First International Workshop on Medical Speech Translation

(Workshop in conjunction with NAACL/HLT 2006)

VENUE

New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, New York City
Friday, June 9, 2006

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Medical applications have emerged as one of the most popular domains for speech translation, and several functional systems now exist. Despite this, there is so far no established consensus on any of the central questions, including the following:

• Does medical speech translation pose special problems, and if so, what are they?

• What do the users (both doctors and patients) actually want? What constitutes acceptable performance, given that medicine is a safety-critical area?

• What are the alternatives to speech translation for non-L1 speakers in healthcare situations?

• What are the most important tasks, sub-domains and language pairs?

• What architectures are most suitable for medical speech translation applications? (Fixed-phrase, ad hoc phrasal rules, rule-based, statistical...)

• What evaluation/data collection methodologies are appropriate to medical speech translation?

• What requirements are there on hardware platforms? What options currently exist?

• How close are we to having applications that can be used in the field?

In this one day workshop, we would like to get together as many as possible of the key players in this field, so that we can exchange information and clarify the above and other issues. We expect the workshop to be of interest to people working in all three component communities - speech technology, machine translation, and medicine.

The main body of the workshop will consist of two parts: oral presentation of papers, followed by a demo session. We will end with a panel discussion, which will include representatives of both the system developer and medical user communities.

IMPORTANT DATES

Mar 31, 2006	Submissions due
Apr 4-10, 2006	Acceptance/rejection notification
Apr 18, 2006	Camera ready copy due
Jun 9, 2006	Workshop

ACCEPTED PRESENTATIONS

Full Papers

Evaluating Task Performance for a Unidirectional Controlled Language Medical Speech Translation System

Nikos Chatzichrisafis, Pierrette Bouillon, Manny Rayner, Marianne Santaholma, Marianne Starlander and Beth Ann Hockey

Speech to Speech Translation for Medical Triage in Korean

Farzad Ehsani, Jim Kimzey, Demetrios Master, Karen Lesea and Hunil Park

Automated Interpretation of Clinical Encounters with Cultural Cues and Electronic Health Record Generation

Daniel T. Heinze, Alexander Turchin and V. Jagannathan

Usability Issues in an Interactive Speech-to-Speech Translation System for Healthcare

Mark Seligman and Mike Dillinger

Language Engineering and the Pathway to Healthcare: A User-Oriented View

Harold Somers

Demo Presentations

Converser™: Highly Interactive Speech-to-Speech Translation for Healthcare

Mike Dillinger and Mark Seligman

A Multi-Lingual Decision Support Prototype for the Medical Domain

David Dinh, Dennis Chan and Jack Chen

Speech to Speech Translation for Medical Triage in Korean

Farzad Ehsani, Jim Kimzey, Demetrios Master, Karen Lesea and Hunil Park

IBM MASTOR SYSTEM: Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator

Yuqing Gao, Bowen Zhou, Ruhi Sarikaya, Mohamed Afify, Hong-Kwang Kuo, Wei-zhong Zhu, Yonggang Deng, Charles Prosser, Wei Zhang and Laurent Besacier

Accultran: Automated Interpretation of Clinical Encounters with Cultural Cues and Electronic Health Record Generation

Daniel T. Heinze, Alexander Turchin and V. Jagannathan

MedSLT: A Limited-Domain Unidirectional Grammar-Based Medical Speech Translator

Manny Rayner, Pierrette Bouillon, Nikos Chatzichrisafis, Marianne Santaholma, Marianne Starlander, Beth Ann Hockey, Yukie Nakao, Hitoshi Isahara and Kyoko Kanzaki

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Herve Blanchon                        CLIPS-GETA, Grenoble, France
Pierrette Bouillon (Co-chair)     University of Geneva, Switzerland
Mike Dillinger                           Spokentranslation.com, US
Farzad Ehsani (Co-chair)          Sehda, Inc., US
Glenn Flores                             Medical College of Wisconsin, US
Robert Frederking (Co-chair)   Carnegie Mellon University, US
John Fry                                   Stanford University, US
John Hutchins                           University of East Anglia, UK
Hitoshi Isahara                          NICT, Japan
Lori Levin                                 Carnegie Mellon University, US
Shri Narayanan                            USC Viterbi School of Engineering, US
Manny Rayner (Co-chair)         University of Geneva, Switzerland; ICSI/NASA Ames Research Center, US
Harold Somers                         University of Manchester, UK
Tanja Schultz                            Carnegie Mellon University, US
Vol Van Dalsem III                  El Camino Hospital, US
Bowen Zhou                             IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, US

CONTACT INFORMATION 

All inquiries should be sent to
with the SUBJECT heading "NAACL/HLT WORKSHOP INQUIRY".