The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
October 6-10
The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas has been rescheduled to OCTOBER 6-10 and will be held as a virtual conference using Microsoft Teams, a powerful, enterprise collaboration platform. It was previously scheduled from September 8-12 in Orlando, Florida.
The submission deadline for all papers and presentations has now been extended two months in order to provide time to rework submissions, and in some cases, to reconsider making submissions during what continues to be a period of great uncertainty.
The organizing committee will do everything possible to maximize virtual interactions between conference attendees within all the contexts normally provided by a physical conference. We expect to have an expanded virtual audience of experts and practitioners from research, industry, and academia, including many students who might normally not be able to attend.
For academic and commercial researchers, AMTA 2020 provides a unique opportunity to share the latest results with colleagues as well as understand real-world user requirements. Business and government participants will benefit from updates on leading-edge R&D in Machine Translation and have a chance to present and discuss their use cases.
The virtual conference will continue to feature three main tracks – Research, Commercial, and Government, each dedicated to a respective area in machine translation research, commercial application, and government use. There will be invited talks from experts in the field such as Colin Cherry (Google Research), Mona Diab (George Washington University), Chris Wendt (Microsoft Research), Eric Paquin (Translators without Borders), Danielle Silverman (National Virtual Translation Center), and Andy Way (ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University), as well as panels of practitioners from across the MT spectrum. A special Student Research Workshop will provide students an opportunity to present their work during a session of the main conference. Relevant and engaging tutorials and workshops will also be held on the first and last days of the conference.
The following dates have been updated to provide for the new virtual format and they apply to each of the tracks listed below:
Submission deadline: Wednesday, 1 July 2020
Notification of acceptance:Monday, 3 August 2020
Final “camera-ready” versions: Monday, 31 August 2020
Main conference: 6-10 October 2020
The submission and “camera-ready” deadline time zone is “Anywhere on Earth” (UTC–12). Before the conference, the organizing committee will work with each presenter to ensure readiness for presenting in the virtual environment. By default, we expect presenters to give live presentations with an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of each presentation. In certain cases, however, the committee may determine that pre-recording the presentation is a preferable option to ensure its quality. More information on acceptable modes of presentation will be forthcoming.
We look forward to “seeing” you at AMTA 2020 – VIRTUAL!
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 with 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.
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 they will be 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:
Original contributions, which will be included in the conference proceedings upon acceptance.
Non-archival submissions, which will 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 (UTC-12), Wednesday, 1 July 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. Full papers presented at the conference and included in the proceedings will also be hosted on the ACL Anthology.
AMTA will hold its first Student Research Workshop together with the main conference in 2020 and invites submissions from students at all stages of their education.
The purpose of the Student Research Workshop is to provide students with a special opportunity to present their work and receive focused, intentional feedback from international experts in the field of machine translation. Accepted work will have at least one experienced member of the government, industry, and/or academia with knowledge in the student’s particular research area. These senior members will prepare comments and questions ahead of time and will work with the student to provide them with an outside perspective on their work’s impact and potential.
We invite two types of submissions:
Research papers must describe original, unpublished work, and follow the submission criteria described in the AMTA 2020 Call for MT Research Papers above. They may include multiple authors, but the primary and first author must be a student. These papers will be blindly reviewed and evaluated and then presented along with main conference papers. They will be published in the AMTA Student Research Workshop volume of the conference proceedings and hosted on the ACL Anthology.
Research proposals may contain previously published work. They should describe a proposed research trajectory, ideally (but optionally) rooted in the student’s existing work that is either already completed or in-progress. Research proposals must have only a single author.
Submissions:
All submitted papers must be in PDF. Papers must be submitted to the START system at https://www.softconf.com/amta2020/srw/ by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), Wednesday, 1 July 2020.
For Research Papers please follow the submission guidelines found in the Call for MT Research Papers, noting the alternate submission URL above.
Research Proposals should be no longer than 5 (five) pages (not counting references, which have no page limit). Another page will be allowed for accepted papers.
Call for Presentations: Commercial MT Users and Translators:
The Commercial MT Users and Translators track will focus on how MT helps corporations, NGOs, 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. We welcome presentations from MT technology and service providers, but their presentations should not constitute a “sales pitch;” the focus should be on innovative MT technology, processes, and principles rather than on a particular product or offering.
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 may 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.
What to submit
Please submit a 250 to 500-word abstract describing the topic of your presentation by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), Wednesday, 1 July 2020 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 (more information coming soon).
