*** Deadline extended: now 15 Mar 2008 ***

Third Workshop on
Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation
(SSST-3)

NAACL HLT 2009 Workshop
5 June 2009, Boulder, Colorado

The Third Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation
(SSST-3) seeks to build on the foundations established in the first two
SSST workshops, which brought together a large number of researchers
working on diverse aspects of synchronous/transduction grammars
(hereafter, S/TGs) 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-based models; using S/TGs for semantics
and generation; syntax-based evaluation of machine translation; and
formal properties of S/TGs. Presentations have led to productive and
thought-provoking discussions, comparing and contrasting different
approaches, and identifying the questions that are most pressing for
future progress in this topic.

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.

We invite papers on:

* syntax-based / tree-structured statistical translation models and
language models
* machine learning techniques for inducing structured translation models
* algorithms for training, decoding, and scoring with S/TGs
* empirical studies on adequacy and efficiency of formalisms
* studies on the usefulness of syntactic resources for translation
* formal properties of S/TGs
* scalability of structured translation methods to small or large data
* applications of S/TGs to related areas including:
o speech translation
o formal semantics and semantic parsing
o paraphrases and textual entailment
o information retrieval and extraction

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


Organizers

* Dekai WU (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
* David CHIANG (USC Information Sciences Institute)


Program Committee

* Srinivas BANGALORE (AT&T Research)
* Liang HUANG (Google)
* Kevin KNIGHT (USC Information Sciences Institute)
* Daniel MARCU (USC Information Sciences Institute)
* Yuji MATSUMOTO (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
* Stefan RIEZLER (Google)
* Giorgio SATTA (Padua)
* Libin SHEN (BBN)
* Christoph TILLMANN (IBM)
* Stephan VOGEL (Carnegie Mellon University)
* Taro WATANABE (NTT)
* Yuk-Wah WONG (Google)
* Richard ZENS (Google)


Important Dates

Submission deadline: 15 Mar 2009
Notification to authors: 30 Mar 2009
Camera copy deadline: 12 Apr 2009


Submission

Papers will be accepted on or before 6 Mar 2009 in PDF or Postscript
formats via the START system at
https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/SSST3/. Submissions should follow
the NAACL HLT 2009 length and formatting requirements for full papers of
eight (8) pages of content with one (1) extra page for references, found
at http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html.


Camera Copy

Camera ready final versions will be accepted on or before 12 Apr 2009 in
PDF or Postscript formats via the START system at
https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/SSST3/. Papers should still follow
the NAACL HLT 2009 length and formatting requirements for full papers,
found at http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html.


Contact

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