AMTA 2012 Workshop on Translation and Social Media (TSM 2012)
Call for Papers
November 1st, 2012
San Diego, CA, USA
http://amta2012.amtaweb.org/
--------------- Description ---------------
During the last couple of years, user generated content on the World
Wide Web has increased significantly. Users post status updates,
comments, news and observations on services like Twitter; they
communicate with networks of friends through web pages like Facebook;
and they produce and publish audio and audio-visual content, such as
comments, lectures or entertainment in the form of videos on platforms
such as YouTube, and as Podcasts, e.g., via iTunes.
Nowadays, users do not publish content mainly in English anymore,
instead they publish in a multitude of languages. This means that due
to the language barrier, many users cannot access all available
content. The use of machine and speech translation technology can help
bridge the language barrier in these situations.
However, in order to automatically translate these new domains we
expect several obstacles to be overcome:
- Speech recognition and translation systems need to be able to
rapidly adapt to rapidly changing topics as user generated
content shifts in focus and topic.
- Text and speech in social media will be extremely noisy,
ungrammatical and will not adhere to conventional rules, instead
following its own, continuously changing conventions.
At the same time we expect to discover new possibilities to exploit
social media content for improving speech recognition and translation
systems in an opportunistic way, e.g., by finding and utilizing
parallel corpora in multiple languages addressing the same topics, or
by utilizing additional meta-information available to the content,
such as tags, comments, key-word lists. Also, the network structure in
social media could provide valuable information in translating its
content.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the area
of machine and speech translation in order to discuss the challenges
brought up by the content of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube videos and podcasts.
We expect participants to submit discussion papers that argue for new
research and techniques necessary for dealing with machine and speech
translation in the domain outlined above, as well as papers presenting
results of related and potentially preliminary research that is
breaking new ground.
---------------- Important Dates ---------------
- Full Paper submission deadline: July 31st
- Acceptance/Rejection: August 25th
- Camera Ready Paper: September 7
- Workshop: November 1st
--------------- Organizing Committee ---------------
Chairs: Satoshi Nakamura (NAIST, Japan) and Alex Waibel (KIT, Germany)
Program Chairs: Graham Neubig (NAIST, Japan), Sebastian Stüker (KIT,
Germany), and Joy Ying Zhang (CMU-SV, USA)
Publicity Chair: Margit Rödder (KIT, Germany)