Daumé Helps Lead International Workshop on Machine Interpretation

Hal Daumé III, an associate professor of computer science and director of the Computational and Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory in UMIACS, recently co-organized an international workshop for researchers specializing in the emerging field of simultaneous machine translation: systems that can translate speech as it is being spoken, rather than waiting for the end.

The program, held from Aug. 2–6 at the Shonan Village Center near Tokyo, Japan, featured presentations by top computer scientists working in the areas of machine translation, speech synthesis, speech translation and machine learning.

“We hope that participants went away with a better understanding of the current challenges in machine interpretation of language,” Daumé says.

Organizers are working to create a “shared task” competition next year to encourage additional research in this field, he added.

The workshop featured a professional interpreter in Italian and Spanish, who also conducts research in interpretation studies, and a second professional interpreter in Japanese and English who told participants about how humans deal with interpretation both based on personal experience and scientific studies.

Current and former UMD-affiliated researchers participating in the workshop were Marine Carpuat, an assistant professor of computer with an appointment in UMIACS, Amittai Axelrod, a joint postdoctoral researcher at UMD and Johns Hopkins University, and Jordan Boyd-Graber, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a former UMIACS member.

Boyd-Graber also served as a co-organizer of the workshop.

Daumé says events held at the Shonan Village Center are similar in style to seminars at Schloss Dagsthul, a renowned research retreat center in Germany, and aim to promote informatics research at an international level.

The meetings at Shonan Village are overseen by the National Institute of Informatics in Japan.