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 submission guidelines in the AMTA 2020 Call for MT Research Papers above. However, slide decks are also acceptable. Only abstracts are required to be submitted by the initial submission date, however, only papers and slide decks will be accepted by the final camera-ready date for publication in the Proceedings.
Call for Presentations: Government and Military MT Stakeholders
We invite 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.
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.
Submissions:
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
Please email your abstract to the Government/Military MT Stakeholders Chair (govtmtusers@amtaweb.org) by 11:59PM (UTC-12), Wednesday, 1 July 2020.
If you have original software that you would like to show, you may also consider submitting a proposal to Exhibitions (more information coming soon).
Publication
While not mandatory, presenters are strongly encouraged to have their submissions published in the AMTA 2020 Proceedings, producing papers in accordance with the submission guidelines in the AMTA 2020 Call for MT Research Papers above. 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.
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 deeply technical research and development topics but also on, for instance, the collection and curation of training data, best practices in training MT systems, 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, 6 October 2020, immediately preceding the main conference, and Saturday, 10 October 2020, immediately following the main conference. All tutorial presenters and workshop chairs will receive training on the conference’s virtual meeting platform.
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.
Because of the unusual circumstances of this conference, every effort will be made to accept or reject (with reason) tutorial proposals as soon as possible after they are received by the organizing committee.
Proposals for tutorials should be submitted by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), Wednesday, 1 July 2020, to tutorials@amtaweb.org and include:
The title
a 250-500 word description of the proposed content
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 a full-day event.
Because of the unusual circumstances of this conference, every effort will be made to accept or reject (with reason) workshop proposals as soon as possible after they are received by the organizing committee.
Workshop proposals should be submitted by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), Wednesday, 1 July 2020, to workshops@amtaweb.org and include:
the 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.)
The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas has been rescheduled to OCTOBER 6-10 and will be held as a virtual conference using Microsoft Teams, a powerful, enterprise collaboration platform. It was previously scheduled from September 8th to the 12th in Orlando, Florida
We apologize for sending out this notice only now, but along with the organizers of many other conferences, we have been scrambling to finalize the new arrangements.
The submission deadline for all papers and presentations, which was April 27, will now be extended approximately two months in order to give everyone plenty of time to rework their submissions, and in some cases reconsider making submissions during what continues to be a time of great uncertainty.
An updated Call For Papers and Presentations with new dates and submission instructions will be distributed on or before next Monday, May 4th.
Please know that we will do everything possible to maximize virtual interactions between conference attendees within all the contexts normally provided by a physical conference, and we expect to have an expanded virtual audience of experts and practitioners from research, industry, and academia, including many students who might normally not be able to attend.
For academic and commercial researchers, AMTA 2020 provides a unique opportunity to share the latest results with colleagues as well as understand real-world user requirements. Business and government participants will benefit from updates on leading-edge R&D in Machine Translation and have a chance to present and discuss their use cases.
The virtual conference will continue to feature three main tracks – Research, Commercial, and Government, each dedicated to a respective area in machine translation research, commercial application, and government use.There will be invited talks from experts in the field such as Colin Cherry (Google Research), Mona Diab (George Washington University), Chris Wendt (Microsoft Research), Eric Paquin (Translators without Borders), Danielle Silverman (National Virtual Translation Center), and Andy Way (ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University), as well as panels of practitioners from across the MT spectrum. A special Student Research Workshop that will provide students an opportunity to present their work during a session of the main conference. Relevant and engaging tutorials and workshops will also be held on the first and last days of the conference.
We look forward to “seeing” you at AMTA 2020 – VIRTUAL!
Steve Richardson
AMTA President
We are pleased to announce that the following machine translation experts from the research, commercial, and government sectors will be giving keynote presentations at the conference:
Colin Cherry is a Research Scientist at Google
Translate in Montreal. Previously, he was a Senior Research Officer at Canada’s
National Research Council. His primary research area is machine translation,
but he has also been known to venture into parsing, morphology and information
extraction. He is currently chair of the executive board of the North American
Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), an action editor at the
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), and
recently served as research track chair for the meeting of the Association for
Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA 2018).
