Tuesday, 23rd September, 2003Saturday, 27th September, 2003A number of workshops of interest and impact for MT researchers, developers, vendors or users of MT technologies will take place towards the end of the MT Summit. Each workshop has its own web site including a Call for Papers and other details.
W1: AMTA SIG-IL Sixth Workshop ON Interlingualshttp://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/FWOI/SixthWorkshop/call.htmlThe Fourth and Fifth IL Workshops have featured active participation by workshop members in the substance of the workshop: they have been workshops in the literal sense of the word. The Fifth IL workshop, in particular, asked participants to code thematic roles prior to the workshop and then to make a short presentation about their activity. This workshop will continue in that tradition. Instead of focussing on thematic roles,
workshop participants will be asked to identify and mark up events, states, and objects in
three texts: one English text, a translation of that text into another language, and a
re-translation back into English of the second text. Active participants will also provide a
short paper, discussing the markup task. In the afternoon, the combined This task is seen as a prelude to a possible large-scale markup of multi-lingual text for thematic roles. Of course, all are welcome to attend this workshop, though participation in the markup tasks is encouraged. The workshop will be the 7th in a series sponsored in part by the Special Interest Group on Interlinguas of AMTA. W2: Machine Translation for Semitic Languageshttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alavie/semitic-MT-wshp.htmlOver the past decade there has been some progress on the computational processing of Semitic languages. Several workshops in recent years - both regional and affiliated with international conferences - have addressed the spectrum of issues relating to the processing of Arabic and other Semitic languages. The progress of recent years has opened the door to advanced computational applications such as MT. Research on MT of Semitic languages is, however, still in its early stages. Accurate translation of Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic languages requires treatment of unique linguistic characteristics, some of which are common to all Semitic languages, others specific to each of these individual languages and their dialects. W3: Teaching Translation Technologies and Toolshttp://www.dlsi.ua.es/~mlf/t4/In view of the success of the preceding workshops on Teaching MT, the first held as part of the the last MT Summit in Santiago de Compostela in September 2001, and the second the 6th EAMT Workshop held in Manchester in November 2002, we propose a third workshop with an expanded scope which will not only address MT but also computer-aided translation technologies and tools. The workshop will provide an opportunity for MT and CAT instructors to exchange their experience by presenting papers or demonstrations describing the tools and techniques they use in the classroom or in the laboratory. W4: Towards Systematizing MT Evaluationhttp://www.issco.unige.ch/projects/isle/MTE-at-MTS9.htmlEstimating the quality of any MT system accurately is only possible if the evaluation
methodology is robust and systematic. The NSF and EU-funded ISLE project has created a
taxonomy that relates situations and measures for a variety of MT applications. The
"Framework for MT Evaluation in ISLE" (FEMTI) is now available online. The
effort of matching these measures correctly with their appropriate evaluation tasks,
however, is an area that needs further attention. For example, what effect do "user
needs" have on the "functionality characteristics" specified in the FEMTI
guidelines? To what extent are there unseen relationships in the branches of the taxonomy?
How can we judge when a given evaluation measure is appropriate? Issues that come to bear on
this question are the automation of MT evaluation, the extension to MT applications such as
automated speech-translation, and the evaluation of the very training corpora that an MT
system relies on to improve output quality. Important datesThe deadline for submission to the workshop on MT Evaluation has now passed. Deadlines for participation in other workshops are given on the respective web pages.Submission guidelinesAddresses and instructions for submitting papers differ for each workshop: see the relevant web page. For general conference information and further details as it becomes available, visit the MT Summit web site: http://www.mt-summit.org/ |