SSST-2 2008

ACL-08:HLT Second Workshop on        SYNTAX AND STRUCTURE IN STATISTICAL TRANSLATION (SSST-2)

June 2008, Columbus, Ohio

The Second Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST-2) seeks to build on the foundations established in the first SSST which was held as an AMTA-sponsored workshop at NAACL-HLT 2007. SSST-1 brought together a large number of researchers working on diverse aspects of synchronous/transduction grammars (hereafter, S/TGs) in relation to statistical machine translation. Its program comprised high-quality papers discussing current work spanning topics including: new grammatical models of translation; discriminative training of syntax-based models; using S/TGs for semantics and generation; syntax-based evaluation of machine translation; and formal properties of S/TGs.

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 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, and recent years have seen significant progress on many fronts.

SSST-2 seeks to bring together researchers in these diverse areas, providing a forum for discussing recent results, comparing and contrasting different approaches, and identifying the questions that are most pressing for future progress in this field. 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

For more information: http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai/ssst/

SUBMISSION

Papers will be accepted on or before 17 Mar 2008 in PDF or Postscript formats via the START system at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS03/. Submissions should follow the ACL-08: HLT formatting requirements, found at http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 17 Mar 2008 Notification to authors: 7 Apr 2008 Camera-ready copy deadline: 21 Apr 2008

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) Pascale FUNG (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) Daniel GILDEA (University of Rochester) Kevin KNIGHT (USC Information Sciences Institute) Jonas KUHN (Potsdam) Yang LIU (ICT) Daniel MARCU (USC Information Sciences Institute) Yuji MATSUMOTO (Nara Institute of Science and Technology) Hermann NEY (RWTH Aachen) Owen RAMBOW (Columbia University) Philip RESNIK (University of Maryland) Stefan RIEZLER (Google) Libin SHEN (BBN) Christoph TILLMANN (IBM) Stephan VOGEL (Carnegie Mellon University) Taro WATANABE (NTT) Andy WAY (Dublin City University) Yuk-Wah WONG (Google) Richard ZENS (Google)

CONTACT Please send inquiries to ssst@cs.ust.hk.

Last updated: 2008.02.01 This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP