CALL FOR PAPERS

AMTA 2012 Workshop on Monolingual Machine Translation (MONOMT 2012)
* Colocated with AMTA 2012 (The Tenth Biennial Conference of the
Association for Machine Translation in the America)

Title: Monolingual Machine Translation (MONOMT 2012).
Date: Nov 1, 2012
Location: San Diego, United States
http://computing.dcu.ie/~tokita/MONOMT/monomt.htm

DESCRIPTION

Due to the increasing demands for high quality translation,
monolingual Machine Translation (MT) subtasks are frequently
encountered in various occasions, where one MT task is decomposed into
several subtasks some of which can be called `monolingual'. Such
monolingual MT subtasks include: (1) MT for morphologically rich
languages, [Bojar, 08] aimed at dealing with morphologic richness of
the target, as is the case with the English-Czech (EN-CZ) language
pair. An MT task is thus split into two subtasks: first, English is
(`bilingually') translated into simplified Czech and then, the
obtained morphologically normalized Czech is (`monolingually')
translated into morphologically rich Czech; (2) system combination
[Matusov et al., 05], where a source sentence is first translated into
the target language by several MT systems, and then, the obtained
translations are combined to create / generate the output in the same
language; (3) statistical post-editing [Dugast et al., 07; Simard et
al., 07], where a source sentence is first translated into the target
language by a rule-based MT system and then, the obtained output is
`monolingually' translated by an SMT system; (4) domain adaptation
using transfer learning [Daume III, 07]: the source side written in a
`source' domain (e.g., newswires) is converted into the target side
written in a `target' domain (e.g., patents); (5) transliteration
between phonemes / alphabets [Knight and Graehl, 98]; (6) considering
reordering issues (SVO and SOV) [Katz-Brown et al., 11]; (7) MERT
process [Arun et al., 10]; (8) translation memory (TM) and MT
integration [Ma et al., 11]; (9) paraphrasing for creating additional
training data or for evaluation purposes.

A distinction could be established between bilingual MT tools
(B-tools) and monolingual MT tools (M-tools) that may be exploited for
monolingual MT. Consider, e.g., monolingual subtasks such as MT for
morphologically rich languages, statistical post-editing, or
transliteration and a task of system combination or domain adaptation
as respective representatives. The latter group is often approached
with monolingual M-tools like monolingual word alignment [Matusov et
al., 05; He et al., 08] and the minimization of Bayes risk [Kumar and
Byrne, 02] (on the outputs of combined systems). However, the former
usually employs bilingual MT tools, like GIZA++ [Och and Ney, 04] to
extract bilingual phrases and MAP decoding on them. The way M-tools
and B-tools are used for monolingual MT is an issue of particular
interest for this workshop.

This workshop is intended to provide the opportunity to discuss ideas
and share opinions on the question of the applicability of M-tools or
B-tools for monolingual MT subtasks, and on their respective strengths
and weaknesses in specific settings. Furthermore we wish to provide
opportunity to demonstrate successful usecases of M-tools.

Possible questions, that are encouraged to be addressed during the
workshop, include:

- ways of applying M-tools to monolingual MT subtasks such as MT for
morphologically rich languages and statistical post-editing.
- investigation of the suitability of B-tools or M-tools for
monolingual MT subtasks.
- performance improvements of monolingual word alignment tools,
since these are necessary for specific monolingual subtasks, such as
MT for morphologically rich languages and statistical post-editing.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: August 3, 2012
Notification to authors:August 31, 2012
Camera ready:September 7, 2012
Workshop: November 1, 2012

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Original papers are invited on different aspects of monolingual MT,
such as:
-MT for morphologically rich languages
-system combination
-statistical post-editing
-domain adaptation
-MERT process
-MT for reordering mismatched language pairs (SVO and SOV, ...)
-MT-TM integration (i.e. MT systems whose prior knowledge includes
bilingual terminology and TM)
-transliteration
-MT using textual entailment
-MT using confidence estimation
-paraphrasing
-hybrid MT
-...

Papers describing the mechanism of MT tools that may be considered
`monolingual' are also encouraged. Some possible topics are listed
below:
-MBR decoding, consensus decoding
-monolingual word alignment (based on TER, METEOR,...)
-language models constructed by learning the representation of data
-data structure related matters
-ranking algorithms
-multitask learning (in the context of domain adaptation)
-...

For more information, please visit http://computing.dcu.ie/~tokita/MONOMT/monomt.htm