ACL-02 Workshop on
Speech-to-Speech Translation: Algorithms and Systems
July 11 2002
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
A workshop held as part of the
Association for Computational Linguistics 40th anniversary meeting
ACL-02 (http://www.acl02.org)
Hosted by The Computer and Information Science Department and the
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
July 7-12 2002
CALL FOR PAPERS
DESCRIPTION:
Facilitation of speech communication across language barriers is a
critical problem to solve for a global economy to thrive. Robust
systems for speech-to-speech translation (S2S) are clearly necessary to
move us towards achieving this goal. However, construction of such
systems is clearly extremely complex, involving research in Automatic
Speech Recognition(ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Machine Translation (MT),
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Generation (NLG). Although
substantial progress in each of these components individually has
been made over the last two decades, simply integrating individual
ASR, NLU, MT, NLG, and TTS components to produce S2S systems is not
sufficient to produce acceptable results. For example, conventional
text-based MT systems have not been designed to cope with the imperfect
syntax and transcription errors which characterize automatically transcribed
conversational speech. Traditional speech recognizers (ASR component) and
speech synthesizers (TTS component) have not been designed to recognize
or synthesize speakers' emotional expressions which convey meanings and
play an important role in the communications between human beings.
Therefore, speech-to-speech translation raises a whole new set of
algorithmic challenges over and above those associated with the individual
underlying technologies themselves.
We would like to bring together various researchers in the field together
to present the current state-of-the-art on speech-to-speech translation
and discuss the challenges involved in building a functioning
high performance system. We hope to hear about different approaches to the
S2S realization and exchange ideas about the advantages and disadvantages
of various approaches. The workshop will specifically focus on
natural language processing problems which are unique and critical to
producing robust speech-to-speech translation systems and components.
We solicit submissions to the workshop in the following areas, however
any other topic related to the speech-to-speech translation is also
acceptable:
Machine Translation:
- Algorithms for machine translation applicable to S2S
- Algorithms and systems for application specific and limited dom
ain
machine translation
- Rule-based MT, statistical MT, template-based MT, interlingua-b
ased
MT
Speech recognition and TTS:
- Enhancing the performance of ASR in S2S using natural language
processing techniques
- TTS modules with highly naturalness and emotional expressions
- Robust speech recognition algorithms for S2S
- Challenges for extracting and conveying stress, prosody and emo
tions
in speech across languages
NLP:
- Natural language processing algorithms for S2S
- Natural language generation from meaning representations
Language:
- Challenges for speech-to-speech translation across languages du
e to
language characteristics, and suggestion of solutions
- Challenges for conveying stress, prosody and emotions in speech
across languages
System architecture and software integration
- Component architecture and design of modular S2S systems
- Portability of S2S systems to different languages and domains
- Implementation issues for robust and limited resource S2S
systems
Multilingual Data Collection and System Evaluation:
- Evaluation metrics of spoken language translation quality
- Language resources and knowledge acquisition
SUBMISSIONS:
We invite paper submissions from all researchers in the area of
S2S translation, natural language processing, linguistics, and all
related topics. All submissions will be reviewed by an international
program committee. If sufficiently many high-quality papers are submitted, we
will consider publishing selected papers in an edited volume.
Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings
and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We recommend
the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files available
at:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style/.
Deadline for paper submissions is March 15, 2002. Papers in pdf format
must be submitted electronically to: yuqing@us.ibm.com.
WORKSHOPS REGISTRATION FEES:
The duration of the workshop is one full day. Only ACL-02 conference
participants are allowed to register for the workshop. The registration
fee is going to be set by the ACL-02 organizing committee. The Proceedings
of the Workshop will be published by the ACL-02 organizing committee.
IMPORTANT DATES:
March 15, 2002: Deadline for workshop paper submissions
April 19, 2002: Notification of acceptance to authors
May 17, 2002: Deadline for camera-ready final version copies
July 11, 2002: S2S workshop in ACL-02 in Philadelphia
ORGANIZERS:
Yuqing Gao (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center)
Alex Waibel (Carneggie Mellon University)
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Yuqing Gao, Project Lead, Speech-to-Speech Translation Research, IBM T.
J. Watson Research Center
Alex Waibel, Professor & Director, Interactive Systems Lab, Carnegie
Mellon University (USA) & University Karlsruhe (Germany)
Hakan Erdogan, Speech-to-Speech Translation Research, IBM T. J. Watson
Research Center
Michael Picheny, Manager, Speech Recognition Research, IBM T. J. Watson
Research Center
Seiichi Yamamoto, Director, ATR Spoken Language Translation Research
Laboratories (Japan)
Gianni Lazzari, Vice Director of ITC-irst (Italy)
Taiyi Huang, Professor, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of
Sciences
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