[ntcir:140] CFP: IWSLT2004: International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

[Noriko Kando <kando@xxxxxxxxx>]

INTERSPEECH/ICSLP-2004 satellite workshop
International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation
- Evaluation Campaign on Spoken Language Translation -

*** Final Call for Participants / Papers ***

September 30 - October 1, 2004
ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories
Kyoto, Japan
http://www.slt.atr.jp/IWSLT2004/


Themes

Spoken language translation technologies attempt to cross the language
barriers between people having different native languages who each want
to engage in conversation by using their mother-tongue. The importance
of these technologies is increasing because there are many more
opportunities for cross-language communication in face-to-face and
telephone conversation, especially in the domain of tourism.

Novel technologies have been proposed to tackle the problems in spoken
language translation research. A number of institutes are developing huge
bilingual or multilingual spoken language corpora. MT technologies based on
machine learning, such as statistical MT and example-based MT, are being
applied to the translation of spoken language by using these corpora. Some
of the characteristics of spoken language seem suitable for the application
of machine-learning-based MT in comparison with written language.
However, there is still no concrete standard methodology for comparing the
translation qualities of spoken language translation systems.

One of the prominent research activities in spoken language translation is
the work being conducted by the Consortium for Speech Translation
Advanced Research (C-STAR III), which is an international partnership of
research laboratories engaged in automatic translation of spoken language.
Current members include ATR (Japan), CAS (China), CLIPS (France), CMU
(USA), ETRI (Korea), ITC-irst (Italy), and UKA (Germany). One of C-STAR's
ongoing projects is the joint development of a speech corpus that handles
a common task in multiple languages. The creation of such a corpus will not
only enable translation among multiple languages but will also facilitate
exchange and discussion of research results among member labs. As a first
result of this activity, a Japanese-English speech corpus comprising
tourism-
related sentences, originally compiled by ATR, has been translated into the
native language of C-STAR members.

In this workshop, an "evaluation campaign" of spoken language translation
technologies will be held by using the multilingual speech corpus
containing
the tourism-related sentences developed by ATR and C-STAR members.
Two types of submissions are invited: 1) participants in the evaluation
campaign
of spoken language translation technologies, and 2) technical papers on
related
issues. An overview of the evaluation campaign is as follows:

Main Theme: Evaluation of spoken language translation systems

Corpus used for the evaluation campaign:
- Basic Travel Expression Corpus (BTEC)
- Languages: Chinese-English, Japanese-English
- Domain: tourism-related sentences
- Media: text in utterance style
- Number of Sentence Pairs: 20,000 for each translation direction

Tracks of the Evaluation Campaign:
- Translation directions:
Chinese to English
Japanese to English
- Resources Used:
Supplied corpus only (C-to-E, J-to-E)
Supplied corpus + additional linguistic resources available from LDC
(C-to-E)
Unrestricted (C-to-E, J-to-E)

Evaluation Methodology of Translated Results
- Subjective Evaluation
- Automatic Evaluation (BLEU, NIST, WER, etc)

The workshop also invites technical papers related to spoken language
translation.
Possible topics for the session include, but are not limited to:

- MT Evaluation Measures
- MT Algorithms
- Word / Phrase Alignment
- Multilingual Lexicon / Translation Rule Extraction
- Multilingual Parsing

Invited Talks [UPDATED!]

Professor Hermann Ney (RWTH, Germany)
Professor Jun'ichi Tsujii (Univ. of Tokyo, Japan)

Important Dates [UPDATED!]

Evaluation Campaign
- Evaluation specifications: February 15, 2004
- Application submission: April 15, 2004
- Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2004
- Sample corpus release: May 7, 2004
- Training corpus release: May 21, 2004
- Test corpus release: August 9, 2004 [changed!]
- Result submission due: August 12, 2004 [changed!]
- Result feedback to participants: September 10, 2004
- Camera-ready submission due: September 17, 2004
- Workshop: September 30 - October 1, 2004

Technical Papers
- Application submission: April 15, 2004
- Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2004 [changed!]
- Camera-ready submission due: September 17, 2004
- Workshop: September 30 - October 1, 2004


Application / Submission Guidelines
See our website: http://www.slt.atr.jp/IWSLT2004/

Organizers
- Seiichi Yamamoto (ATR, Japan; Chair)
- Christian Boitet (CLIPS, France)
- Gianni Lazzari (ITC-irst, Italy)
- Youngjik Lee (ETRI, Korea)
- Alex Waibel (CMU, USA / UKA, Germany)
- Chengqing Zong (CAS, China)

Program Committee
- Marcello Federico (ITC-irst, Italy; Co-chair)
- Hiromi Nakaiwa (ATR, Japan; Co-chair)
- Herve Blanchon (CLIPS, France)
- Key-Sun Choi (KAIST, Korea)
- Casacuberta Francisco (ITI, Spain)
- Sadao Kurohashi (Univ. of Tokyo, Japan)
- Hermann Ney (RWTH, Germany)
- Franz Josef Och (ISI, USA)
- Seung-Shin Oh (ETRI, Korea)
- Michael Paul (ATR, Japan)
- Keh-Yih Su (Behavior Design, Taiwan)
- Alicia Tribble (CMU, USA / UKA, Germany)
- Stephan Vogel (CMU, USA)
- Dekai Wu (HKUST, Hong Kong)
- Bo Xu (CAS, China)
- Chengqing Zong (CAS, China)

Evaluation Committee [UPDATED!]
- Jun'ichi Tsujii (Univ. of Tokyo, Japan; Chair)
- Yasuhiro Akiba (ATR, Japan)
- Marcello Federico (ITC-irst, Italy)
- Noriko Kando (NII, Japan)
- Hiromi Nakaiwa (ATR, Japan)

Local Arrangements
- Eiichiro Sumita (ATR, Japan)

Supporting Organizations
- Acoustic Society of Japan (ASJ)
- Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute International (ATR)
- Asia Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP)
- Asia-Pacific Association of Machine Translation (AAMT)
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
- Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
- Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE)
- International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT)
- International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
- Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI)

Updated information will be on http://www.slt.atr.jp/IWSLT2004/

Contact
Hiromi Nakaiwa
e-mail: hiromi.nakaiwa@xxxxxx
ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories
2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288 Japan

References
- C-STAR, 2003. http://www.c-star.org/
- Takezawa,T. et.al., 2002. Toward a Broad-coverage Bilingual Corpus for
Speech Translation of Travel Conversations in the Real World, LREC.
- Kikui, G. et.al., 2003. Creating Corpora for Speech-to-Speech
Translation,
Eurospeech 2003.

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