Contact: Jay Marciano (tutorials@amtaweb.org or workshops@amtaweb.org)

AMTA 2020, the 18th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas will be held at the Sheraton Hotel Lake Buena Vista in Orlando, Florida, from September 8 through 12, 2020.

The organizing committee of AMTA 2020 is seeking proposals for workshops and tutorials on all topics related to MT research, development, application, and evaluation. Our goal is to have a program of workshops and tutorials that appeals to the various constituents of AMTA (researchers, developers, commercial users, and language professionals). Therefore we welcome not only proposals on technical research and development topics but also on, for instance, human/computer interaction among translators, interpreters, and other users of MT output, and the evolving role of translation automation in the commercial translation production pipeline. 

Tutorials and Workshops will be held on Tuesday, 8 September 2020, immediately preceding the main conference, and Saturday, 12 September 2020, immediately following the main conference.

Tutorials

Tutorials are a forum for experts in MT and MT-related areas to deliver concentrated training on a topic of interest in half-day teaching sessions. Tutorials help conference participants enrich their understanding of particular technical, applied, and business matters surrounding research, development and use of MT and associated technologies, or, in the case of tutorials designed for newcomers, provide background information that facilitates greater understanding of the overall conference program.

Proposals for tutorials should be submitted by 27 April 2020, to tutorials@amtaweb.org and include:

• title
•  a 250-500 word description of the proposed content
• any technical requirements you may have
• and a scanned signed copy of the Tutorial Policy and Leader Agreement Form.

Workshops

AMTA workshops are intended to provide the opportunity for MT-related communities of interest to spend focused time together advancing the state of thinking or the state of practice in their area of interest or endeavor. Workshops are generally scheduled as full-day event.

Workshop proposals should be submitted by April 27, 2020, to workshops@amtaweb.org and include:

• title
•  a 250-500 word description of the proposed content
•  whether this is an ongoing or new workshop
• the expected number of participants
• dates for important milestones (call for papers, recruitment of speakers, etc.)
•  any technical requirements you may have
• and a scanned signed copy of the AMTA Workshop Policy and Leader Agreement Form.

We look forward to receiving your proposal!

Contact: Ben Huyck (governmentmtusers@amtaweb.org)

Government and Military MT Stakeholders:

We encourage you to submit a proposal to speak at AMTA 2020 about your insights on research, development and operational use of MT and MT-related technologies in government and military settings. We especially encourage perspectives that challenge the broader MT community, including issues with implementing and utilizing MT, whether on the technical side, the human side or both.

Important dates:
• Submission deadline: Monday, April 27, 2020
• Notifications of acceptance: Monday, June 8, 2020
• Final “camera-ready” versions: Monday, July 27, 2020

Topics of interest:
1. MT as an operational tool for translation, analysis, information discovery.
2. MT for “non-standard” language in chats, blogs and social networks.
3. Evaluation of MT including estimation of ROI and human factors.
4. MT research and development in government and military settings.
5. Integration of MT into broader workflow, including case studies.
6. Linguistic resources for MT, especially those hard to find or create.
7. Neural MT opportunities and challenges.
8. MT in Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief contexts.
9. Challenges, opportunities and insights into MT needs for the government and military.

Submit your abstract:
Initial submissions should be abstracts 250-500 words in length. The following should accompany each abstract submission:
1. Presentation Title
2. Presenter Name
3. Representing Organization
4. Email Address
5. Phone Number

All accepted submissions will be allotted 30-minute time slots. 

If you have original software that you would like to show, you may also consider submitting a proposal for the exhibition segment.

Publication:
While not mandatory, presenters wishing to have their submissions published in the AMTA 2020 Proceedings are required to produce papers in accordance with the MT Research Track (https://amtaweb.org/amta-2020-call-mt-researchers-papers/) submission guidelines. Slide decks may also be accepted. While only abstracts are required to be submitted by the initial submission date, only papers or slide decks will be accepted by the final camera-ready date for publication in the Proceedings.How to submit:
Please email your abstract to the Government/Military MT Stakeholders Chair (governmentmtusers@amtaweb.org) by Monday, April 27, 2020.

Contact: Janice Campbell, Dmitriy Genzel (commercialmtusers@amtaweb.org)

Overview

The Commercial Users and Translators track will focus on how MT helps corporations, Language Service Providers, and professional translators deliver products and services more effectively. Submissions should report on the use of MT and/or related tools, processes and technologies, to support business goals and serve customer needs in commercial settings.

Theme – Applying Innovation to Business Challenges

Producing ever-increasing volumes of multilingual content with constrained budgets has become a mantra for businesses entering global markets. These challenges are being met through the adoption of innovative technologies and tools, the automation of processes and workflows, and the application of artificial intelligence approaches.        

The machine translation technology landscape is dotted with innovations in translation productivity tools, advancements in neural networks, and novel approaches to producing and delivering content to international audiences.

The goal of the commercial track is to provide a broad spectrum of machine translation applications to achieve the rapid delivery of multilingual content within the constraints of time, cost, scope and quality.   

