter-object relations to infer relevance for summarization. The resulting structures are used by the document generator for dialog minutes and summaries, and by the context evaluation module for translation disambiguation.