Transfer of Pragmatic Intent in Speech-to-Speech Translation (TOPI S2ST)

Dear SigDIAL Colleagues, Machine translation systems today are often used to support realtime dialog across languages. However these systems have been developed using little or knowledge of dialog processes or of interactive communicative intents, and have never yet been evaluated on dialog data. Accordingly we are hosting a challenge task as part of Interspeech 2026, as described below. We invite questions, suggestions, and participation! Nigel Ward, Eliya Nachmani, Satoshi Nakamura, John Ortega Transfer of Pragmatic Intent in Speech-to-Speech Translation (TOPI S2ST) Current S2ST systems do not prioritize pragmatic fidelity, and therefore do not ideally support people conversing across languages. We are offering this task to enable exploration of how to tackle this deficiency. We will provide data for training/tuning and for testing. This will be in the form of Spanish-English utterance pairs, one taken from conversation and the other a pragmatically-faithful reenactment. We will also provide two automatic evaluation metrics, and later provide human evaluation results. Participating teams will provide system-output translations for the utterances in the evaluation set. To lower the barriers to entry, we will provide a Jupyter notebook for a baseline system, and we will offer three tracks within the challenge: unrestricted, limited-training, and entry-level, with the latter intended for teams with prosody modeling expertise but no speech synthesizer expertise. Final output submissions will be due January 10th, but we encourage all to contact us as early as possible, to be added to our mailing list. For full details, please see our website: www.cs.utep.edu/topi/<http://www.cs.utep.edu/topi/> . For questions, please contact any one of us. Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso CCSB 3.0408, +1-915-747-6827 nigel@utep.edu<mailto:nigel@utep.edu> https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/ Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso CCSB 3.0408, +1-915-747-6827 nigel@utep.edu<mailto:nigel@utep.edu> https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/