TSM 2012 - AMTA Workshop on Translation and Social Media (TSM 2012)

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Nowadays, users do not publish content mainly in English anymore, instead they publish in a multitude of languages.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)
Alex Waibel (KIT, Germany)
Program Chairs
Graham Neubig (NAIST, Japan)
Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany)
Joy Ying Zhang (CMU-SV, USA)
Publicity Chair
Margit Rödder (KIT, Germany)
Please click on the links above for details of each workshop, including contact names and deadlines. We are looking forward to your submissions.
http://amta2012.amtaweb.org/workshops.aspx
Alain Désilets
AMTA-2012 Workshops Chair
alain.desilets-AT-nrc-cnrc.gc.ca