Verbmobil was a long-term interdisciplinary Language Technology (esp. Machine Translation) research project with the aim to develop a system that can recognize, translate and produce natural utterances and thus "translate spontaneous speech robustly and bidirectionally for German/English and German/Japanese"[1].
Verbmobil research was carried out between 1993 and 2000 and was funded by Germany's Federal Ministry of Research and Technology, the Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie with a total of 116m Deutschmarks (roughly 60m euros), industry partners (such as DaimlerChrysler, Siemens and Philips) contributed an additional 52 million DM (26m euros).
In the Verbmobil II project, Tübingen University created semi-automatically annotated treebanks for German, Japanese and English spontaneous speech. TüBa-D/S[2] contains ca. 38,000 sentences or 360,000 words. TüBa-E/S[3] contains ca. 30,000 sentences or 310,000 words. TüBa-J/S[4] contains ca. 18,000 sentences or 160,000 words.