In the winter term 2009/10 the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 will host a seminar entitled:

Seminar "Selected Topics in Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition"

Registration for the seminar:

Registration for the seminar is only possible online via the registration page provided by the institute. A link can be found on the Computer Science Department's homepage.

Prerequisites for participation in the seminar:

• Bachelor students: Einführung in das wissenschaftliche Arbeiten (Proseminar)
• Master students: Bachelor degree
• Diploma students: Vordiplom
  
• Attendance of the lectures Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks, Speech Recognition or Statistical Methods in Natural Language Processing, or evidence of equivalent knowledge.
• For successful participants of the above lectures, the possibility of a seminar talk is guaranteed.
  

Seminar format and important dates:

• Proposals: initial proposals will be accepted up until the start of the term (October 12, 2009) at the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or by the relevant supervisor. At this time participants must arrange an appointment with the relevant supervisor. Revised proposals will be accepted up until two weeks after the start of the term.
• Article: must be submitted at least 1 month prior to the trial presentation date to either the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or the relevant supervisor.
  
• Presentation slides: must be submitted at least 1 week prior to the trial presentation date to either the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or the relevant supervisor.
• Trial presentations: at least 2 weeks prior to the actual presentation date; refer to the section on topics.
• Seminar presentations: the exact dates and plan for the presentation block (expected to be around January 2010) will be arranged and announced for the individual topics.
• Final (possibly corrected) articles and presentation slides: must be submitted at the latest 2 weeks after the presentation date to either the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or the relevant supervisor.
• Compulsory attendance: in order to receive a certificate participants must attend all presentation sessions.
• Ethical Guidelines:The Computer Science Department of RWTH Aachen University has adopted ethical guidelines for the authoring of academic work such as seminar reports. Each student has to comply with these guidelines. In this regard, you, as a seminar attendant, have to sign a declaration of compliance, in which you assert that your work complies with the guidelines, that all references used are properly cited, and that the report was done autonomously by yourself. We ask you do download the guidelines and submit the declaration together with your seminar report and talk to your supervisor. You also find a German version of the guidelines and a German version of the declaration you may use as well.

Note: failure to meet deadlines, absence without permission from compulsory sessions (presentations and preliminary meeting as announced by email to each participating student), or dropping out of the seminar after more than 3 weeks after the preliminary meeting/topic distribution, i.e. later than August 13, 2009, results in the grade 5.0/not appeared.

Topics, Relevant References and Participants:

1. Language Classification (NN; Supervisor: David Rybach)
   References:
   
   • J.-L. Gauvain, A. Messaoudi, H. Schwenk: "Language Recognition Using Phone Lattices," in Proc. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), Jeju Island, South Korea, Oct. 2004.
   • M. Faouzi, B. Zeghiba, J.-L. Gauvain, L. Lamel: "Context-dependent phone models and models adaptation for phonotactic language recognition," in Proc. InterSpeech, Antwerp, Belgium, Sept. 2008.
   • P. Torres-Carrasquillo et al.: "The MITLL NIST LRE 2007 Language Recognition System," in Proc. InterSpeech, Antwerp, Belgium, Sept. 2008.
   • F. Castaldo et al.: "Politecnico di Torino System for the 2007 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation," in Proc. InterSpeech, Antwerp, Belgium, Sept. 2008.
2. Universal Background Models (NN; Supervisor: Markus Nussbaum-Thom)
   References:
   
   • D. Povey, S.M. Chu, B. Varadarajan: "Universal Background Model Based Speech Recognition," in Proc. IEEE Intern. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 4561-4564, Las Vegas, NV, April 2008.
   • D. Povey: "Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models for Speech Recognition," Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2009-64.
3. Discriminative Speaker Adaptation for Speech Recognition (NN; Supervisor: Jonas Lööf)
   References:
   
   • L. Wang and P.C. Woodland: "MPE-Based Discriminative Linear Transform for Speaker Adaptation," Proc. Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 2004.
   • K. Yu, M.J.F. Gales and P.C. Woodland: "Unsupervised Discriminative Adaptation Using Discriminative Mapping Transforms," Proc. Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Las Vegas, AR, April 2008.
   • C. K. Raut, K. Yu and M. J. F. Gales: "Adaptive Training using Discriminative Mapping Transforms," Proc. InterSpeech,, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008.
4. Syntax-based Translation (NN; Supervisors: Daniel Stein, David Vilar)
   References:
   
