MT Summit 2021 | 2nd Call for Papers, Presentations, and Workshop and Tutorial Proposals
MT Summit XVIII – 2021
The 18th biennial conference of the International Association of Machine Translation
16-20 August 2021, Orlando, Florida, USA
We are pleased to distribute the 2nd call for papers and presentations, as well as for proposals for Workshops and Tutorials, for MT Summit XVIII, the 18th Machine Translation Summit, to be held 16-20 August 2021. The conference is set to take place at a spectacular venue located just outside the Disney theme parks, the Sheraton Orlando Lake Buena Vista Resort in Orlando, Florida, USA. We also plan to provide registration options for remote viewing of conference presentations, and we will continue to monitor the pandemic situation closely, converting to a completely virtual format if needed to ensure the safety of participants.
This year’s conference is organized by the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. The biennial MT Summit brings together the American (AMTA), Asian-Pacific (AAMT) and European (EAMT) branches of the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT), creating an invaluable opportunity to discuss the issues of the day with a truly global gathering of MT researchers, developers, providers, and users. For academic, student, and commercial researchers, MT Summit XVIII provides a unique context in which to share the latest results with colleagues as well as understand real-world user requirements. MT providers and users in both business and government settings will benefit from updates on leading-edge R&D in Machine Translation and have a chance to present and discuss their use cases. In all these contexts, we strongly encourage student submissions and participation as well.
Special Opportunity for Students
Students who register for the conference will have the opportunity to be paired with mentors to discuss career goals, aspirations, experiences, and recommendations. Repeating the very successful student mentoring sessions held at the AMTA 2020 conference last October, experts in Machine Translation across Academia, Industry, and Government have volunteered to lead small group sessions where students can ask questions and get exposure to the details of possible MT-related career paths. These opportunities are available to all students who attend the conference, regardless of background or experience.
Survey Opportunity on MT Trends
One of the keynotes at the MT Summit will review the results of a survey conducted by CSA Research on MT Trends. We invite representatives from all commercial and government organizations, as well as LSPs and individual freelancers, to participate in this survey about how you and/or your business uses MT technology. Participants will receive the survey results, allowing them to benchmark themselves against their peers. The deadline to participate is April 9, 2021. Please help us collect data that will be meaningful and valuable to the entire MT community by taking this survey.
Conference Tracks
The conference will feature three main tracks – Research, Users and Providers, and Government, each dedicated to a respective area in machine translation research, commercial application, and government use.
The following important dates apply to each of the tracks:
- Submission deadline: Monday, 10 May 2021
- Notification of acceptance: Monday, 21 June 2021
- Final “camera-ready” versions: Monday, 12 July 2021
Please note the earlier deadline for submission of Workshop proposals: Monday, 12 April 2021
The submission and “camera-ready” deadline time zone for all the above dates is “Anywhere on Earth” (UTC–12).
IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to the hybrid nature of the conference, all papers, presentations, tutorials, and workshops will be recorded without exception. Any submission will be understood by the MT Summit Organizing Committee as giving your tacit permission for the organizers to create a video recording of your presentation and make it available to conference attendees, and potentially to members of AMTA, AAMT, or EAMT as well. Depending on the final format of the conference, we may also request that presentations be pre-recorded.
Guidelines for submission to the tracks of the conference are as follows:
Research Track
Chairs: Kevin Duh, Francisco Guzman (mtresearchers@amtaweb.org)
We invite original, substantial, and unpublished research in all aspects of machine translation (MT). We seek submissions across the entire spectrum of MT-related research, but with a particular focus on MT Summit’s strength: the close interaction between researchers and practitioners who are looking to apply the latest MT technology to their tasks. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Advances in data-driven MT (e.g. neural, statistical)
- Lexicon acquisition and integration into MT
- MT for low resource languages
- Model distillation, compression, and on-device MT
- MT in production scenarios, robustness and deployment issues.
- MT for multiple modalities (Speech, OCR)
- MT for communication (chats, blogs, social networks)
- Few-shot adaptation of pre-trained MT systems
- Deep integration of MT technology within translation and localization pipelines
- Large-scale mining of translation resources
- Computer Assisted Translation (CAT)
- MT Evaluation
- Measuring Fairness, Bias, Transparency in Translation
- Detecting and preventing Catastrophic errors in Translation
- Best practices in annotation for Translation
Submission Instructions:
Papers should not be longer than 10 pages of content (for references, unlimited number of pages is allowed). The papers must be submitted in PDF format and adhere to one of the following style guides: PDF version, LaTeX version, MS Word version. To allow for blind reviewing, please do not include author names and affiliations within the paper and avoid obvious self-references. Research track papers 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; we do not require a 1-month anonymity period for previous submissions on arXiv). Authors submitting a similar paper to another conference or workshop must specify this at submission time; if the paper is accepted to multiple venues, the author must choose which one to present at. Papers must be submitted to the following website by the conference submission deadline: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MTSUMMIT2021.
Publication
Final versions of papers must be submitted by the final “camera-ready” date. All Research track papers will be included in the conference proceedings, which will be made publicly available on the MT Summit website after the conference. Papers will also be hosted individually on the ACL Anthology website.
MT Users and Providers Track
Chairs: Janice Campbell, Jay Marciano, Konstantin Savenkov, Alex Yanishevsky (mtusers-providers@amtaweb.org)
This track is intended for users, providers, and developers of machine translation, as well as professional translators and Language Service Providers, to present novel, original, and unpublished applications of machine translation technology or specific use cases.
