The Verbmobil System currently under development in Germany would input speech in a source language dialogue, translate it, and output synthesized speech in a target language, all in real time under the conditions of face-to-face dialogue. This preliminary study is an assessment of the state of the art of the speech recognition and machine translation fields, and a frank discussion of the challenges the developers of such a system face. A speech-based machine translation system in effect combines all the technical problems of understanding and generation systems and adds the very special...

In this international collection of papers there is a wealth of knowledge on artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science (CS) techniques applied to the problem of providing help systems mainly for the UNIX operating system. The research described here involves the representation of technical computer concepts, but also the representation of how users conceptualise such concepts. The collection looks at computational models and systems such as UC, Yucca, and OSCON programmed in languages such as Lisp, Prolog, OPS-5, and C which have been developed to provide UNIX help. These...