[Corpora-List] Call for Participation: 2nd MT Marathon, Berlin, May 12-20

[Philipp Koehn]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:
    SECOND MACHINE TRANSLATION MARATHON
    BERLIN, GERMANY, MAY 12-20, 2008

The EuroMatrix consortium organizes the Second MT Marathon in Berlin
and invites
researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation
for participation.
The event will feature

    * Spring School class on current methods in statistical MT
    * Research showcase
    * Open source convention on resources for machine translation
    * Workshop on evaluation of European language translation
    * Translingual Europe conference

Where & When:
    Wandlitz (near Berlin), SeePark Kurhotel am Wandlitzsee (May 12 -
May 17, 2008)
    Berlin (May 19 & 20, 2008)
How: Registration is now possible!
How much: Attendance is free of charge, but limited.
    We recommend to book a package from the hotel which amounts to
€372.25 for 5
    nights including dinner and breakfast, as well as 6 lunches

http://www.euromatrix.net/second-machine-translation-marathon

Spring School

The Spring School takes place from May 12-16. In daily lectures and
labs, students and
beginning researchers in the field of statistical machine translation
are introduced to recent
methods and the use of currently available open research tools.
Invited talks report on recent
research in the field. At the end of the school, participating
students will know how to build
state-of-the-art machine translation systems from parallel corpora for
any language pair and
will understand current research problems in machine translation.

Day 1: Introduction to MT and MT Evaluation
Day 2: Word-based models and training
Day 3: Phrase-based models and decoding
Day 4: Factored translation models and discriminative training
Day 5: Tree-based models

Research Showcase

Augmenting to the lectures of the summer school, leading researchers
in the field will give
presentation on new methods in statistical machine translation. The
presenters and their
topics will be announced shortly.

Open Source Convention

The EuroMatrix project is dedicated to the development of open source
tools to foster research
and development of machine translation systems. One focus is the
development of the Moses
decoder, which is widely used in academic research as baseline and
benchmark. The open
source convention brings together developers of the Moses decoder and
other open source
efforts for intensive collaboration over a 5-day period (May 12-16).
The sixth day of the
MT Marathon (May 17) is dedicated to open source (Open Source Day). In
a public event
recent developments and available tools are presented to a wider audience.

Hands-on development: Developers who already have some experience in
machine translation
methods and good programming skills are invited to collaborate with
the original Moses
developers and other experts in the field on short but intense 5-day projects.

Call for proposals: The EuroMatrix projects calls for proposals from
developers of machine
translation systems to extend and augment current open source tools
for statistical machine
translation. Such projects which should roughly involve 6 months of
work, carried out as
student projects at universities, development activities at companies,
or hobbyist projects must
add to the freely available open source tool set for machine
translation. Some proposers will
be selected to present their ideas at the Open Source Day, and the
winning proposal will be
awarded with a €1000 grant. Send proposals (1-2 pages) by April 18 to
pkoehn at inf.ed.ac.uk.

Evaluation workshop

During the MT Marathon participants will have a chance to evaluate
state-of-the-art machine
translation quality for a number of European languages. Participants
will judge translations
between English, German, Spanish, French, Czech and Hungarian.  We
will use this as an
opportunity to discuss the types of errors that statistical
translation systems currently make,
and how they might be improved. The workshop will also examine current
research into
automatic evaluation metrics for translation.

If you would like your machine translation system's output to be
judged in the evaluation
workshop, then you can submit an entry to the shared task of the
Euromatrix-sponsored
ACL workshop on statistical machine translation (see
http://www.statmt.org/wmt08/).

Translingual Europe

The international conference Translingual Europe aims to inform
invited representatives of
industry, commerce, research and administration about recent progress
in translation
technology. In order to determine the requirements and the state of
the art with respect to
the European languages, the EU-funded project EuroMatrix has organized an open
technology contest and a survey of available products and resources.
At the Berlin
conference, the results of the endeavors will be presented and
discussed. A third theme
of this conference is the discussion of opportunities and challenges
for European research,
development and technology transfer in this important application area
of information
technology.

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