Title: Simultaneous Machine Translation: Challenges and Opportunities
Mona Diab conducts research in Statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a rapidly growing, exciting field of research in artificial intelligence and computer science. Interdisciplinarity is inherent to NLP, drawing on the fields of computer algorithms, software engineering, statistics, machine learning, linguistics, pragmatics, information technology, etc. In NLP, researchers model language and its use, and build both analytical models and predictive ones. In Professor Diab’s NLP lab, they address problems in social media processing, building robust enabling technologies such as syntactic and semantic processing tools for written texts in different languages, information extraction tools for large data, multilingual processing, machine translation, and computational sociolinguistic processing. Professor Diab has a special interest in Arabic NLP, where the emphasis has been on investigating Arabic dialect processing where there are very few available automated resources.
Group Program Manager for Microsoft’s
automatic translation service.
Chris Wendt graduated as
Diplom-Informatiker from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and subsequently
spent a decade on software internationalization for a multitude of Microsoft
products, including Windows, Internet Explorer, MSN and Bing – bringing these
products to market with equal functionality worldwide.
Since 2005, he has been leading the program management team for Microsoft’s Machine Translation development, responsible for Microsoft Translator, part of Azure Cognitive Services. On the way he delivered Bing Translator and Skype Translator, connecting Microsoft’s research activities with its practical use in services and applications. He is based at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Starting his career as an entrepreneur with technology start-ups in the commercial internet and online search space, Eric Paquin then spent 20 years in various roles in the localisation industry before turning his attention to innovation and design thinking. After completing an MSc in Product Management, he spent the last 2.5 years learning about machine translation technologies and machine learning in general, and helping startups defining their strategy and business goals before joining Translators Without Borders as their Chief Technology Officer.
Government Keynote Speakers
TBA
Machine Translation is here to stay. For many years, MT has seen advances in the quality of output, the number of users, language pair and domain coverage, as well as the number of enterprises investing in MT. MT is now an integral part of most CAT tools and post-editing is a de facto task required from language professionals in many domains. The introduction and wide-scale adoption of NMT has boosted this even more. Languages and domains that were not supported previously are now serious contenders for MT, at least for gisting, if not for more. As MT becomes more and more mainstream, an increasing number of people are interacting with it, for a variety of purposes, even beyond the commercial language industry. The 2020 AMTA conference is therefore an excellent moment in time to take stock of the nature of this interaction, the impact to date and the potential impact into the future.
Building on the success of past workshops that address post-editing, such as the ones held at AMTA 2018 and MT Summit 2019, we present PEMDT1. Like its predecessors, this workshop will bring together post-editing translation tool users (practitioners) and researchers to compare and contrast how each use digital technology for translation. Specifically, the workshop focuses on novel advances in modern-day Computer-Assisted Tools (CAT) such as, but not limited to, Automatic Post-Editing (APE), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and post-editing techniques and their usefulness as components in a practitioner’s workflow. The workshop’s aim is to gain a modern-day outlook on tools and the latest research in the post-editing sector. There will be open discussion amongst attendees along with invited speakers with an attempt to discern what is best for the post-editing field.
AMTA conferences are unique in bringing together MT researchers, developers, and users of MT technology from academia, industry, and government. This year AMTA 2020 we have arranged for a spectacular venue in Orlando, Florida, located just outside the Disney theme parks.
Why attend AMTA 2020? For academic and commercial researchers, it provides a unique opportunity to share the latest results with colleagues as well as understand real-world user requirements. Business and government participants will benefit from updates on leading-edge R&D in Machine Translation and have a chance to present and discuss their use cases.
The conference will feature three main tracks – Research, Commercial, and Government, each dedicated to a respective area in machine translation research, commercial application, and government use. There will be invited talks from experts in the field such as Colin Cherry (Goggle Research), Mona Diab (George Washington University), Chris Wendt (Microsoft Research), and Eric Paquin (Translators without Borders), as well as panels of practitioners from across the MT spectrum. A special Student Research Workshop that will provide students an opportunity to present their work during a session of the main conference. Relevant and engaging tutorials and workshops will also be held on the first and last days of the conference.
The following important dates apply to each of the tracks listed below:
Submission deadline: Monday, 27 April 2020
Notification of acceptance: Monday, 8 June 2020
Conference registration opens: Monday, 22 June 2020
Final “camera-ready” versions: Monday, 27 July 2020
Main conference: September 8–12, 2020
The submission and “camera-ready” deadline time zone is “Anywhere on Earth” (UTC–12).
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 with 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.
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 they will be 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:
Original contributions, which will be included in the conference proceedings upon acceptance.
Non-archival submissions, which will 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 (UTC-12), 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. Full papers presented at the conference and included in the proceedings will also be hosted on the ACL Anthology.
