Corpora: AMTA-2002 ***Updated submission guidelines*** - Call for Papers

[Deborah Coughlin]

                       --- CALL FOR PAPERS ---
    The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas

      *** SUBMISSION GUIDELINES HAVE CHANGED ***

        *** SEE UPDATED GUIDELINES BELOW ***

AMTA-2002 Conference
Location:  Tiburon, California 
Dates:  October 8-12, 2002

The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is
pleased to announce its fifth biennial conference, planned for October
8-12, 2002, in Tiburon (near San Francisco), California.

CONFERENCE THEME: From Research to Real Users

Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade
ago at TMI-92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms for
MT, including data-driven approaches (e.g., statistical, example-based)
and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional rule-based
components.

During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer
architectures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated track,
increasing their coverage (primarily through manual update of their
lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and usage,
principally through the medium of the Internet. Web page translators
have become commonplace; a number of online translation services have
appeared, including in their offerings both raw and post-edited MT; and
large corporations have been turning increasingly to MT to address the
exigencies of global communication.  Still, the output of the
transfer-based systems employed in this expansion represents but a small
drop in the ever-growing translation marketplace bucket.

Now, 10 years later, we wonder if this mounting variety of MT users is
any better off, and if the promise of the research technologies is being
realized to any measurable degree.  In this regard, we pose the
following questions:

Why aren't any current commercially available MT systems primarily
data-driven?

Do any commercially available systems integrate (or plan to integrate)
data-driven components?

Do data-driven systems have significant performance or quality issues?

Can such systems really provide better quality to users, or is their
main advantage one of fast, facilitated customization?

If any new MT technology could provide such benefits (somewhat higher
quality, or facilitated customization), would that be the key to more
widespread use of MT, or are there yet other more relevant unresolved
issues, such as system integration?

If better quality, customization, or system integration aren't the
answer, then what is it that users really need from MT in order for it
to be more useful to them?

We solicit participation on these and other topics related to the
research, development, and use of MT in the form of original papers,
demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and panels. We invite all who are
interested in MT to participate, including developers, researchers, end
users, professional translators, managers, and marketing experts. We
especially invite users to share their experiences, developers to
describe their novel systems, managers and marketers to talk about what
is happening in the marketplace, researchers to detail new capabilities
or methods, and visionaries to describe the future as they see it.  We
also welcome and encourage participation by members of AMTA's sister
organizations, AAMT in Asia and EAMT in Europe.

INVITED SPEAKERS

We are pleased to announce that invited speakers for the conference will
include Yorick Wilks and Ken Church, both notable participants at
TMI-92, and Jaap van der Meer, former president of ALPNET.  We
anticipate that the speakers will provide a sharp and stimulating focus
on the theme of the conference.

Further details regarding the conference, including a call for Tutorial
and Workshop proposals, may be found on the AMTA Web site at:
http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2002/


CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair
Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Local Arrangements Chair 
Bob Frederking, Workshops and Tutorials 
Laurie Gerber, Exhibits Coordinator 


*** PLEASE NOTE THAT THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES HAVE CHANGED***
         *** UPDATED GUIDELINES ARE PROVIDED BELOW ***

PAPER AND SYSTEM DESCRIPTION/DEMONSTRATION SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES

We are pleased to announce that the AMTA-2002 conference proceedings
will be published in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series
by Springer-Verlag.  (LNCS/LNAI series home page is located at:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html)

It is therefore recommended that initial submissions to AMTA-2002 adhere
as closely as possible to the formatting guidelines for authors located
at:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
These guidelines will need to be strictly adhered to for the final
versions of submissions that are accepted for publication in the
proceedings. 

All submissions should be in English, and it is recommended that they be
prepared using Latex2e or Microsoft Word, per instructions at the
authors' web site given above (see site for details on using other text
processing systems). Once prepared, they should be submitted
electronically for review in one of the following three formats:

PDF (recommended)
PostScript
Microsoft Word

All submissions will be received and processed using the Conference
Management Toolkit (CMT), located at:
http://cmt.research.microsoft.com/AMTA2002. 

Authors should follow the instructions at the CMT web site to register,
enter information about themselves and their paper, and upload a copy of
their paper in one of the acceptable formats by the submission deadline.


Any questions regarding submissions or the use of this web site should
be directed in email to:
AMTA2002 at microsoft.com. 
 
Important SUBMISSION DEADLINES are as follows: 

Submissions uploaded at CMT web site:   April 15, 2002 (Monday)
Notification of acceptance:             May 31, 2002 (Friday)
Final versions of papers due:           July 15, 2002 (Monday)

At the CMT web site, authors will be asked to designate their
submissions for one of the three conference tracks listed below. Again,
initial submissions are expected to adhere as closely as possible to the
guidelines found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
Information regarding submission length and additional requirements is
also provided below.

Conference tracks:

1. Theoretical papers: Unpublished papers describing original work on
all aspects of Machine Translation.  Preference will be given to papers
that include concrete results and that address the theme of moving MT
research technology (including, but not limited to, data-driven systems
or components) into real use.  Papers may not be longer than 10 pages.

2. User studies: Studies of users' experiences with implementing MT or
testing its applicability to some task.  Of particular interest are
experiences deploying new or advanced MT technology in a production
context.  Users, managers, and sales/marketing professionals are
especially welcome to submit.  Studies may not be longer than 8 pages.

3. System descriptions with optional system demonstrations: Approx. 25
minutes will be allocated per system description/demo.  Descriptions may
not be longer than 4 pages. The goal of system descriptions is to
educate participants about the features and functionality of current and
emerging MT systems. Sales presentations are not appropriate. The
following additional information should be provided in each system
description;
	-  name and contact information of system builder
	-  system category (research, pre-market prototype, or
commercially available)
	-  system characteristics (e.g., languages, domains,
integration/networking features)
If a system demonstration is included, please provide the following
information:
	-  hardware platform and operating system
	-  name and contact information of system operations specialist