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SUMMARY:Language Barriers along the Long Tail of Language
DTSTART:20090518T161500
DTSTAMP:20260506T195421Z
UID:91adc9ac043565420c93f3c2b708254d7697edcfaa48da7f9b2c15c6
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Alex Waibel\, Carnegie Mellon University\, USA & Univers
 ity of Karlsruhe\, Germany\nDuring the last decade Speech-to-Speech Transl
 ation has morphed from an exotic subfield at speech & language conferences
  to the main and best funded research topic in the speech and language are
 a. During its rapid rise the field has gone through distinct phases: \n1) 
 domain limited concept demonstrations\n2) domain limited spontaneous two-w
 ay translators\n3) domain-unlimited speech translators.\n\nThe rapid growt
 h is explained by considerable commercial\, public and humanitarian intere
 st and the intense R&D\; activity has led to considerable progress and imp
 ressive new capabilities. However\, we are still far from having overcome 
 the language divide: Aside from continuing issues with performance\, most 
 advances have also only been achieved on a handful of well-funded language
 s. To reach the goal of global connectedness this trick would have to be r
 epeated for many more (6\,000+) languages\, not to mention dialects and ac
 cents. With present methods\, the cost would be prohibitive and so we see 
 the emergence of the latest challenge\, (in our view the 4th phase): how t
 o go from 10 to 1000+ languages.\n\nAt first glance\, the problem may just
  be a repetition of current methods\, perhaps with economies of scale. On 
 closer inspection\, however\, it becomes clear that language data acquisit
 ion & maintenance represent the most significant cost\, and they are inver
 sely proportional to the size of a language. They can be addressed by adva
 ncing machine learning and human interaction techniques that lead to lower
 ed cost and more dynamic language maintenance. Available solutions fall in
 to five orthogonal categories that will be discussed.\nAlex Waibel's bio
LOCATION:INM202
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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