Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST)
NAACL-HLT 2007 /
AMTA Workshop
26 April 2007, Rochester, New York
The need for structural mappings between languages is widely recognized in the fields of statistical machine translation and spoken language translation, and there is a growing consensus that these mappings are appropriately represented using a family of formalisms that includes synchronous/transduction grammars (hereafter, S/TGs) and their tree-transducer equivalents. To date, flat-structured models, such as the word-based IBM models of the early 1990s or the more recent phrase-based models, remain widely used. But tree-structured mappings arguably offer a much greater potential for learning valid generalizations about relationships between languages.
Within this area of research there is a rich diversity of approaches. There is active research ranging from formal properties of S/TGs to large-scale end-to-end systems. There are approaches that make heavy use of linguistic theory, and approaches that use little or none. There is theoretical work characterizing the expressiveness and complexity of particular formalisms, as well as empirical work assessing their modeling accuracy and descriptive adequacy across various language pairs. There is work being done to invent better translation models, and work to design better algorithms. Recent years have seen significant progress on all these fronts. In particular, systems based on these formalisms are now top contenders in MT evaluations.
In response to this bustling new situation, the workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST) seeks to bring together researchers working on diverse aspects of synchronous/transduction grammars in relation to statistical machine translation, to discuss current work, compare and contrast different approaches, and identify the questions that are most pressing for future progress in this topic.
We invite papers on:
- syntax-based / tree-structured statistical translation models and language models
- machine learning techniques for inducing structured translation models
- algorithms for training, decoding, and scoring with S/TGs
- empirical studies on adequacy and efficiency of formalisms
- studies on the usefulness of syntactic resources for translation
- formal properties of S/TGs
- scalability of structured translation methods to small or large data
- applications of S/TGs to related areas including:
- speech translation
- formal semantics and semantic parsing
- paraphrases and textual entailment
- information retrieval and extraction
Student Scholarships
The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is graciously offering two $500 scholarships to help students to participate at SSST. If you are a student or know of a student who would like to be able to attend, please contact us for more information. Please note that recipients of the scholarship must be members of AMTA.
Papers/Slides
Organizers
- Dekai WU (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
- David CHIANG (USC Information Sciences Institute)
Program Committee
- Srinivas BANGALORE (AT&T Research)
- Marine CARPUAT (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
- Daniel GILDEA (University of Rochester)
- Kevin KNIGHT (USC Information Sciences Institute)
- Daniel MARCU (USC Information Sciences Institute)
- Hermann NEY (RWTH Aachen)
- Owen RAMBOW (Columbia University)
- Philip RESNIK (University of Maryland)
- Giorgio SATTA (University of Padua)
- Stuart SHIEBER (Harvard University)
- Christoph TILLMANN (IBM)
- Enrique VIDAL (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
- Stephan VOGEL (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Andy WAY (Dublin City University)
- Taro WATANABE (NTT)
- Richard ZENS (RWTH Aachen)
Important Dates
Submission deadline: 1 Feb 2007
Notification to authors: 22 Feb 2007
Camera copy deadline: 1 Mar 2007
Camera Copy
Camera ready final versions will be accepted on or before 1 March 2007 in PDF or Postscript formats via the START system at http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsSSST/final.html. Papers should still follow the NAACL-HLT formatting requirements, found at http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/styles/.
Submission
Papers will be accepted on or before 1 Feb 2007 in PDF or Postscript formats via the START system at http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsSSST/. Submissions should follow the NAACL-HLT formatting requirements, found at http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/styles/.
Contact
Please send inquiries to ssst@cs.ust.hk.
Last updated: 2007.03.26