Verbmobil From a Software Engineering Point of View: System Design and Software Integration

The distributed research and software development in Verbmobil resulted in an integrated speech-to-speech translation system. The size of the project, the heterogeneous environment at the various development sites and the constraint of software reuse required professional software engineering for successful integration. For this purpose, a software design and integration group was established. This article describes the software engineering strategies applied within Verbmobil. We discuss the prerequisites necessary for successful integration, describe the software framework provided by the system group, show how modules communicate and how integrations were performed. We also discuss design decisions and show that the concepts and the integration framework are not limited to speech-to-speech translation systems, but are also applicable to any large scale distributed software development project.