We seek submissions for 30-minute presentations, which will include several minutes for questions and discussion, concerning the use of MT and/or related tools, processes, and technologies to support business goals and serve the customer or user in commercial settings.
Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Preparing data for MT training and customization: extraction, alignment, and cleaning of corpora, terminology, DNT and abbreviations, data augmentation, metadata extraction, working with data drift.
- Advanced techniques of training and domain adaptation of MT engines: open frameworks and commercial Custom MT platforms, approaches to analyze and improve training performance.
- Applying MT for low-resource or otherwise special circumstances: low resource language pairs, cross-dialect and cross-domain translation.
- Evaluation of MT systems with respect to available reference data, technical and linguistic requirements.
- MT quality and confidence scoring: tools and metrics that identify risk, support business KPIs and estimate ROI.
- Advanced MT fine-tuning and enhancement, including pre- and post-processing, controlling style, tone of voice, gender, pseudonymization, automated post-editing and others.
- Interactive and real-time adaptive MT systems, including advanced approaches to leverage TM and end-user feedback.
- MT Post-Editing: switching from HT to MTPE, success and failure stories, applicability to different content-types, MTPE training, defining fair pricing models and working with translation buyers and providers.
- Technical challenges in MT adoption: file format and tag support, integration, security, performance, data protection, locality and compliance.
- MT Case Studies: making the business case for adopting MT to drive business requirements, expand markets and engage with customers. Post-edited MT, real-time MT, cross-language information retrieval.
- Augmenting MT with other AI tools to solve complex business problems: classification, content moderation, sentiment analysis, OCR, STT and TTS.
- Source text improvement: improving the source content for MT, both through automatic tools such as grammar correction and guidelines.
Submission Instructions
Please submit a 250 to 500-word abstract describing your presentation topic to the MT Users and Providers Chairs (mtusers-providers@amtaweb.org) by the conference submission deadline. The submission should include a 100-words-or-less biographical description of the proposed speaker(s). 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 real-world use cases, rather than on a particular product or offering.
Publication
Presentations in the form of slide decks are acceptable submissions and should be in PDF format. Papers are welcomed, as they typically provide a greater level of detail and understanding to conference attendees. If submitted, papers should be formatted according to the guidelines under Submission Instructions for the Research Track (see above) . Only abstracts are required to be submitted by the initial submission deadline. Papers and slide decks must be submitted by the final “camera-ready” date for publication in the conference proceedings and on the ACL Anthology website.
Government Track
Chairs: Ben Huyck, Steve LaRocca (govtmtusers@amtaweb.org)
We invite MT practitioners involved with governments worldwide to submit proposals for presentations 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 include, but are not limited to:
- MT as an operational tool for translation, analysis, information discovery.
- MT for “non-standard” language in chats, blogs and social networks.
- Evaluation of MT including estimation of ROI and human factors.
- MT research and development in government and military settings.
- Integration of MT into broader workflow, including case studies.
- Linguistic resources for MT, especially those hard to find or create.
- Neural MT opportunities and challenges.
- MT in Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief contexts.
- Challenges, opportunities and insights into MT needs for the government and military.
Submission Instructions
Initial submissions should be abstracts 250-500 words in length. The following should accompany each abstract submission:
1. Presentation Title
2. Presenter Name, including a short bio (<100 words)
3. Representing Organization
4. Email Address
5. Phone Number
Please email your abstract to the Government Track Chairs (govtmtusers@amtaweb.org) by the conference submission deadline.
Publication
While not mandatory, presenters are strongly encouraged to have their submissions published in the conference proceedings, producing papers in accordance with the guidelines under Submission Instructions for the Research Track (see above). Slide decks may also be accepted. While only abstracts are required to be submitted by the initial submission deadline, papers and/or slide decks must be submitted by the final camera-ready date for publication in the conference proceedings and on the ACL Anthology website.
Workshop and Tutorial Proposals
Chair: Jay Marciano (tutorials@amtaweb.org or workshops@amtaweb.org)
The organizing committee of MT Summit XVIII 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 the MT community (researchers, developers, students, 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 Monday, August 16, immediately preceding the main conference, and Friday, August 20, 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 sent by the conference submission deadline to tutorials@amtaweb.organdinclude:
- the title
- a 250-500 word description of the proposed content
- a short (<100 words) biographical introduction to the proposed presenter(s)
- any technical requirements you may have
- a scanned signed copy of the Tutorial Policy and Leader Agreement Form
Workshops
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 typically scheduled as full-day events.
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 so that the workshop organizers have adequate time to prepare the workshop.
We encourage you to submit your proposals for workshops as early as possible to workshops@amtaweb.organdinclude:
- the title
- a 250-500 word description of the proposed content
- whether this is an ongoing or new workshop
- a short (<100 words) biographical introduction to the proposed presenter(s)
- the expected number of participants
- dates for important milestones (call for papers, recruitment of speakers, etc.)
- any technical requirements you may have
- a scanned signed copy of the Workshop Policy and Leader Agreement Form.
Workshop proposals should be submitted no later than Monday, 12 April 2021. Please note that this date is one month earlier than the deadline for other papers and presentations at MT Summit XVIII.
We look forward to receiving your proposal!