AMTA will hold its first Student Research Workshop together with the main conference in 2020 and invites submissions from students at all stages of their education.
The purpose of the Student Research Workshop is to provide students with a special opportunity to present their work and receive focused, intentional feedback from international experts in the field of machine translation. Accepted work will have at least one experienced member of the government, industry, and/or academia with knowledge in the student’s particular research area. These senior members will prepare comments and questions ahead of time and will work with the student to provide them with an outside perspective on their work’s impact and potential.
We invite two types of submissions:
Research papers must describe original, unpublished work, and follow the submission criteria described in the AMTA 2020 Call for MT Research Papers. They may include multiple authors, but the primary and first author must be a student. These papers will be blindly reviewed and evaluated and then presented along with main conference papers. They will be published in the AMTA Student Research Workshop volume of the conference proceedings and hosted on the ACL Anthology.
Research proposals may contain previously published work. They should describe a proposed research trajectory, ideally (but optionally) rooted in the student’s existing work that is either already completed or in-progress. Research proposals must have only a single author.
Submissions:
All submitted papers must be in PDF. Papers must be submitted to the START system at https://www.softconf.com/amta2020/srw/ by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), Monday, 27 April 2020.
Research Proposals should be no longer than 5 (five) pages (not counting references, which have no page limit). Another page will be allowed for accepted papers.
Call for Presentations: Commercial MT Users and Translators:
The Commercial MT Users and Translators track will focus on how MT helps corporations, NGOs, 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. We welcome presentations from MT technology and service providers, but their presentations should not constitute a “sales pitch;” the focus should be on innovative MT technology, processes, and principles rather than on a particular product or offering.
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 may 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.
What to submit
Please submit a 250 to 500-word abstract describing the topic of your presentation by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), Monday, 27 April 2020 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 (more information coming soon).
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 MT Research Papers submission guidelines above. However, slide decks are also acceptable. Only abstracts are required to be submitted by the initial submission date, however, only papers and slide decks will be accepted by the final camera-ready date for publication in the Proceedings.
Call for Presentations: Government and Military MT Stakeholders
We invite 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.
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.
Submissions:
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
Please email your abstract to the Government/Military MT Stakeholders Chair (govtmtusers@amtaweb.org) by 11:59PM (UTC-12), Monday, April 27, 2020.
If you have original software that you would like to show, you may also consider submitting a proposal to Exhibitions (more information coming soon).
Publication
While not mandatory, presenters are strongly encouraged to have their submissions published in the AMTA 2020 Proceedings, producing papers in accordance with the MT Research Papers submission guidelines above. 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.
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 11:59 pm (UTC-12), 27 April 2020, to tutorials@amtaweb.org and include:
title
a 250-500 word description of the proposed content
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 a full-day event.
Workshop proposals should be submitted by 11:59 pm (UTC-12), 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.)
AMTA 2020 – VIRTUAL The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. October 6-10 The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas has been rescheduled to OCTOBER 6-10 and will be held as a virtual conference using Microsoft Teams, a powerful, enterprise collaboration platform. It was previously scheduled from September 8-12 in Orlando, […]
The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas has been rescheduled to OCTOBER 6-10 and will be held as a virtual conference using Microsoft Teams, a powerful, enterprise collaboration platform. It was previously scheduled from September 8th to the 12th in Orlando, Florida We apologize for sending out this notice only now, but along with the organizers […]
We are pleased to announce that the following machine translation experts from the research, commercial, and government sectors will be giving keynote presentations at the conference: Research Keynote Speakers Colin Cherry Colin Cherry is a Research Scientist at Google Translate in Montreal. Previously, he was a Senior Research Officer at Canada’s National Research Council. His […]
Machine Translation is here to stay. For many years, MT has seen advances in the quality of output, the number of users, language pair and domain coverage, as well as the number of enterprises investing in MT. MT is now an integral part of most CAT tools and post-editing is a de facto task required […]
Building on the success of past workshops that address post-editing, such as the ones held at AMTA 2018 and MT Summit 2019, we present PEMDT1. Like its predecessors, this workshop will bring together post-editing translation tool users (practitioners) and researchers to compare and contrast how each use digital technology for translation. Specifically, the workshop focuses […]
The 14th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. September 8-12 Sheraton Orlando Lake Buena Vista Resort Orlando, Florida, USA AMTA conferences are unique in bringing together MT researchers, developers, and users of MT technology from academia, industry, and government. This year AMTA 2020 we have arranged for a spectacular venue […]
