Metaglossia: The Translation World

Voice-recognition technology has made significant progress of late, becoming a popular feature of smartphones, automotive navigation and entertainment systems. While a panel of Silicon Valley tech experts says it still has its glitches, it can eventually improve to where talking to a machine is like talking to a person.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — If speech-recognition technology were a human, it would be like a 5- or 6-year-old child. At the age of 1, you can speak to a child, but you have to speak slowly and simply using small words. By 5 or 6, it starts to better understand your words and, more importantly, your meaning.

The comparison of computer speech development to human speech development came up during a panel discussion Aug. 20 at a forum hosted by the Churchill Club of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, Calif. Representatives of a speech-recognition software company, an automaker and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak discussed where speech recognition has been and where it’s going.

Speech is becoming the new computer user interface, said Quentin Hardy, deputy technology editor of The New York Times and moderator of the panel, continuing a long line of UI evolution from the punch card and the command line interface to the mouse and the touch-screen.

With each advance, the interaction shifts became less machine and more human. When we want to get someone’s attention, we tap them on the shoulder like we tap on a screen, said Wozniak, and when we want to talk to someone, we speak.

IWSLT2012: The 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

Submitted by Taro Watanabe on 6 August 2012 - 12:23am
Abbreviated Title: IWSLT2012
Call for Papers
Submission Deadline: 7 Sep 2012
Event Dates: 6 Dec 2012 - 7 Dec 2012
City: Hong Kong
Country: China
Contact: Chengqing Zong
Chiori Hori
Contact Email: cqzong@nlpr.ia.ac.cn
chiori.hori@nict.go.jp
Website: http://iwslt2012.org
Call for papers for IWLST2012
http://iwslt2012.org

The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) is a yearly scientific workshop, associated with an open evaluation campaign on spoken language translation, where both scientific papers and system descriptions are presented. The 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation will take place in Hong Kong on December 6-7, 2012.

The IWSLT invites submissions of scientific papers to be published in the workshop proceedings and presented in dedicated technical sessions of the workshop, either in oral or poster form. The workshop welcomes high quality contributions covering theoretical and practical issues in the fields of automatic speech recognition and machine translation, that are applied to spoken language translation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Speech and text MT
• Integration of ASR and MT
• MT and SLT approaches
• MT and SLT evaluation
• Language resources for MT and SLT
• Open source software for MT and SLT
• Adaptation in MT
• Simultaneous speech translation
• Speech translation of lectures
• Efficiency in MT
• Stream-based algorithms for MT
• Multilingual ASR and TTS
• Rich transcription of speech for MT
• Translation of on-verbal events