Call for Papers, Presentations, and Proposals

AMTA 2008
The 8th Biennial Conference of the
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Waikiki, Hawaii, October 21-25

AMTA's mission is to promote progress in the research, development, and use of translation technologies by fostering discussion between researchers, developers, and users of translation technologies in government and industry.

Come join us! For AMTA 2008, we want to offer a wide array of up-to-date content related to translation automation:
first-rate research that defines the cutting edge of future translations systems;
case studies on practical uses of current translation systems in government and industry;
panel discussions of issues that affect everyone interested in translation automation;
a showcase of current and future translation technologies and products;
in-depth tutorials on specific topics in research and use of translation automation;
dynamic panels on issues facing the MT research, MT developer, and MT user communities;
specialized workshops on topics of current interest;
co-located workshops, such as the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2008), and the NIST Metrics for Machine Translation Challenge;
co-located events including LISA@AMTA

We solicit your submissions in English for:
unpublished research papers on any aspect of Machine Translation;
presentations about uses of Machine Translation in government or corporate settings;
proposals for Workshops;
proposals for half-day and full-day Tutorials;
proposals for Panel discussions;

More information about each type of submission is included below.

Conference Web Page: http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2008.html
Important Dates for AMTA 2008
June 30 Final submission deadline for papers, presentations, and proposals
August 1 Notification to authors
August 15 Camera-ready copy due
October 21-25 Conference

MT Research Papers
Contact: Stephan Vogel ( stephan.vogel@cs.cmu.edu )

Machine Translation continues to be one of the most active research areas within Natural Language Processing. MT evaluations, such as those conducted by NIST, provide ample evidence that the field of MT continues to grow and attract more and more researchers. Data-driven approaches have become particularly fashionable in recent years. These approaches have generated systems that have been the top performers in recent comparative evaluations. Furthermore, the challenge of building competitive MT systems has been significantly reduced with the introduction of open source toolkits such as Giza++ and Moses. This development, exciting as it is, also bears the danger of introducing uniformity into MT research. AMTA aims to promote diversity in MT research and actively seeks research papers across the entire range of the MT research spectrum for the AMTA 2008 research program. We solicit submissions in English of unpublished papers describing original research on all aspects of Machine Translation.

Topics
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Advances in data-driven MT (Statistical MT, Example-based MT, etc.)
Advances in rule-based MT (Transfer-based MT, Interlingual MT, etc.)
Lexicon and grammar acquisition and induction
Hybrid approaches that integrate and unify aspects of rule-based MT and statistical MT
MT for resource-poor languages
MT on resource-limited machinery (e.g. PDAs)
Distributed architectures for large data MT
Speech-to-speech or speech-to-text MT
MT with OCR
MT for communication (chats, blogs, social networks)
MT Evaluation

What to submit
Papers should not be longer than 10 pages and should be in pdf format.

How to submit
Detailed submission instructions for research papers will be included in an updated CFP, which will be distributed within the next few weeks. Details will also be posted on the AMTA website as soon as they are available. The final submission deadline for research papers will be June 30 [11:59pm EST (GMT-5:00)].
MT User Presentations: Commercial Users
Contact: Arle Lommel ( arle@lisa.org )

The Commercial User session, hosted and run by the Localization Industry Standards Association ( http://www.lisa.org ), will focus on how MT is used to meet business needs such as just-in-time localization of critical information, provision of technical support information, or creation of preliminary translations for post-editing. Submissions should focus on the use of MT in a business setting and how it is integrated with other technologies to support business goals.
Topics
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
Use of MT to provide localization of data-driven, dynamic, or user-specific information
Use of MT to reduce localization time and/or cost
Ways in which MT can be used to increase the scope of globalization projects
Integrating MT and human translation
Managing change when implementing MT systems
Open-source and Low-cost MT tools; are they realistic and is there a market for them?
What to submit
Ideal presentations will clearly identify a business need and describe how MT meets those needs, with a candid assessment of its strengths and limitations for that particular usage. Submissions should be 250-500 word summaries and may be sent directly in e-mail or as attachments in RTF format.

