Second Call for
Papers, Presentations, and Proposals
AMTA
2008
The 8th Biennial
Conference of the
Association for Machine Translation
in the
AMTA’s mission is to promote progress in the research, development,
and use of translation technologies by fostering discussion between
researchers, developers, and users of translation technologies in government
and industry.
Come join us! For AMTA
2008, we want to offer a wide array of up-to-date content related to translation
automation:
·
first-rate
research that defines the cutting edge of future translations systems,
·
case
studies on practical uses of current translation systems in government and
industry,
·
panel
discussions of issues that affect everyone interested in translation
automation,
·
a
showcase of current and future translation technologies and products.
·
in-depth
tutorials on specific topics in research and use of translation automation,
·
dynamic
panels on issues facing the MT research, MT developer, and MT user communities
·
specialized
workshops on topics of current interest,
·
co-located
workshops, such as the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation
(IWSLT 2008), and the NIST Metrics for
Machine Translation Challenge
·
co-located
events including LISA@AMTA
We solicit your submissions in English for:
·
unpublished
research papers on any aspect of Machine Translation;
·
presentations
about uses of Machine Translation in government or corporate settings;
·
proposals
for Workshops;
·
proposals
for half-day and full-day Tutorials;
·
proposals
for Panel discussions;
More information about each type of submission is included
below.
Conference Web Page:
http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2008.html
Important Dates for AMTA2008
June 30 Final submission deadline for papers, presentations,
and proposals
August 1 Notification to authors
August 15 Camera-ready copy due
October 21-25 Conference
MT Research Papers
Contact: Stephan Vogel (
Machine Translation continues to be one of the most active
research areas within Natural Language Processing. MT evaluations, such as those conducted by
NIST, provide ample evidence that the field of MT continues to grow and attract
more and more researchers. Data-driven approaches have become particularly
fashionable in recent years. These approaches have generated systems that have
been the top performers in recent comparative evaluations. Furthermore, the
challenge of building competitive MT systems has been significantly reduced
with the introduction of open source toolkits such as
Topics
Topics
of interest include but are not limited to:
·
Advances
in data-driven MT (
·
Advances
in rule-based MT (Transfer-based MT, Interlingual MT, etc.)
·
Lexicon
and grammar acquisition and induction
·
Hybrid
approaches that integrate and unify aspects of rule-based MT and statistical MT
·
MT
for resource-poor languages
·
MT
on resource-limited machinery (e.g. PDAs)
·
Distributed
architectures for large data MT
·
Speech-to-speech
or speech-to-text MT
·
MT
with OCR
·
MT
for communication (chats, blogs, social networks)
·
MT
Evaluation
What to submit
Papers should not be longer than 10 pages and should be in pdf format.
How to submit
AMTA
2008 is using the START conference management system. To submit a research paper
go to the submission website at:
https://www.softconf.com/starts/amta08/submit.html
and
follow the instructions on the web page. The final submission deadline for research papers
is June 30 [11:59pm EST (GMT-5:00)].
MT User Presentations: Commercial Users
Contact: Arle Lommel ( arle@lisa.org )
The Commercial User session, hosted and run by the
Localization Industry Standards Association (http://www.lisa.org), will focus on
how MT is used to meet business needs such as just-in-time localization of
critical information, provision of technical support information, or creation
of preliminary translations for post-editing. Submissions should focus on the
use of MT in a business setting and how it is integrated with other
technologies to support business goals.
Topics
Potential
topics include (but are not limited to):
·
Use
of MT to provide localization of data-driven, dynamic, or user-specific
information
·
Use
of MT to reduce localization time and/or cost
·
Ways
in which MT can be used to increase the scope of globalization projects
·
Integrating
MT and human translation
·
Managing
change when implementing MT systems
·
Open-source
and Low-cost MT tools – are they realistic and is there a market for them?
What to submit
Ideal presentations will clearly identify a business need
and describe how MT meets those needs, with a candid assessment of its
strengths and limitations for that particular usage.
Submissions should be 250-500 word summaries and may be
sent directly in e-mail or as attachments in RTF format.
How to submit
Send
submissions and questions to Arle Lommel (arle@lisa.org) with a copy to Mike
Dillinger (president@amtaweb.org) by June 30.
