[Corpora-List] Reminder CFP: 1st International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-Based MT

Tue Sep 8 08:12:34 UTC 2009

[Apologies for cross-posting]

*********************** Second Call for Papers ************************

First International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-based Machine
Translation

2nd--3rd November 2009 - Alacant, Spain

http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/freerbmt09/
organisers-freeRBMT at dlsi.ua.es

Important dates:

* 25th September - Submission deadline 
* 12th October - Notification to authors 
* 25th October - Deadline for camera-ready copy 
* 2nd/3rd November - Workshop

Description:

The free/open-source software movement has arrived into the field of
machine translation. Machine translation is special in that, in addition
to specific algorithms, it heavily depends on extensive
language-dependent data. Therefore, not only the engine or the tools
used to manage these data have to be free/open-source, but also the data
themselves. There are many machine translation packages of this type
available, but most of them are corpus-based, and, in particular,
statistical machine translation systems: rule-based systems built on
these principles are still little known and little used.

There are distinct advantages to having free/open-source licences for
rule-based machine translation: linguistic knowledge for a language pair
is encoded explicitly in the form of linguistic data, so that both
humans and the machine translation engine can process it. This makes
them naturally available to build knowledge for other language pairs or
even for other human language technologies besides machine translation,
and, conversely, linguistic knowledge from other sources may be reused
to build machine translation systems. The free and open scenario makes
this reuse easier, and, if copylefted licences are used, builds a
commons of knowledge and resources that benefits all the language
communities involved. These advantages are even clearer for
less-resourced languages, for which large bilingual corpora are not
available, and for morphologically rich languages, which even with large
corpora suffer from data sparseness.

This workshop aims at bringing together the experience of researchers
and developers in the field of rule-based machine translation who have
decided to board the free/open-source train and are effectively
contributing to creating that commons of explicit knowledge: machine
translation rules and dictionaries, and machine translation systems
whose behaviour is transparent and clearly traceable through their
explicit logic. 

Scope:

The main areas of interest for the workshop are as follows.

* Language-independent toolkits, platforms, and frameworks for
rule-based machine translation 

* Language-specific machine translation systems 

* Hybrid systems where RBMT is the main component 

* Manual and automated evaluation of machine translation systems,
comparative evaluation of RBMT and SMT/hybrid systems. 

* Linguistic resources for RBMT (machine-readable dictionaries,
part-of-speech taggers, morphological analysers, parsers etc.) 

* Methods for inducing/inferring data for RBMT systems (supervised,
semi-supervised or unsupervised) 

* Interoperability between systems, tools, data 

* Practical descriptions of RBMT integration and usage (in publishing,
by professional translators, for free/open-source software)

Note that this is intended as a guideline, and we welcome submissions on
other aspects of free and open-source rule-based machine translation.

Submissions:

All submissions should be made through the conference management system,
the url of which is: 

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=freerbmt09

Submissions should describe original work, completed or in progress, be
anonymous (no authors, affiliations or addresses, and no explicit
self-reference), be no longer than eight (8) pages of A4, and be in PDF
format. Initial versions of papers must conform to the conference
format.

Where a submission discusses software or data, in final publication it
will be required to include information on how both the software and the
data can be publically accessed. The software and data should be clearly
licensed under an approved licence. A list of free software licences may
be found at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html.

If you come across any problem with your submission, please do not
hesitate to contact the organisers. 

Programme committee:

* Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant 
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant 
* Mikel L. Forcada, Universitat d'Alacant 
* Trond Trosterud, Romssa Universitehta 
* Kevin P. Scannell, University of Saint Louis 
* Hrafn Loftsson, Háskólinn í Reykjavík 
* Kepa Sarasola, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea 
* Lluís Padró, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Organisers:

* Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant 
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant 
* Francis M. Tyers, Universitat d'Alacant 
* Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Universitat d'Alacant
* Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Universitat d'Alacant
  * Xavier Ibars-Rives, Universitat d'Alacant

-- 
Felipe Sánchez Martínez <fsanchez at dlsi.ua.es>
Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos
Universidad de Alicante, E-03071 Alicante (Spain)
Tel.: +34 965 903 400, ext: 2966 Fax: +34 965 909 326
http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~fsanchez

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