How to submit
Send submissions and questions to Arle Lommel ( arle@lisa.org ) with a copy to Mike Dillinger ( president@amtaweb.org ) by June 30.
MT User Presentations: Government Users
Contacts: Nick Bemish ( Nicholas.Bemish@dia.mil )
Clare Voss ( voss@arl.army.mil )

The MT User Track emphasizes the strategic value and effectiveness of MT across various applications. This year, AMTA is augmenting its User Track to include more sessions that will focus on issues pertinent to the government community. The primary objective is to recruit participants from government program managers, acquisition experts, researchers, developers, and users of MT technology to help shape and contribute to the content of these special focus sessions. By joining the wider AMTA community for this conference, participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their technical needs, ongoing challenges, and lessons learned. The sessions will be structured to provide open and constructive dialogue among attendees with diverse technical backgrounds and areas of expertise. The secondary objective of this approach is to establish longer-term connections among participants and foster new cooperative efforts.

Topics
Topics for papers, presentations, and panel discussions, including but not limited to:

Integration solutions and their limitations
a. Interoperability of MT engines
b. Security/accreditation
c. Business process/workflow management
d. IT platform challenges (LAN/WAN/Stand-alone)
e. Service-oriented architecture (SOA), MT engines in web services
f. Scalability (at operational and enterprise levels)
g. Maintenance, upgrades, service agreements
Assessments of maturity of current solutions for
a. Speech-to-Text (S2T)
b. Text-to-Text (T2T)
c. OCR and MT
d. Voice recognition, transcription, and translation
e. Image to Text translation
f. Handwriting recognition and translation
Documentation and Validation issues
a. Requirements versus needs
b. Concepts of Operations (conops' for military utility)
c. Proof of concept, Technological readiness levels (TRLs)
d. Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP)
e. Evaluations, baselining, benchmarks, and best of breed
f. Customization, training/tuning
Real-world use of MT
a. Military operational use
b. Homeland Defense
c. Cyber Security
Challenges in Government Acquisition
a. Process
b. Length of Time (Contracting)
c. Funding Streams (Type, Color, Earmark, UFR)
d. Return on Investment (ROI) (Factors for costs of tools, integration, maintenance, linguists, data retrieval and sharing)
Overarching concepts
a. Oversight
b. Policy and Procedures
c. Lessons Learned
d. Measures of performance and effectiveness
e. Human-in-the-Loop and MT-in-the-Loop compatibility (machines do what they do best and humans do what they do best)
Identified "gaps" in current systems
a. Named entities (NE) : incorrect names in MT output, unknown organization names, lack of NE extractors with training modules
b. Dictionaries : incomplete domain and topic coverage, portable across MTs
c. Morphology : significant agreement errors, no learning from corrections
d. Syntax : incorrect dependency analyses, ungrammatical sentences
e. Less commonly taught languages : Africa
f. System combinations : limited plug & play capability across MT tools
g. Adaptation - shift to other text topic & types, go beyond reliance on newswire
h. Pre- and Post-MT editing solutions : lexicon building, translation memory

What to submit
For this special focus of the User Track, AMTA encourages representatives from government agencies as well as those with experience working on contract or in cooperative agreement with government agencies to contact the Track Chairs and identify topics relevant to their interests for inclusion in session discussions or working groups. Proposals for topic sessions that actively promote attendee participation and provide a mix of interactive formats including demos, discussion, and hands-on, on-site access to working systems are strongly encouraged.
This is an open to the public forum, so all topics, presentations and discussions must remain at the Unclassified level. Presentations should be either 20 or 45 minutes in duration and should be indicated at time of submission. Please indicate whether presentations will be allowed for release to AMTA attendees at the conclusion of the conference. Those identified as not for release will be maintained by the Government Users Group co-chairs for a period not to exceed 90 days after the conference ends. PowerPoint and MS word documents are the preferred submission formats. Presentations that address multiple topic areas in a logical sequence are preferred.

