CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS MACHINE TRANSLATION SPECIAL ISSUE ON SPOKEN LANGUAGE TRANSLATION Guest editor: Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University) Guest editorial board: Doug Arnold (University of Essex) Pascale Fung (HKUST, Hong Kong) Walter Kasper (DFKI, Saarbrucken) Alon Lavie (CMU, Pittsburgh) Lori Levin (CMU, Pittsburgh) Hermann Ney (RWTH, Aachen) Harold Somers (UMIST, Manchester) Some 15 years ago, when Machine Translation had become fashionable again in Europe, few people would be prepared to consider seriously embarking upon spoken language translation research. After all, where both machine translation of written text, and speech understanding and production (despite important achievements) were still quite far from showing robustness in domain-independent applications, it seemed clear that putting three not even halfway understood technologies together would be premature, and bound to fail. Since then, the world has changed. Many researchers, both in academia and in industry, have taken up the challenge to build systems capable of translating spoken language. Does that mean that most of the problems involved in speech-to-text, text-to-text translation, and text-to-speech have been solved? The answer is no: although we have made a tremendous progress, both from a scientific and from a technological point of view, many of the fundamental problems in MT and in speech understanding remain unsolved. Yet a certain degree of optimism is justified here. First of all, it is clear that on the whole general expectations of what MT will do are changing. Where in the past the ultimate goal of MT seemed to be to provide a perfect, but cheaper and faster alternative to the human translator, there is now a clear shift from the ideal of fully automated high quality translation of unrestricted texts to the more practical problem of overcoming the language barriers we encounter in various situations. This shift of focus allows us to partition the problem we address into a series of smaller ones, the solution to which may be within our reach. This applies both to spoken and written language translation. If we look at spoken communication between human beings with different native languages, very often the main success criterion for this communication is not whether or not the individual utterances produced by the participants have been expressed or understood without errors (which will rarely be the case), but rather whether the intended goal of the communication has been attained (hotel room reservation, airline information, etc). This observation is extremely important when we try to set our goals for spoken translation systems. Once we have realized that communication takes place in a specific context, with a specific goal, and have accepted that sentence-by-sentence linguistically correct translation is not a necessary condition for successful multilingual communication, we can start exploiting the full potential of spoken dialogues in human-human and human-machine interaction: the basic structure of dialogues, the ways to control dialogue flow, the possibility for repair. A workshop dedicated to spoken language translation, organized in conjunction with EACL/ACL 1997 in Madrid, showed that there was a keen interest in the topic, and that many acedemic and industrial research teams have interesting results to report. Therefore we feel that the time has come to dedicate a special issue of the journal Machine Translation to this topic, and we are inviting high-quality, previously unpublished research papers addressing problems in the whole field of spoken language translation. (Note: authors who had papers accepted for the Madrid workshop are especially encouraged to submit papers which have developed out of their workshop contributions, though they should note that we do not intend simply to reprint the workshop papers in their original form.) We are especially interested in papers addressing problems or solutions that are typical for spoken language translation (as opposed to written language translation). FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Please consult the journal's web pages: home page: http://kapis.www.wkap.nl/journalhome.htm/0922-6567 Instructions for Authors: http://kapis.www.wkap.nl/kaphtml.htm/IFA0922-6567 LaTeX style files: http://kapis.www.wkap.nl/jrnlstyle.htm/0922-6567 Articles should be submitted DIRECTLY TO THE PUBLISHERS, either by e-mail to ELLEN.KLINK@wkap.nl, with the subject header "Submission to COAT Speech special issue", or in hard-copy to either of the following addresses: Machine Translation Editorial Office, Machine Translation Editorial Office Kluwer Academic Publishers Kluwer Academic Publishers P.O. Box 990, P.O. Box 230 3300 AZ Dordrecht, Accord, MA 02018-023 The Netherlands U.S.A. The journal is typeset using LaTeX, so the preferred medium for submission of articles in electronic format is LaTeX source (using the Kluwer style file) or gzipped postscript. If submitting hard-copy, four copies of the paper are required. The length of the papers should be approximately 10-20 pages if using the Kluwer style file (around 20k words). Authors are requested to send a copy of an Abstract of not more than 200 words to the guest editor Steven.Krauwer@let.ruu.nl or in hard-copy to Steven Krauwer, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Submissions should be received by July 1 1998. Papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the editorial board. We are aiming for publication as issue 3 or 4 of volume 13 (Autumn or Winter, 1998).