Tracking and Understanding Temporal Descriptions in Dialogue

The Verbmobil system provides speech-to-speech translations for appointmentscheduling dialogues, where two partners seek a date that suits both.The `context-evaluation" module of Verbmobil monitors this negotiation bytracking and comparing the temporal descriptions in a two-step manner:first, the temporal expressions of an utterance are mapped to a shallow representationlanguage "ZeitGram"; these terms are then given a semanticinterpretation as "interval descriptions" (IDs). In this...