Compositional semantics in Verbmobil

Abstract

The paper discusses how compositional semantics is implemented in the Verbmobil speech-to-speech translation system using LUD, a description language for underspecified discourse representation structures. The description language and its formal interpretation in DRT are described as well as its implementation together with the architecture of the system´s entire syntactic-semantic processing module. We show that a linguistically sound theory and formalism can be properly implemented in a system with (near) real-time requirements.