Corpora: AMTA Workshop

[Jessie Pinkham]

Call for Abstracts for the AMTA workshop on Customization Strategies for
MT

 

Machine translation systems must have customization capabilities in
order to claim success as a commercial product or a research prototype.
Minimally, these include the ability to add translations for new words
and phrases, but may also include more sophisticated functionality such
as adapting to new syntactic structures or writing styles, and may even
be the means of acquiring all the system's translation knowledge (e.g.,
in statistical systems), We propose to bring MT developers and
researchers together to discuss the customization capabilities of their
systems, with an emphasis on using common data for the discussion.  

 

This workshop is intended to cover all types of customization
strategies, although preference in selection will be given to novel
strategies. We encourage participation from MT developers of commercial
systems, and researchers working on all types of MT systems (traditional
transfer, interlingua, example-based, or statistical).

 

To make the discussion more interesting, we request that participants
demonstrate the customization capabilities of their system using data
freely available to everyone, such as Hansard data for French-English or
other data available from ELRA or LDC.  Microsoft has also agreed to
make technical manual data available for several language pairs (English
and any of these: French, Spanish, German, Japanese) for purposes of
research related to this workshop. (For access to this data please send
email to CustomWS at microsoft.com.)

 

We request that interested parties submit a two page abstract with the
following information:

-         overview of your MT system

-         description of customization capabilities

-         comparison of this strategy to other known strategies

-         data that will be used to test capability

-         proposed evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the
customization

-         estimate of time that would be required to customize for the
chosen domain, based on your sample run.

-          

Dates:

            Call for participation:                             June 8

            Abstract submission deadline:                July 7

            Acceptance notification:                        July 22

            Early registration for AMTA:                 July 31

            Papers due:
September 6

            AMTA workshop                                 October 8

 

Instructions for submission:

 

All submissions should be in English, and it is recommended that they be
submitted in one of the following three formats: PDF (preferred);
PostScript; Microsoft Word. All submissions will be received and
processed using the Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) located at
http://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CustomWS.

 

Authors should follow the instructions at the CMT web site to register,
enter information about themselves and their abstract, and upload a copy
of their abstract in one of the acceptable formats by the submission
deadline. Report any problems with the website to
CustomWS at microsoft.com.

 

For information on obtaining Microsoft Data to participate in the
workshop, please contact CustomWS at microsoft.com

 

Organizers: Jessie Pinkham, Deborah Coughlin, Bill Dolan