How to submit
Send submissions to Nick Bemish ( Nicholas.Bemish@dia.mil ) or Clare Voss (voss@arl.army.mil ).

AMTA Student Research Workshop
Contacts: Aaron Phillips ( aphillips@cmu.edu )
Behrang Mohit ( behrang@cs.pitt.edu )
Faculty Advisor: Alon Lavie ( alavie@cs.cmu.edu )

In its effort to foster the professional growth of the next generation of MT researchers, AMTA 2008 will feature a new AMTA Student Research Workshop, which will be embedded as an integral part of the research program at the conference. Students at all levels of study (undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate) are invited to submit papers describing their research work. To qualify, the main author of the paper must be a student or a post-doc. Both completed work as well as work in progress is eligible for submission. Submissions will be competitively reviewed by a committee consisting of both advanced MT students and researchers, in a process similar to the reviewing of submissions to the main AMTA 2008 research program.

Topics
All topics related to MT research are welcome. See the list of topics for the MT Research Program above for a listing of sample topics of interest.

What to submit
Papers should not be longer than 10 pages and should be in pdf format.

How to submit
Detailed submission instructions for research papers will be included in an updated CFP, which will be distributed within the next few weeks. Details will also be posted on the AMTA website as soon as they are available. The final submission deadline for research papers will be June 30 [11:59pm EST (GMT-5:00)].
Workshop Proposals
Contact: Farzad Ehsani ( farzad@fluentialinc.com )

Special interest groups looking for an opportunity to focus on recent work related to MT are invited to join us in Hawai�??i. Workshops on spoken language translation (IWSLT) and on MT evaluation (organized by NIST) are already being organized for AMTA 2008.

Workshops will be held on Tuesday, October 21 and Saturday, October 25.

Topics
Workshops provide an opportunity for increasing awareness of new technologies or persistent problems. Past workshops have dealt with MT evaluation, syntax in SMT, post-editing techniques, controlled language (CLAW), standards for MT, computer-assisted language learning with MT, using interlinguas for MT, open-source MT, example-based MT, patent translation, MT for the Semantic web, resources, etc.

What to submit
Submissions should include the title of the workshop, a proposed schedule (e.g. call for papers, recruitment of speakers), a list of workshop activities (papers, hands-on activities, shared tasks), technical/audio-visual requirements, the expected number of participants, and whether this is an ongoing or new workshop.

How to submit
Send submissions to Farzad Ehsani ( farzad@fluentialinc.com ). We will evaluate Workshop proposals as soon as they are submitted. The last day for submissions is June 30.
Tutorial Proposals
Contact: Michelle Vanni ( mvanni@arl.army.mil )

AMTA conference tutorials introduce our members to exciting innovations, to practical skills, or to different disciplinary perspectives. MT is a kaleidoscopic universe of ideas, concerns, and capabilities that requires the efforts and talents of professionals in multiple disciplines. The goal of cross-language meaning transfer is shared among translators, technologists, and researchers of all stripes -- but we often need cross-training to improve communication. Tutorials at AMTA enhance our members' effectiveness by offering a means for understanding issues, solutions, and perspectives of multiple approaches and different disciplines.

Tutorials will be held on Tuesday, October 21 and Saturday, October 25.

Topics
Participants should learn about approaches to handling issues and solving problems in MT. Problems can be broad, as with representing meaning at different levels and disambiguating homophones and homographs. They can also be narrow, as with adapting MT systems to instant messaging data or handling specific input degradation phenomena from character and speech recognition in a given language. Evaluation topics provide the opportunity for consideration of concerns relating to approaches whose adoption affects the MT community across the board, among others. Topics are presented in an accessible manner, one that allows for substantive interaction. Tutorials provide valuable information that helps attendees get more out of the conference.

We ask that tutorials be of interest to a broad audience and invite:
Tutorials on practical concerns of managers, technologists, and IT professionals
Technical and scientific tutorials on high-impact issues, approaches, and techniques