Conf: AMTA-2002

[Thierry Hamon]

From: "Jessie Pinkham" <jessiep at microsoft.com>
Message-Id: <DE8C2EEE23641143A8C0CD7705C26AE70423CCF0 at red-msg-03.redmond.corp.microsoft.com>
X-url: http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2002/

           --- CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ---
     --- ONLINE REGISTRATION NOW AVAILABLE! ---

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.

Online registration is now available on the conference web site:
http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2002/

Register at a discounted rate until August 11, 2002!

A preliminary program, providing the schedule for tutorials,
workshops, exhibits, accepted papers, panels, and invited speakers for
the conference, is also now posted on the conference web site.

We look forward to seeing you in Tiburon!


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?

INVITED SPEAKERS

We are pleased to announce that invited speakers for the conference
will include Yorick Wilks and Ken Church, both notable participants at
TMI-92, and Jaap van der Meer, former CEO of ALPNET.  We anticipate
that the speakers will provide a sharp and stimulating focus on the
theme of the conference.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair
Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Local Arrangements Chair
Bob Frederking, Workshops and Tutorials
Laurie Gerber, Exhibits Coordinator

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Arendse Bernth (IBM Research)
Christian Boitet (GETA, CLIPS, IMAG)
Ralf Brown (LTI, CMU)
Robert Cain (Foreign Broadcast Information Service)
Michael Carl (RALI)
Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research)
Laurie Gerber (Language Technology Broker)
Stephen Helmreich (CRL, NMSU)
Eduard Hovy (ISI, USC)
Pierre Isabelle (XRCE)
Christine Kamprath (Caterpillar)
Elliott Macklovitch (RALI)
Bente Maegaard (CST)
Michael McCord (IBM Research)
Robert C. Moore (Microsoft Research)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen)
Sergei Nirenburg (CRL, NMSU)
Franz Och (RWTH Aachen)
Joseph Pentheroudakis (Microsoft Research)
Jessie Pinkham (Microsoft Research)
Fred Popowich (Gavagai Technology Inc.)
Florence Reeder (MITRE)
Harold Somers (UMIST)
Keh-Yih Su (Behavior Design Corp.)
Eiichiro Sumita (ATR)
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI)
Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft Research)
Hideo Watanabe (TRL, IBM)
Andy Way (Dublin City Univ.)
Eric Wehrli (Univ. of Geneva)
John White (Northrop Grumman IT)
Jin Yang (SYSTRAN)
Ming Zhou (Microsoft Research)

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