MT User Presentations: Government Users
Contacts: Nick Bemish ( Nicholas.Bemish@dia.mil )
Clare Voss ( voss@arl.army.mil
)
The MT User Track emphasizes the
strategic value and effectiveness of MT across various applications. This year,
AMTA is augmenting its User Track to include more sessions that will focus on
issues pertinent to the government community. The primary objective is to
recruit participants from government—program managers, acquisition experts,
researchers, developers, and users of MT technology—to help shape and
contribute to the content of these special focus sessions. By joining the wider
AMTA community for this conference, participants will have the opportunity to
present and discuss their technical needs, ongoing challenges, and lessons
learned. The sessions will be structured to provide open and constructive
dialogue among attendees with diverse technical backgrounds and areas of
expertise. The secondary objective of this approach is to establish longer-term
connections among participants and foster new cooperative efforts.
Topics
Topics for papers, presentations,
and panel discussions, including but not limited to:
Integration
solutions and their limitations
a. Interoperability of MT engines
b. Security/accreditation
c. Business process/workflow management
d. IT platform challenges (LAN/WAN/Stand-alone)
e. Service-oriented architecture (SOA), MT
engines in web services
f. Scalability (at
operational and enterprise levels)
g.
Maintenance,
upgrades, service agreements
Assessments
of maturity of current solutions for
a. Speech-to-Text
(S2T)
b. Text-to-Text (T2T)
c. OCR and MT
d. Voice recognition, transcription, and
translation
e. Image to Text translation
f. Handwriting
recognition and translation
Documentation
and Validation issues
a. Requirements versus needs
b. Concepts of
Operations (“conops” for military utility)
c. Proof of
concept, Technological readiness levels (TRLs)
d. Tactics,
Techniques, and Procedures (TTP)
e. Evaluations,
baselining, bench marks, and “best of breed”
f. Customization,
training/tuning
Real-world
use of MT
a.
Military
operational use
b.
Homeland
Defense
c.
Cyber
Security
Challenges
in Government Acquisition
a.
Process
b.
Length
of Time (Contracting)
c.
Funding
Streams (Type, Color, Earmark, UFR)
d.
Return
on Investment (ROI) (Factors for costs of tools, integration, maintenance,
linguists, data retrieval and sharing)
Overarching
concepts
a. Oversight
b. Policy and Procedures
c. Lessons Learned
d. Measures of performance and effectiveness
e.
Human-in-the-Loop and MT-in-the-Loop compatibility (machines do what they
do best and humans do what they do best)
Identified
“gaps” in current systems
a.
Named entities (NE) – incorrect names in MT output, unknown organization
names, lack of NE extractors with training modules
b. Dictionaries –
incomplete domain and topic coverage, portable across MTs
c. Morphology –
significant agreement errors, no learning from corrections
d. Syntax –
incorrect dependency analyses, ungrammatical sentences
e. Less commonly
taught languages –
f. System
combinations – limited plug & play capability across MT tools
g. Adaptation -
shift to other text topic & types, go beyond reliance on newswire
h. Pre- and
Post-MT editing solutions – lexicon building, translation memory
What to submit
For this special focus of the User Track, AMTA encourages representatives from government agencies as well as those with experience working on contract or in cooperative agreement with government agencies to contact the Track Chairs and identify topics relevant to their interests for inclusion in session discussions or working groups. Proposals for topic sessions that actively promote attendee participation and provide a mix of interactive formats—including demos, discussion, and hands-on, on-site access to working systems—are strongly encouraged.
This is an open to the public forum, so all topics, presentations and discussions must remain at the Unclassified level. Presentations should be either 20 or 45 minutes in duration and should be indicated at time of submission. Please indicate whether presentations will be allowed for release to AMTA attendees at the conclusion of the conference. Those identified as not for release will be maintained by the Government Users Group co-chairs for a period not to exceed 90 days after the conference ends. PowerPoint and MS word documents are the preferred submission formats. Presentations that address multiple topic areas in a logical sequence are preferred.
How to submit
Send submissions to Nick Bemish ( Nicholas.Bemish@dia.mil ) or Clare Voss (voss@arl.army.mil ).
