Verbmobil Interface Terms (VITs)

Abstract

This article describes the concepts and the contents of Verbmobil Interface Terms (VITs). In VITs all linguistic information of an utterance relevant for translation is represented. They are used to provide an interface representation between several linguistic and dialog components of the Verbmobil system. Information in VITs is encoded in a record-like data structure. The fields are variable-free lists of non-recursive terms, so-called "flat" set representations. They are filled with semantic, scopal, sortal, morpho-syntactic, prosodic, and discourse information. A labelling system is used to relate different kinds of information to each other. A library package realizing an abstract data type implements