CALL FOR PAPERS

Speech Translation for Medical and Other Safety-Critical Applications

COLING conference workshop

Manchester, England
Saturday, August 23, 2008

*** Deadline: 5 May ***

http://www.issco.unige.ch/slt4med08/

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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, several advanced prototype systems were
demonstrated, and 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.
For this reason, we are broadening the scope of the second workshop
to include other safety-critical tasks, such as emergency response.

* The technology is mature enough that useful systems can
realistically be field-deployed now or in the very near future.

* Systems targeted on these kinds of applications are often more useful
if they can be made available on mobile or wearable hardware
platforms.

* The basic communication model should be collaborative, and allow the
client users (patients in the case of medical applications) to play
an active role.

Despite this, there is so far little agreement on many central
questions, including choices of architectures, component technologies,
and evaluation methodologies. In this second workshop, we would again
like to create a forum where people interested in these types of
systems can meet, exchange ideas and demo live systems. We hope that
the concrete result of the meeting will be the definition of at least
one shared task for the emerging medical/safety-critical speech
translation community, which will include shared data sets and an
agreed-on evaluation methodology appropriate to the special
characteristics of the domain.

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.

All submissions should use the style files available on the main
COLING conference web site. Author information should be included in
the papers, since reviewing will NOT be blind. The main workshop
page will soon include a link for submissions.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Workshop paper submission deadline 5 May
Notification of acceptance of workshop papers 6 June
Camera-ready copy of papers due 1 July

PROGRAM 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
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
Bowen Zhou IBM, US

QUERIES:

Please address queries to Manny Rayner (Emmanuel.Rayner@issco.unige.ch)
or Pierrette Bouillon (Pierrette.Bouillon@issco.unige.ch)