Coling 2008
Workshop on
Speech Processing for Safety Critical Translation and Pervasive Applications

Manchester, Saturday 23 August, 2008

In connection with Coling 2008, the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Programme including demo session now available

Call for Papers

Two ideas currently gaining popularity in spoken dialogue construction are safety critical translation and pervasive speech-enabled applications. Safety critical, and in particular, medical, applications have emerged as one of the most popular domains for speech translation. At the first workshop on medical speech translation, held at HLT 2006, a measure of consensus emerged on at least some points. The key issue that differentiates the medical domain from most other application areas for speech translation is its safety-critical nature; systems can realistically be field- deployed now or in the very near future; the basic communication model should be collaborative, and allow the client users to play an active role; and medical systems are often most useful when deployed on mobile devices. This last point offers a natural link to pervasive computing applications, where spoken language technologies provide an effective and natural interface for mobile devices in situations where traditional modes of communication are less appropriate.

However, there is so far little agreement on many central questions, including choices of architectures, component technologies, and evaluation methodologies. In this workshop we hope that people interested in these types of application will meet, exchange ideas and demo live systems.

Submission

Submissions may be of the following kinds:

Long papers (up to 8 pages) describing substantial work on speech translation for medical and other safety-critical applications. We particularly encourage papers describing user-centered system evaluations.
System demonstrations, accompanied by short papers (up to 4 pages). Submission of a long paper does NOT preclude submission of an accompanying demo paper.
Short papers (up to 4 pages) describing component systems, including ASR, MT and TTS, which are particularly relevant to medical and safety critical speech translation.
Position statements (up to 4 pages) suggesting definitions of a shared task.

Papers should be submitted via the START submission web page. All submissions should use the same style and format as for the main conference. Style files can be downloaded from the Coling 2008 style guidelines page. Author information should be included in the papers, since reviewing will NOT be blind.

Workshop Programme

Saturday, August 23, 2008
9:30–9:40	Opening Remarks
	Session 1: Architectures for Speech Translation
09:40–10:05	Mitigation of Data Sparsity in Classifier-Based Translation Emil Ettelaie, Panayiotis G. Georgiou and Shrikanth S. Narayanan
10:05–10:30	Speech Translation with Grammatical Framework Björn Bringert
10:30–11:00	Break
	Session 2: Pervasive Speech Applications
11:00–11:25	An Integrated Dialog Simulation Technique for Evaluating Spoken Dialog Systems Sangkeun Jung, Cheongjae Lee, Kyungduk Kim and Gary Geunbae Lee
11:25–11:50	Economical Global Access to a VoiceXML Gateway Using Open Source Technologies Kulwinder Singh and Dong-Won Park
11:50–12:15	Interoperability and Knowledge Representation in Distributed Health and Fitness Companion Dialogue System Jaakko Hakulinen and Markku Turunen
12:30–14:00	Lunch
	Session 3: Speech Translation Demos
14:00–15:30	The 2008 MedSLT System Manny Rayner, Pierrette Bouillon, Jane Brotanek, Glenn Flores, Sonia Halimi, Beth Ann Hockey, Hitoshi Isahara, Kyoko Kanzaki, Elisabeth Kron, Yukie Nakao, Marianne Santaholma, Marianne Starlander and Nikos Tsourakis
14:00–15:30	Language Understanding in Maryland Virtual Patient Sergei Nirenburg, Stephen Beale, Marjorie McShane, Bruce Jarrell and George Fantry
14:00–15:30	Rapid Portability among Domains in an Interactive Spoken Language Translation System Mark Seligman and Mike Dillinger
15:30–16:00	Break
	Session 4: Speech Translation Systems
16:00–16:25	Speech Translation for Triage of Emergency Phonecalls in Minority Languages Udhyakumar Nallasamy, Alan Black, Tanja Schultz, Robert Frederking and Jerry Weltman
16:25–16:50	Speech to Speech Translation for Nurse Patient Interaction Farzad Ehsani, Jim Kimzey, Elaine Zuber, Demitrios Master and Karen Sudre
	Session 5: A Shared Task for Medical Speech Translation?
16:50–17:05	A Small-Vocabulary Shared Task for Medical Speech Translation Manny Rayner, Pierrette Bouillon, Glenn Flores, Farzad Ehsani, Marianne Starlander, Beth Ann Hockey, Jane Brotanek and Lukas Biewald
17:05–close	Panel Discussion

Calendar

Workshop

23 August

Programme committee

Laurent Besacier - U Grenoble, France
Pierrette Bouillon (co-chair) - U Geneva, Switzerland
Mike Dillinger - SpokenTranslation, US
Farzad Ehsani (co-chair) - Fluential, US
Glenn Flores - U Texas, US
Robert Frederking (co-chair) - CMU, US
Hitoshi Isahara - NICT, Japan
Michael McTear (co-chair) - U Ulster, Northern Ireland
Shri Narayanan - USC, US
Aarne Ranta - U Gothenburg, Sweden
Manny Rayner (co-chair) - U Geneva, Switzerland
Tanja Schultz - U Karlsruhe, Germany
Harold Somers - U Manchester, UK, and Dublin City U, Ireland
Bowen Zhou - IBM, US

Last updated: Mon Jul 07, 2008