The 2nd Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation

Challenges, Recent Advances, and Future Directions

Workshop at NAACL 2021, Mexico City, June 10, 2021
Contact: autosimtrans.workshop@gmail.com or twitter.com/autosimtrans

First Call for Papers

The 1st Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans)
Workshop at ACL 2020, Seattle, Washington, USA

The 2nd Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans) Workshop at NAACL 2021

Mexico City, Mexico

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Submission Deadline: Monday, March 15, 2021, 11:59pm Submission Link: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2021/AutoSimTrans2021/


WORKSHOP OVERVIEW

Simultaneous translation, which performs translation concurrently with the source speech, is widely useful in many scenarios such as international conferences, negotiations, press releases, legal proceedings, and medicine. It combines the AI technologies of machine translation (MT), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), is becoming a cutting-edge research field.

As an emerging and interdisciplinary field, simultaneous translation faces many great challenges, and is considered one of the holy grails of AI. As an evidence of the growing importance of simultaneous translation within NLP, one of us (Liang) gave an invited talk at ACL 2019 on the recent advances in this field (see more at [13]). This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in machine translation, speech processing, and human interpretation, to discuss recent advances and open challenges of simultaneous translation. including: The architecture of simultaneous translation: traditional pipeline (ASR-MT-TTS) or end-to-end (speech-speech);

  • Translation models: robust, high quality, and low latency;
  • Data resources: large and high-quality corpora for training simultaneous translation systems.
  • Evaluation methods: metrics to evaluate the translation quality and time latency;
  • Machine aided simultaneous translation (MAST): improve the efficiency and quality of human interpreters;

Meanwhile, the workshop will also explore challenges for developing practical simultaneous translation systems and will provide opportunity for participants show their products.

We introduce two submission tracks in this workshop:


SHARED TASK

We are organizing a simultaneous translation shared task in two directions with different input modes:
(a) Chinese-to-English with streaming transcription as input, (b) Chinese-to-English with speech audio as input, and (c) English-to-Spanish with streaming transcription as input

There are three competitions in total.

We will provide open datasets and evaluation environment. Participants are encouraged (though not required) to submit their system description papers and present them at the Workshop.

For more time line and dataset information, please see the Shared Task page.


INVITED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS (confirmed)

We have two sets of keynote speakers: 4 from simultaneous translation, and 2 from human interpretation research. We hope this workshop will greatly increase the communication and cross fertilization between the two fields. All these speakers are confirmed.

SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION SPEAKERS
  • Will Lewis, Principal Technical Project Manager, Microsoft Research, USA
  • Lucia Specia, Professor, Imperial College London, UK
  • Liang Huang, Assoc. Professor, Oregon State & Distinguished Scientist, Baidu Research, USA
  • Satoshi Nakamura, Professor, NAIST, Japan (tentatively yes)
HUMAN INTERPRETATION SPEAKERS
  • Hong Jiang, Sr. Lecturer and AIIC Member, Dept. of Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
  • More speakers TBD

AWARDS

We will have paper awards (best paper award, etc.) and shared task awards (based on evaluation performance) sponsored by the industrial sponsors.


FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE

We can offer partial financial aid to student authors who demonstrate significant financial need. Instructions on how to apply for financial assistance will be provided after paper acceptance decisions have been finalized.


IMPORTANT DATES

Shared Task
  • Registration and Release of data: December 28, 2020 - January 31, 2021
  • System Submission: February 20, 2021 - March 7, 2021
  • System Description Due: March 15, 2021
  • Notification of Acceptance: April 15, 2021
  • Camera-ready Papers Due: Monday, April 26, 2021
Papers
  • Submission Deadline: Monday, March 15, 2021 (both research and systems description papers)
  • Notification of Acceptance: Thursday, Monday, April 15, 2021
  • Camera-ready Papers Due: Monday, April 26, 2021
  • Workshop: Thursday, June 10, 2021

All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM GMT -12 (anywhere in the world).


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Our AutoSimTrans Workshop follows the same submission policy from the ACL Submission Guidelines.

There are two formats: long papers (8 pages content plus unlimited references) and short papers (4 pages contect plus unlimited references). Authors can also upload a separate appendix of unlimited length, which is optional for the reviewers. The final versions of both long and short papers will be given one extra page of content to address reviewers comments.

For those who participate in the shared task, you are encouraged (though not requried) to submit a system description paper of 4 to 8 pages of content plus unlimited references to AutoSimTrans to describe your system.

Paper submission site: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2021/AutoSimTrans2021/


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  • Hua Wu, Baidu Inc., China; wu_hua@baidu.com
  • Colin Cherry, Google, Canada; colincherry@google.com
  • Liang Huang, Oregon State University and Baidu Research, USA; lianghuang@baidu.com
  • Zhongjun He, Baidu Inc., China; hezhongjun@baidu.com
  • Qun Liu,Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Hong Kong, China; qun.liu@huawei.com
  • Maha Elbayad, Université Grenoble Alpes, France; maha.elbayad@infria.fr
Steering COMMITTEE
  • Mark Liberman, Professor of Linguistics and Director of LDC, University of Pennsylvania, USA
  • Haifeng Wang, CTO, Baidu, China
Program Chair
  • Mingbo Ma, Baidu Research, USA; mingboma@baidu.com
Shared Task Chair
  • Ruiqing Zhang, Baidu Inc., China

For further information, please visit workshop page


CONTACT

Email: mingboma@baidu.com or autosimtrans.workshop@gmail.com
Twitter: twitter.com/autosimtrans

Read more: autosimtrans.github.io