[Corpora-List] Call for Papers: ACL 2008 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

[Christof Monz]

                             ACL 2008
                        THIRD WORKSHOP ON
                 STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION

                       June 19 or 20, 2008

                   http://www.statmt.org/wmt08/


This workshop on statistical and hybrid methods for machine
translation, and builds on the 2005 ACL Workshop on Parallel Text, the
2006 NAACL Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, and the 2007
ACL Second Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. The workshop
will feature papers on topics related to MT, and will feature two
shared tasks: a shared translation task for 12 pairs of European
languages, and a shared evaluation task to test automatic evaluation
metrics.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

     * word-based, phrase-based, syntax-based SMT
     * using comparable corpora for SMT
     * incorporating linguistic information into SMT
     * decoding
     * system combination
     * error analysis
     * manual and automatic method for evaluating MT
     * scaling MT to very large data sets

We encourage authors to evaluate their approaches to the above topics
using the common data sets created for the shared translation task. In
addition to scientific papers, we will also feature two shared tasks.


SHARED TRANSLATION TASK

The first is a shared translation task which will examine translation
between the following language pairs:

     * English-German and German-English
     * English-French and French-English
     * English-Spanish and Spanish-English
     * German-Spanish and Spanish-German
     * English-Czech and Czech-English
     * English-Hungarian and Hungarian-English

Participants may submit translations for any or all of the language
directions. In addition to the common test sets the workshop
organizers will provide optional training resources, including a newly
expanded release of the Europarl corpora and out-of-domain corpora.

All participants who submit entries will have their translations
evaluated. We will evaluate translation performance by human
judgment. To facilitate the human evaluation we will require
participants in the shared task to manually judge some of the
submitted translations.

A more detailed description of the shared translation task (including
information about the test and training corpora, a freely available MT
system, and a number of other resources) is available from:

http://www.statmt.org/wmt08/shared-task.html

We also provide a baseline machine translation system, whose
performance matches the best systems from last year's shared task.
SHARED EVALUATION TASK

The second task is a shared evaluation task. Participants in this task
will submit automatic evaluation metrics for machine translation,
which will be assessed on their ability to:

     * Rank systems on their overall performance on the test set
     * Rank systems on a sentence by sentence level

Participants in the shared translation task will submit translation
results for a set of a few thousand sentences. Their system outputs
will be distributed to participants in the shared evaluation task
along with the reference translations. The translations will be ranked
with automatic evaluation metrics. We will measure the correlation of
automatic evaluation metrics with the human judgments.

More details of the shared evaluation task (including submission
formats and the collected manual evaluations from last year's
workshop) is available from:

http://www.statmt.org/wmt08/shared-evaluation-task.html


PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submissions will consist of regular full papers of max. 8 pages,
formatted following the ACL 2008 guidelines. In addition, shared task
participants will be invited to submit short papers (max. 4 pages)
describing their systems or their evaluation metrics. Both submission
and review processes will be handled electronically.

We encourage individuals who are submitting research papers to
evaluate their approaches using the training resources provided by
this workshop and past workshops, so that their experiments can be
repeated by others using these publicly available corpora.


IMPORTANT DATES

March 14, 2008 Regular paper submissions
March 21, 2008 (shared translation task) Results submissions
April  4, 2008 (shared evaluation task) Results submissions
April  4, 2008 (both shared tasks) Short paper submissions
April 12, 2008 Notification (both regular and short papers)
April 21, 2008 Camera-ready papers


ORGANIZERS

Chris Callison-Burch (Johns Hopkins University)
Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh)
Christof Monz (University of London)
Josh Schroeder (University of Edinburgh)
Cameron Shaw Fordyce


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