   • Daniel Marcu, Wei Wang, Abdessamad Echihabi, and Kevin Knight: "SPMT: Statistical Machine Translation with Syntactified Target Language Phrases," pp. 44-52, Proc. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Sydney, Australia, July 2006.
   • S. DeNeefe, K. Knight, W. Wang, D. Marcu: "What Can Syntax-Based MT Learn from Phrase-Based MT?" Proc. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL), Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.
   • L. Shen, J. Xu, R. Weischedel: "A New String-to-Dependency Translation Algorithm with a Target Dependency Language Model," Proc. of 46^th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT), Columbus, Ohio, June 2008.
5. Discriminative Alignment for Machine Translation (NN; Supervisors: Martin Ratajczak, Arne Mauser)
   References:
   
   • Ben Taskar, Simon Lacoste-Julien, and Dan Klein: "A Discriminative Matching Approach to Word Alignment," pp. 73--80, Proc. Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP), Vancouver, Canada, October 2005.
   • Abraham Ittycheriah and Salim Roukos: "A Maximum Entropy Word Aligner for Arabic-English Machine Translation," pp. 89-96, Proc. Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP), Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 2005.
   • Phil Blunsom and Trevor Cohn: "Discriminative Word Alignment with Conditional Random Fields," pp. 65-72, Proc. 21^st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44^th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, Australia, July 2006.
6. Discriminative Training for Machine Translation (Bagiil; Supervisors: Matthias Huck, Arne Mauser)
   References:
   
   • Abraham Ittycheriah and Salim Roukos: "Direct Translation Model," pp. 57-64, Proc. Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT), Rochester, NY, April 2007.
   • Percy Liang, Alexandre Bouchard-Cote, Dan Klein, and Ben Taskar: "An End-to-End Discriminative Approach to Machine Translation," pp. 761-768, Proc. Joint Conf. of the Int. Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics (Coling-ACL), Sydney, Australia, July 2006.
   • D. Chiang, Y. Marton, Ph. Resnik: "Online large-margin training of syntactic and structural translation features," in Proc. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 224-233, Honolulu, Hawaii, October 2009.

Guidelines for the article and presentation:

• Online LaTeX-Documentation:

• LaTeX: "A document preparation system"
• LaTeX help 1.1
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX
  
• LaTeX 2e for authors

• Document Templates:

• Article Template (164kB),  contains the template and all necessary files in tar format (or here 53kB in zip format).
• Presentation Slide Template (4.9MB), a zip file containing the template and all necessary graphics as well as the institute’s style template.

• Guidelines for articles and presentation slides:

• The aim of the seminar for the participants is to learn the following:
• to tackle a topic and to expand knowledge
• to critically analyze the literature
  
• to hold a presentation
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
  

• Important: As part of the introduction, a slide should outline the most important literature used for the presentation. In addition, the presentation should clearly indicate which literature the particular elements of the presentation refer to.
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
• Participants are expected to seek out additional literature on their topic. Assistance with the literature search is available at the faculty’s library. Access to literature is naturally also available at the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 library.
• Notation/Mathematical Formulas: consistent, correct notation is essential. When necessary, differing notation from various literature sources is to be modified or standardized in order to be clear and consistent. The lectures held by the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 should provide a guide as to what appropriate notation should look like.
  
• Tables must have titles (appearing above the table).
• Figures must have captions (appearing below the figure).
  
• In the case that no adequate translation of an English technical term is available, the term should be used unchanged.
• Articles and presentation slides can also be prepared in English.
  
• Completeness: acknowledge all literature and sources.
  
• Referencing must conform to the standard described in the article template.
• Examples should be used to illustrate points.
• Examples should be as complex as necessary but as simple as possible.
• Slides should be used as presentation aids and not to replace the role of the presenter; specifically, slides should:
• illustrate important points and relationships;
• remind the audience (and the presenter) of important aspects and considerations;
  
• give the audience an overview of the presentation.
  
• Slides should not contain chunks of text or complicated sentences; rather they should consist of succinct words and terms.
• Use illustrations where appropriate - a picture says a thousand words!
• Abbreviations should be defined at the first usage in the manner demonstrated in the following example: "[...] at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule (RWTH) there are [...]".
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
• Usage of fonts, typefaces and colors in presentation slides must be consistent and appropriate. Such means should serve to clarify points or relationships, not be applied needlessly or at random.
  
• Care should be taken when selecting fonts for presentation slides (also within diagrams) to ensure legibility on a projector even for those seated far from the screen.
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Registration for the seminar:

Registration for the seminar  is only possible online via the registration page  provided by the institute. A link can be found on the Computer Science Department's homepage.

Inquiries relating to organizational aspects of the seminar should be directed to:

Room 6125b (1. Etage E2)
Telephone: 0241 / 80 21 612
E-Mail: schlueter@cs.rwth-aachen.de