Full Title: Speech Translation for Medical Applications
Short Title: SLT4MED08

Date: 23-Aug-2008 - 23-Aug-2008
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Manny Rayner
Meeting Email: Emmanuel.Rayner@issco.unige.ch
Web Site: http://www.issco.unige.ch/slt4med08/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

Call Deadline: 05-May-2008

Meeting Description:

Speech Translation for Medical and Other Safety-Critical Applications

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/

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)