Corpora: ACL-02 Workshop CFP: Speech-to-Speech Translation: Algorithms and Systems

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

                            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 at 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