Dear ISCA Members:

The ISCA Archive now contains another series of
ISCA-supported workshops: IWSLT 2004 through IWSLT 2011.

The IWSLT series (International Workshop for Spoken
Language Translation), an annual workshop since 2004, covers
the field of speech-to-speech translation. Each workshop is
accompanied by an evaluation campaign.

The workshop series was initiated 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' (Introduction to the 2004
workshop) and its successor consortia. Consequently, the evaluation campaigns
'are organized in the manner of coopetition. While participants compete
for achieving the best result in the evaluation, they come together
afterwards and discuss and share their techniques that they
used in their systems. In this respect, IWSLT proposes challenging
research tasks and an open experimental infrastructure for the scientific
community working on spoken and written language translation.'
(Foreword to IWSLT 2011).

'The contributions cover 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:
▪ 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
▪ Adaptation in MT
▪ Simultaneous speech translation
▪ Speech translation of lectures
▪ Efficiency in MT
▪ Stream-based algorithms for MT
▪ Multilingual ASR and TTS
▪ Rich transcription of speech for MT
▪ Translation of non-verbal events'
(Foreword to IWSLT 2011).

The papers (and presentations) that have been freely accessible
in the web at the various labs where the workshops took
place, are now together in the ISCA Archive as well.

Great thanks to Joseph Mariani (LIMSI, France), Michael Paul (ATR, Japan),
and Alex Waibel (KIT, Germany, and CMU, USA)
for giving permission to reprint this workshop series in the
ISCA Archives and for making this possible.

Enjoy the Archive!
Wolfgang Hess, ISCA Archive Coordinator
February 2012