[Corpora-List] CFP SSST-6: Sixth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation (ACL 2012)

Tue Mar 13 19:40:45 UTC 2012

SSST-6: Sixth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation
ACL 2012 / SIGMT / SIGLEX Workshop 12 July 2012, Jeju, Republic of Korea

*** New submission deadline: 15 Apr 2012 *** 
*** Special theme: Semantic MT Evaluation ***

The Sixth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical
Translation (SSST-6) seeks to build on the foundations established in
the first five SSST workshops, which brought together a large number
of researchers working on diverse aspects of structure, semantics and
representation in relation to statistical machine translation. Its
program each year has comprised high-quality papers discussing current
work spanning topics including: new grammatical models of translation;
new learning methods for syntax- and semantics-based models; formal
properties of synchronous/transduction grammars (hereafter S/TGs);
discriminative training of models incorporating linguistic features;
using S/TGs for semantics and generation; and syntax- and
semantics-based evaluation of machine translation.

The need for structural mappings between languages is widely
recognized in the fields of statistical machine translation and spoken
language translation, and there is a growing consensus that these
mappings are appropriately represented using a family of formalisms
that includes synchronous/transduction grammars and their
tree-transducer equivalents. To date, flat-structured models, such as
the word-based IBM models of the early 1990s or the more recent
phrase-based models, remain widely used. But tree-structured mappings
arguably offer a much greater potential for learning valid
generalizations about relationships between languages.

Within this area of research there is a rich diversity of approaches.
There is active research ranging from formal properties of S/TGs to
large-scale end-to-end systems. There are approaches that make heavy
use of linguistic theory, and approaches that use little or none.
There is theoretical work characterizing the expressiveness and
complexity of particular formalisms, as well as empirical work
assessing their modeling accuracy and descriptive adequacy across
various language pairs. There is work being done to invent better
translation models, and work to design better algorithms. Recent years
have seen significant progress on all these fronts. In particular,
systems based on these formalisms are now top contenders in MT
evaluations.

At the same time, SMT has seen a movement toward semantics over the
past few years, which has been reflected at recent SSST workshops,
including the last edition which had semantics for SMT as a special
theme.  The issues of deep syntax and shallow semantics are closely
linked and SSST-6 encourages submissions on semantics for MT in a
number of directions, including semantic role labeling (SRL) for SMT,
WSD for SMT and in particular, semantics for MT evaluation.  In order
to emphasize the need to evaluate MT in a way that properly assesses
preservation of structure and semantics, SSST-6 is highlighting
Semantic MT Evaluation as a special workshop theme.

We invite papers on:

* syntactically- and semantically-motivated evaluation of MT
* syntax-based / semantics-based / tree-structured SMT
* machine learning techniques for inducing structured translation models
* algorithms for training, decoding, and scoring with semantic
representation structure
* empirical studies on adequacy and efficiency of formalisms
* creation and usefulness of syntactic/semantic resources for MT
* formal properties of synchronous/transduction grammars
* learning semantic information from monolingual, parallel or comparable corpora
* unsupervised and semi-supervised word sense induction and
disambiguation methods for MT
* lexical substitution, word sense induction and
disambiguation,semantic role labeling, textual entailment, paraphrase
and other semantic tasks for MT
* semantic features for MT models (word alignment, translation
lexicons, language models, etc.)
* evaluation of syntactic/semantic components within MT (task-based evaluation)
* scalability of structured translation methods to small or large data
 * applications of synchronous/transduction grammars to areas
including: speech translation, formal semantics and semantic parsing,
paraphrases and textual entailment, information retrieval and
extraction,  etc.

For more information: http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai/ssst/

SPECIAL THEME: SEMANTIC MT  EVALUATION

Ongoing work suggests that MT evaluation is improved by generalizing
across similar word meanings (Zhou et al., 2006; Apidianaki et al,
2009; Snover et al., 2009; Denkowski and Lavie, 2010), and explicitly
modeling preservation of meaning with textual entailment (Padó et al.
2009), or semantic frames (Lo and Wu, 2011).  However, crucial
questions such as what frameworks are best suited to measure MT
quality in general, and the impact of semantic modeling in MT
evaluation remain unanswered. With this year's special theme, we seek
to bring together researchers working on semantics and on translation
evaluation in order to encourage cross-pollination of ideas, share
insights into the needs of MT evaluation and what current developments
in semantics have to offer. We particularly encourage the submission
of papers addressing the following issues related to semantics-driven
evaluation of MT:

 * MT evaluation  metrics generalizing across similar word meanings
 * MT evaluation  metrics explicitly modeling preservation of meaning
via textual entailment, semantic frames, etc
 * New frameworks to measure MT quality using semantic information,
including machine learning approaches
 * Evaluation of the impact of semantic modeling on MT evaluation
 * Use of semantic information for quality/confidence estimation (MT
evaluation without reference translations)

ORGANIZERS

Marine CARPUAT, National Research Council Canada
Lucia SPECIA, University of Sheffield
Dekai WU, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline:  15 Apr 2012
Notification to authors:  4 May 2012
Camera copy deadline:  11 Apr 2012

SUBMISSION

Papers will be accepted on or before 2 Apr 2012 in PDF or Postscript
formats via the START system:
https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/ssst-6/. Submissions should follow
the ACL 2012 length and formatting requirements for long papers of
eight (8) pages of content with two (2) additional pages of
references, found at http://www.acl2012.org/call/sub01.asp

CONTACT

Please send inquiries to ssst at cs.ust.hk.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Marianna Apidianaki, LIMSI-CNRS
Wilker Aziz, University of Wolverhampton
Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Research
David Chiang, USC ISI
Colin Cherry, National Research Council Canada
Mona Diab, Columbia University
Alexander Fraser, University of Stuttgart
Daniel Gildea, University of Rochester
Nizar Habash, Columbia University
Yifan He, Dublin City University
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh
Kevin Knight, USC ISI
Alon Lavie, CMU
Yanjun Ma, Baidu
Daniel Marcu, USC ISI and Language Weaver
Lluìs Màrquez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Sudip Kumar Naskar, Dublin City University
Hwee-Tou Ng, National University of Singapore
Daniele Pighin, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Markus Saers, HKUST
Libin Shen, IBM Research
Matthew Snover, BBN
John Tinsley, Dublin City University
Stephan Vogel, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Taro Watanabe, NICT
Deyi Xiong, National University of Singapore
François Yvon, Université Paris Sud 11

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