Student MT Research Workshop
Contacts: Aaron Phillips (
Behrang Mohit (
Faculty Advisor: Alon Lavie (
In
its effort to promote and foster the professional growth of the next generation
of MT researchers, AMTA 2008 will feature a new “MT Student Research Workshop”,
which will be embedded as an integral part of the research program at the
conference. Students at all levels of study (undergraduate, graduate
and post-graduate) are invited to submit papers describing their research work.
To qualify, the main author of the paper must be a student or a post-doc. Both
completed work as well as work in progress is eligible for submission.
Submissions will be competitively reviewed by a committee consisting of both
advanced MT students and researchers, in a process similar to the reviewing of
submissions to the main AMTA-2008 research program. Financial
support is being provided by the
Topics
All
topics related to MT research are welcome. See the list of topics for the MT
Research Program above for a listing of sample topics of interest.
What to submit
Papers should not be longer than 10 pages, formatted using the provided style for research papers, and in pdf format.
How to submit
AMTA
2008 is using the START conference management system. To submit a paper to the Student
Research Workshop, go to the submission website at:
https://www.softconf.com/starts/amta08/submit.html
and follow the instructions
on the web page.
Important: please make sure to select “Student Workshop
Paper” as the Submission Category for the paper. The final submission deadline for research papers
is June 30 [11:59pm EST (GMT-5:00)].
Workshop Proposals
Contact: Farzad Ehsani (
Special
interest groups looking for an opportunity to present recent work related to MT
may want to organize a workshop at AMTA 2008.
Workshops will be held on Tuesday, October 21 and
Saturday, October 25.
Topics
Developers,
evaluators, researchers, and IT specialists are engaged in the process of
understanding better the effects of specific approaches to the refinement of
sense rendering. Workshops are often successfully organized around these
approaches. The incorporation of named-entity extraction, ontology-based
semantic representation, and domain-specific dictionaries are but a few of the
many possible examples. Such workshops provide an opportunity for increasing
awareness of new work in a given approach or technique of interest.
What to submit
Submissions
should include the title of the workshop, a proposed schedule (e.g. call for
papers, recruitment of speakers), a list of workshop activities (papers,
hand-on activities, shared tasks), technical requirements, the expected number
of participants, and whether this is an ongoing or new workshop.
How to submit
Send
submissions to Farzad Ehsani ( farzad@fluentialinc.com
). We will
evaluate Workshop proposals as soon as they are submitted. The last day for
submissions is June 30.
Tutorial
Proposals
Contact: Michelle Vanni (
mvanni@arl.army.mil )
AMTA
conference tutorials introduce our members to exciting innovations, to
practical skills, or to different disciplinary perspectives. MT is a
kaleidoscopic universe of ideas, concerns, and capabilities that requires the
efforts and talents of professionals in multiple disciplines. The goal of
cross-language meaning transfer is shared among translators, technologists, and
researchers of all stripes -- but we often need cross-training to improve
communication. Tutorials at AMTA enhance our members' effectiveness by offering
a means for understanding issues, solutions, and perspectives of multiple
approaches and different disciplines.
Tutorials
will be held on Tuesday, October 21 and Saturday, October 25.
Topics
Participants
should learn about approaches to handling issues and solving problems in
We
ask that tutorials be of interest to a broad audience and invite:
Ÿ Tutorials
on practical concerns of managers, technologists, and IT professionals
Ÿ Technical and scientific tutorials
on high-impact issues, approaches, and techniques
Ÿ Tutorials which explain a recent
development in the field or recount “lessons learned”
Ÿ Introductory, overview, or survey
tutorials on high-interest, leading-edge R&D topics
If
you have an idea but are new to the process of proposing tutorials, please
contact us. We can assist you in developing your idea.
What
to submit
Submissions
should include the title and a brief description of the proposed tutorial's topic
and content, including a short outline of the presentation or interactive
activity, showing that the content can be covered in three hours. Be sure to
include technical requirements and a description of the professional expertise
of the tutorial prsenters.
How
to submit
Send submissions
to Michelle Vanni ( mvanni@arl.army.mil ). We will evaluate
Tutorial proposals as soon as they are submitted. The last day for submissions
is June 30.