Appel: AMTA-2002 Conference

[Alexis Nasr]

            --- PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ---

      The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas



AMTA-2002 Conference

Location:  Tiburon, California

Dates:  October 8-12, 2002



The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is
pleased to announce its fifth biennial conference, planned for October
8-12, 2002, in Tiburon (near San Francisco), California.

Conference theme: From Research to Real Users

Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade
ago at TMI-92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms
for MT, including data-driven approaches (e.g., statistical,
example-based) and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional
rule-based components.

During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer
architectures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated
track, increasing their coverage (primarily through manual update of
their lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and
usage, principally through the medium of the Internet. Web page
translators have become commonplace; a number of online translation
services have appeared, including in their offerings both raw and
post-edited MT; and large corporations have been turning increasingly
to MT to address the exigencies of global communication.  Still, the
output of the transfer-based systems employed in this expansion
represents but a small drop in the ever-growing translation
marketplace bucket.

Now, 10 years later, we wonder if this mounting variety of MT users is
any better off, and if the promise of the research technologies is
being realized to any measurable degree.  In this regard, we pose the
following questions:

Why aren't any current commercially available MT systems primarily
data-driven?

Do any commercially available systems integrate (or plan to integrate)
data-driven components?

Do data-driven systems have significant performance or quality issues?

Can such systems really provide better quality to users, or is their
main advantage one of fast, facilitated customization?

If any new MT technology could provide such benefits (somewhat higher
quality, or facilitated customization), would that be the key to more
widespread use of MT, or are there yet other more relevant unresolved
issues, such as system integration?

If better quality, customization, or system integration aren't the
answer, then what is it that users really need from MT in order for it
to be more useful to them?

We solicit participation on these and other topics related to the
research, development, and use of MT in the form of original papers,
demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and panels. We invite all who
are interested in MT to participate, including developers,
researchers, end users, professional translators, managers, and
marketing experts. We especially invite users to share their
experiences, developers to describe their novel systems, managers and
marketers to talk about what is happening in the marketplace,
researchers to detail new capabilities or methods, and visionaries to
describe the future as they see it.  We also welcome and encourage
participation by members of AMTA's sister organizations, AAMT in Asia
and EAMT in Europe.

For planning purposes, preliminary dates for submissions are as follows:

Submissions due:                    April 15, 2002 (Monday)

Notification of acceptance:         May 31, 2002 (Friday)

Final versions due:                 July 15, 2002 (Monday)

Details regarding the conference, including submission guidelines,
will be provided shortly on the AMTA Web site:

http://www.amtaweb.org <http://www.amtaweb.org/>

Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair

Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair






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