2021Q3 Reports: SIGSLT

The SIG SLT main effort is to organize the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT). IWSLT the premiere annual scientific conference for the study, development and evaluation of spoken language translation technology. Launched in 2004 and spun out from the C-STAR speech translation consortium before it (1992-2003), IWSLT is the main venue for scientific exchange on all topics related to speech-to-text translation, speech-to- speech translation, simultaneous and consecutive translation, speech dubbing, cross-lingual communication including all multimodal, emotional, paralinguistic, and stylistic aspects and their applications in the field. The conference organizes evaluations around challenge areas, and presents scientific papers and system descriptions.

This year, the IWSLT evaluation campaign featured four shared tasks: (i) Simultaneous Speech Translation; (ii) Offline Speech Translation; (iii) Multilingual Speech Translation; and (iv) Low-Resource Speech Translation. Each shared task was coordinated by a chair. The shared tasks attracted a total of 22 teams, from academy, research centers and industry. System submissions resulted in system papers that will be presented at the conference. Following our call for papers, this year 40 submissions were received. In a blind review process, 11 research papers were selected out of 19 for oral presentation (58%) in addition to 21 system papers.

The organizing and program committees of IWSLT 2021 are visible in https://iwslt.org/2021 Members of our SIG-SLT registered through sigslt@googlegroups.com are 55

The yearly meeting of the IWSLT steering committee will happen before the conference (Aug 5-6,2021).