7th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

                             (IWSLT 2010)

                  First Call for Participants / Papers

                          December 2-3, 2010

                             Paris, France

                       http://iwslt2010.fbk.eu

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The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT)

is a yearly scientific workshop, associated with an open evaluation

campaign on spoken language translation, where both scientific papers

and system descriptions are presented. The 7th International Workshop

on Spoken Language Translation will take place in Paris, France

on 2-3 December 2010.

=== Scientific Papers

The IWSLT invites submissions of scientific papers to be published

in the workshop proceedings and presented in dedicated technical sessions

of the workshop, either in oral or poster form. The workshop welcomes high

quality contributions covering theoretical and practical issues in the field

of machine translation (MT), in general, and spoken language translation (SLT),

including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS)

and MT, in particular. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  - Speech and text MT

  - Integration of ASR and MT

  - MT and SLT approaches

  - MT and SLT evaluation

  - Language resources for MT and SLT

  - Open source software for MT and SLT

  - Pivot-language-based MT

  - Adaptation in MT

  - Simultaneous speech translation

  - Efficiency in MT

  - Stream-based algorithms for MT

  - Multilingual ASR and TTS

Submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by three members of the workshop

program committee. Authors of accepted papers are requested to present their

paper at the workshop.

=== Evaluation Campaign

IWSLT evaluations are not organized for the sake of competition, but their goal

is to foster cooperative work and scientific exchange. In this respect, IWSLT

proposes challenging research tasks and an open experimental infrastructure

for the scientific community working on spoken and written language translation.

This year, the IWSLT evaluation campaign will offer three tasks:

  - public speeches (TALK) on a variety of topics, from English to French (NEW CHALLENGE),

  - spoken dialogues (DIALOG) in travel situations, between Chinese and English,

  - traveling expressions (BTEC), from Arabic, Turkish, and French to English.

For each task, monolingual and bilingual language resources will be provided to

participants in order to train their translation systems, as well as sets of manual

and automatic speech transcripts (with n-best and lattices) and reference translations,

allowing researchers working only on written language translation to also participate.

Moreover, blind test sets will be released and all translation outputs produced

by the participants will be evaluated using several automatic translation quality

metrics. Human assessment will be carried out for the translation of spoken dialogues

and basic travel expressions.

The goal of this year's new challenge (translation of public speeches) will be

to establish reference baselines and appropriate evaluation protocols for future

evaluations. As a consequence, although an evaluation server will be set-up to compute

several translation accuracy metrics, there will be no official ranking of participants

published by the organizers for this task.

Each participant in the evaluation campaign is requested to submit a paper describing

the MT system, the utilized resources, and results using the provided test data.

Contrastive run submissions using only the bilingual resources provided by IWSLT

as well as investigations of the contribution of each utilized resource are highly

appreciated. Results feedback will be provided by the organizers a few days after

the run submissions. Finally, all participants are requested to present their papers

describing their MT systems at the workshop.

=== Important Dates

Evaluation Campaign:

  - Training corpus release           28 May 2010

  - Test corpus release                       23 August 2010

  - Run submissions due (DIALOG, BTEC)        6 September 2010

  - Run submissions due (TALK)        30 September 2010

  - MT system description due         14 October 2010

  - Notification of acceptance        29 October 2010

  - Camera-ready paper due            10 November 2010

Scientific Papers:

  - Paper submission due              4 September 2010

  - Notification of acceptance        16 October 2010

  - Camera-ready paper due            10 November 2010

=== Organizers

IWSLT Steering Committee:

  - Alex Waibel (CMU, USA / Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany)

  - Marcello Federico (FBK-irst, Italy)

  - Satoshi Nakamura (NICT, Japan)

Chairs:

  * Workshop:

    - Alex Waibel (CMU, USA / KIT, Germany)

    - Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, France)

  * Evaluation Committee:

    - Michael Paul (NICT, Japan)

    - Marcello Federico (FBK-irst, Italy)

  * Program Committee:

    - Ian Lane (CMU, USA)

    - François Yvon (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11, France)

Local Organizing Committee:

  - Martine Garnier-Rizet (IMMI, Chair)

  - Lynn Barreteau (IMMI)

  - Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI)

  - Aurélien Max (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11)

  - Guillaume Wisniewski (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11)

Program Committee:

  - Alexandre Allauzen (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11, France)

  - Laurent Besacier (LIG, France)

  - Arianna Bisazza (FBK-irst, Italy)

  - Francisco Casacuberta (ITI-UPV, Spain)

  - Boxing Chen (NRC, Canada)

  - Mehmet Uğur Doğan (Tubitak-Uekae, Turkey)

  - Matthias Eck (Mobile Technologies, USA)

  - Philipp Koehn (Univ. Edinburgh, UK)

  - Philippe Langlais (Univ. Montreal, Canada)

  - Geunbae Lee (Postech, Korea)

  - Yves Lepage (GREYC, France)

  - Haizhou Li (I2R, Singapore)

  - José B. Mariño (TALP-UPC, Spain)

  - Coskun Mermer (Tubitak-Uekae, Turkey)

  - Hermann Ney (RWTH, Germany)

  - Hwee Tou Ng (NUS, Singapore)

  - Matthias Paulik (CMU, USA)

  - Holger Schwenk (LIUM, France)

  - Wade Shen (MIT-LL, USA)

  - Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany)

  - Eiichiro Sumita (NICT, Japan)

  - Hajime Tsukada (NTT, Japan)

  - Haifeng Wang (Baidu, China)

  - Andy Way (DCU, Ireland)

  - Joy Zhang (CMU, USA)

  - Chengqing Zong (CASIA, China)

For all information, please visit the IWSLT 2010 Web site: http://iwslt2010.fbk.eu