[Corpora-List] CFP: Workshop on "Strategies for developing machine translation for minority languages"

[Briony Williams]

                  FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

      "Strategies for developing machine translation for minority languages"
      ======================================================================

            5th SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages
                 on Tuesday May 23rd 2006 (morning)
            Magazzini del Cotone Conference Centre, Genoa, Italy

    Organised in conjunction with LREC 2006: Fifth International Conference on
      Language Resources and Evaluation, Genoa, Italy, 24-26 May 2006

Background
==========

This workshop continues the series of LREC workshops organized by SALTMIL 
(SALTMIL is the ISCA Special Interest Group for Speech And Language 
Technology for Minority Languages:  http://isl.ntf.uni-lj.si/SALTMIL/ ):

The minority or "less resourced" languages of the world are under increasing 
pressure from the major languages (especially English), and many of them lack 
full political recognition.  Some minority languages have been well 
researched linguistically, but most have not, and the vast majority do not 
yet possess basic speech and language resources (such as text and speech 
corpora, lexicons, POS taggers, etc) which would enable the commercial 
development of products.

The workshop aims to share information on tools and best practice, so that 
isolated researchers will not need to start from nothing.  An important 
aspect will be the forming of personal contacts, which can minimise 
duplication of effort.  There will be a balance between presentations of 
existing language resources, and more general presentations designed to give 
background information needed by all researchers present.

Format
======

The workshop will begin with the following presentations from invited speakers:

  * Delyth Prys (University of Wales, Bangor):  "The BLARK matrix and its 
relation to the language resources situation for the Celtic languages."
  * Hermann Ney (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 
Germany):  "Statistical Machine Translation with and without a bilingual 
training corpus"
  * Mikel Forcada (Universitat d’Alacant, Spain):  "Open source machine 
translation: an opportunity for minor languages"
  * Lori Levin (Carnegie Mellon University, USA):  "Omnivorous MT: Using 
whatever resources are available."
  * Anna Sågvall Hein (University of Uppsala, Sweden):  "Approaching new 
languages in machine translation."

These talks will then be followed by a poster session featuring contributed 
papers.

Papers
======

Papers are invited that describe research and development in the following areas:

  * The BLARK (Basic Language Resource Kit) matrix at ELDA, and how it 
relates to minority languages.
  * The advantages and disadvantages of different corpus-based strategies for 
developing MT, with reference to a) speed of development, and b) level of 
researcher expertise required.
  * What open-source or free language resources are available for developing MT?
  * Existing resources for minority languages, with particular emphasis on 
software tools that have been found useful.

All contributed papers will be presented in poster format. All contributions 
will be printed in the workshop proceedings (CD). They will also be published 
on the SALTMIL website.

Timetable:
=========

  * Paper submission deadline:   Feb 17, 2006
  * Notification of acceptance:  March 10, 2006
  * Final version of paper:      April 10, 2006
  * Workshop:                    May 23, 2006 (morning)

Submissions:
===========

Abstracts should be in English, and up to 4 pages long. The submission format 
is PDF.

Papers will be reviewed by members of the organising committee. The reviews 
are not anonymous.

Accepted papers may be up to 6 pages long. The final papers should be in the 
format specified for the proceedings by the LREC organisers.

Each submission should include: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact 
author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers.

Abstracts should be sent via e-mail to Briony Williams at b.williams @ 
bangor.ac.uk.  The deadline for submission is February 17th.

Organising committee
====================

  * Briony Williams (University of Wales, Bangor, UK:  b.williams @ bangor.ac.uk)
  * Kepa Sarasola (University of the Basque Country: ksarasola @ si.ehu.es)
  * Bojan Petek (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia: bojan.petek @ uni-lj.si)
  * Julie Berndsen (University College Dublin, Ireland: julie.berndsen @ ucd.ie)
  * Atelach Alemu Argaw (University of Stockholm, Sweden: atelach @ dsv.su.se)