The 6th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation will take place in Tokyo, Japan in December 2009. The focus of this year's evaluation campaign will be the translation of task-oriented human dialogs in travel situations. The speech data was recorded through human interpreters, where native speakers of different languages were asked to complete certain travel-related tasks like hotel reservations using their mother-tongue. The translation of the freely-uttered conversation was carried-out by human interpreters. The obtained speech data was annotated with dialog and speaker information. For the Challenge Task, IWSLT participants will have to translate both, the Chinese and English, outputs of the automatic speech recognizers (lattice, N/1BEST) into English and Chinese, respectively.
Like in previous IWSLT events, a standard BTEC Task will be provided. However, the BTEC Task will focus on text input only, i.e. no automatic speech recognizer results (lattice, N/1BEST) have to be translated. In addition to the Arabic-English and Chinese-English translation tasks, this year's evaluation campaign features Turkish as a new input language.
Each participant in the evaluation campaign is requested to submit a paper describing the MT system, the utilized resources, and results using the provided test data. Contrastive run submissions using only the bilingual resources provided by IWSLT as well as investigations in the contribution of each utilized resource are highly appreciated. Moreover, all participants are requested to present their papers at the workshop.
In addition to the evaluation campaign, the IWSLT 2009 workshop also invites scientific paper submissions related to spoken language technologies. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Spoken dialog modeling
- Integration of ASR and MT
- SMT, EBMT, RBMT, Hybrid MT
- MT evaluation
- Language resources for MT
- Open source software for MT
- Pivot-language-based MT
- Task adaptation and portability in MT