Topics of interest might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Making the business case for adopting MT to drive business requirements, expand markets and engage with customers.
• Practical applications for using raw (aka stock) MT no human intervention, such as post editing.
• Novel approaches to using MT in a commercial environment.
• Advances in adaptive and interactive MT technologies.
• Process and criteria for migrating to Neural MT from other systems, such as Statistical MT.
• Using MT for leveraging between similar languages, such as Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian, Spanish and Catalan; and language variants such as US to UK English, Brazilian to Continental Portuguese.  
• MT quality and confidence scoring, tools, and metrics that support business KPIs.
• Productivity measures and quality frameworks that enhance business processes and translation workflows.
• TM cleanup and corpus preparation techniques for engine training.
• Approaches and challenges to building your own MT engines.
• Quality vs. quantity and fit for purpose when choosing corpora for customizing engines (e.g. Translation Memories, terminology/glossaries, Do Not Translate lists).
• MT Post Editing challenges.
• New business applications for MT; for example, speech to speech, speech to text, videos, search and indexing applications, emergency response and disaster management, social media, chatbots.
• API challenges such as tag handling and/or reordering.
• Open Standards for machine translation
• Overview and comparisons of open source MT tools and services.
• Artificial Intelligence approaches to machine translation including Natural Language Processing or Machine Learning applications to enhance the translation process (e.g. information extraction and retrieval, text categorization, Named Entity Recognition, POS tagging, etc.).
• Approaches and challenges to using MT for low-resource or long-tail languages.
• Advances in domain adaptation.
• Handling potentially offensive, illegal or profane language in MT output.

Important dates

Submission deadline: April 27, 2020

Notification of acceptance: June 8, 2020

Final “camera-ready” versions: July 27, 2020

What to submit

Please submit a 250 to 500-word abstract describing the topic of your presentation to the Commercial MT Users Chairs (commercialmtusers@amtaweb.org). Address any questions to this email address. Presentations will describe how MT services, as well as complementary systems, technologies, tools and processes address specific business challenges. Submissions should not contain commercial solicitations of specific tools. If you have original software that you would like to show, you may also consider submitting a proposal to Exhibitions.

Publication

Please indicate whether you intend to submit your presentation for publication in the AMTA 2020 Conference Proceedings. Although it  is not a requirement, we strongly encourage you to make your presentation available in the Proceedings so that others can learn from your experiences. If you agree to have your presentation published in the Proceedings, you should format it according to the Research Track submission guidelines. However, slide decks are also acceptable. Only abstracts are required to be submitted by the initial submission date. Papers and slide decks will be accepted by the final camera-ready date for publication in the Proceedings.

AMTA solicits original research papers that will advance the field of Machine Translation. In addition to regular contributions, we are also seeking extended abstracts that report in-progress work or novel applications of technology to real scenarios. Submissions must be unpublished and in English.

We seek submissions across the entire spectrum of MT-related research, but put a particular focus on AMTA’s strength: the close interaction between researchers and practitioners who are looking to apply the latest MT technology to their tasks. We particularly encourage submissions that are oriented towards building robust and practical systems, including user-in-the-loop translation systems, adaptation to particular domains or usage scenarios, and utilization of available resources in production scenarios.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: Monday, 27 April 2020

Notification of acceptance: Monday, 8 June 2020

Final “camera-ready” versions: Monday, 27 July 2020

All deadlines are in “Anywhere on Earth” time zone (GMT-12).

Submission Instructions:

Full papers must not exceed 12 (twelve) pages plus 2 (two) pages for references, and must be formatted according to the AMTA style guide: PDF version / LaTeX version / MS Word version. These papers will be rigorously reviewed for novelty and impact, and published in the AMTA proceedings. They will be presented at the conference as either oral presentations or posters.

We will also be accepting submissions of extended abstracts of no more than 6 (six) pages plus 2 (two) pages for references. These abstracts can be used to report in-progress or late-breaking research results, analyses of the effects of applying research technology to practical application scenarios, or descriptions of demos appearing at the conference. Abstract submissions are further divided into two subcategories:

1. Original contributions, which will be included in the conference proceedings upon acceptance.
2. Non-archival submissions, which will not not appear in the proceedings, but will still be presented at the conference.

Both types of abstracts will be double-blind reviewed for informativeness, correctness and clarity. They will be presented at the conference as posters. Abstracts should be anonymized, and should put “This is a submission to the [original / non-archival] extended abstract track.” at the end of the abstract field in the START submission page (it does not need to be noted in the paper itself).

Submitted papers must be in PDF. To allow for blind reviewing, please do not include author names and affiliations within the paper, and avoid obvious self-references. Papers must be submitted to the START system (https://www.softconf.com/amta2020/papers/) by 11:59 pm PDT (GMT – 7 hours), Monday, 27 April 2020.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Advances in various MT paradigms: data-driven, rule-based, and hybrids
• MT applications and embedding: translation/localization aids, speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, OCR, MT for communication (chats, blogs, social networks), multilingual applications, etc.
• Technologies for MT deployment: quality estimation and domain adaptation
• MT in special settings: low resources, massive resources, high volume, low computing resources
• Human factors in MT and user interfaces for MT
• Linguistic resources for MT: dictionaries, terminology banks, corpora
• MT evaluation techniques and evaluation results
• Empirical studies on translation data

Multiple Submissions:

Full papers and extended abstracts that will appear in the AMTA proceedings must represent new work that has not been previously published (pre-prints posted online on servers such as arXiv do not count as published papers, and thus are allowed to be submitted). It is the responsibility of the author(s) to inform the program chairs of any potential problem with respect to this requirement. Authors submitting a similar paper both to AMTA and another conference or workshop must inform the program chairs by email (mtresearchers@amtaweb.org), specifying to which other conference or workshop they are submitting their work. If a paper is accepted at both AMTA and another conference, then to appear at AMTA it can either be presented at AMTA as a full paper and withdrawn from the other conference, or it can be withdrawn from the AMTA proceedings, but still presented at AMTA as a non-archival extended abstract.