The 18th Biennial Machine Translation Summit



Aug 16 – Aug 20

About the Conference:

Due to continuing COVID restrictions on travel, we have decided to hold MT Summit 2021 online on August 16-20, 2021. We have extended the submission deadline for Research papers to Tuesday, May 18, 2021 and for User/Provider and Government abstracts to Tuesday, June 1, 2021 to allow people more time to reconsider and adjust their plans for submissions given the new conference format.

As an online conference, MT Summit 2021 will accommodate more academic, industry, and government specialists from all around the world, especially MT professionals who cannot travel to the United States at the moment. In a recent survey we conducted, more than 80% of the respondents indicated they were planning to attend only virtually. With the move to a fully virtual event and an inclusive approach, we anticipate more than 500 attendees from across the MT spectrum this year.

MT Summit 2021 will include these engaging features:

  • 50+ presentations with fresh research, industry insights, and use cases from practitioners at top-tier universities, leading MT providers, and global enterprises
  • Keynote presentations by Lucie Seguin, CEO of the Translation Bureau of Canada, Jane Nemcova, former Managing Director of AI at Lionbridge, and world-recognized MT researchers Lucia Specia and Graham Neubig
  • A special presentation on the results of a recent worldwide survey on MT technology and business trends by Common Sense Advisory
  • A panel of MT experts headed by Alon Lavie, VP of Language Technologies at Unbabel, discussing the future of MT from the varied perspectives of researchers, technology providers, LSPs, and enterprises
  • Workshops on MT of Low-Resource Languages, Automated Spoken Language Translation, Patent and Scientific Literature Translation, and Automatic Translation between Sign and Verbal Languages (all included with conference registration)
  • Several hours of fluid networking opportunities for all conference attendees
  • Career mentoring sessions for students with experts from industry, government, and academia, and special student registration rates provided by a generous sponsor
  • A technology showcase & fair with demonstrations of the latest MT-related innovations by a variety of sponsors and exhibitors

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 30, 2021. Please help us collect data that will be meaningful and valuable to the entire MT community by taking this survey.

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.

Organizing Committee

Executive Committee:

Steve Richardson, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, IAMT and AMTA President

Patricia O’Neill-Brown, U.S. Government, AMTA Vice President

Natalia Levitina, PTC, AMTA Secretary

Jen Doyon, MITRE, IAMT and AMTA Treasurer

Elaine O’Curran, Welocalize, AMTA Counselor

Alon Lavie, Unbabel, AMTA Consultant

Research Track Co-Chairs

Kevin Duh, Johns Hopkins University, AMTA MT Researchers Director

Francisco (Paco) Guzman, Facebook AI, AMTA MT Researchers Director

MT Users and Providers Track Co-Chairs

Janice Campbell, Adobe, AMTA MT Users and Providers Director

Jay Marciano, Lengoo, AMTA MT Users and Providers Director

Konstantin Savenkov, Intento, AMTA MT Users and Providers Director

Alex Yanishevsky, Welocalize, AMTA MT Users and Providers Director

Government Track Co-Chairs

Ben Huyck, MITRE

Stephen Larocca, U.S. Army Research Laboratory

Workshops and Tutorials Chair

Jay Marciano, Lengoo, AMTA MT Users and Providers Director

Exhibitions Chair

Alex Yanishevsky, Welocalize, AMTA MT Users and Providers Director

Sponsorship Chair

Ray Flournoy, Etsy

Communications Chair

Konstatin Dranch, CustomMT

Marketing Director

Kate Ozerova, Smartcat

Webmaster

Darius Hughes, Brigham Young University

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 deadlines
    • Research Track                     Tuesday, 18 May, 2021  **EXTENDED**
    • User/Provider Track             Tuesday, 1 June, 2021   **EXTENDED**
    • Government Track                Tuesday, 1 June, 2021   **EXTENDED**
  • Notification of acceptance:            Monday, 21 June 2021
  • Final “camera-ready” versions:     Monday, 12 July 2021

The earlier deadline for submission of Workshop proposals (Monday, 12 April 2021) has already passed.

The submission and “camera-ready” deadline time zone for all the above dates is “Anywhere on Earth” (UTC–12).

IMPORTANT NOTE: Because the conference will be held virtually, 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. In the coming weeks, we may also request that some presentations be pre-recorded to avoid technical issues during the virtual conference.

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 versionLaTeX versionMS 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 click here to submit a 250 to 500-word abstract describing your presentation/paper to the MT Users and Providers Chairs by the conference submission deadline. 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

Please click here to submit a 250 to 500-word abstract describing your presentation/paper to the Government Track Chairs 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.

Tutorial Proposals

Chair: Jay Marciano (tutorials@amtaweb.org)

The organizing committee of MT Summit XVIII is seeking proposals for tutorials on all topics related to MT research, development, application, and evaluation. Our goal is to provide tutorials that appeal 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, together with Workshops, will be held on Monday, August 16, immediately preceding the main conference, and Friday, August 20, immediately following the main conference.

 

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.org and include:

  • 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

 

We look forward to receiving your proposal!

AMTA 2016 | Accepted Tutorials

October 18th, 2017 / Darius Hughes / 0 comments

October 28: — Introduction to MT (Jay Marciano) — Dependency-Based Statistical Machine Translation (Qun Liu and Liangyou Li) November 1: — Computer Aided Translation: Advances and Challenges (Philipp Koehn) — Advances in Neural Machine Translation (Rico Sennrich, Alexandra Birch, and Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt) — ModernMT (Marcello Federico and Marco Trombetti)   Scroll down for more information. Introduction to MT        October 28, […]

AMTA 2016 | Call for Workshop Proposals

October 18th, 2017 / Darius Hughes / 0 comments

The call for workshop proposals is closed. Contact: Roland Kuhn (workshops@amtaweb.org) AMTA workshops are intended to provide the opportunity for MT-related communities of interest to spend time together advancing the state of thinking or the state of practice in their area of endeavor. We are particularly interested in submissions related to commercialization of MT and/or […]

MT Summit XV | Keynote Speakers

August 19th, 2017 / Darius Hughes / 0 comments

AMTA and IAMT are proud to announce the following keynote speakers for MT Summit XV in Miami: KyungHyun Cho (NYU) — Neural Machine Translation: Introduction and Progress Report Abstract: Neural machine translation is a recently proposed framework for machine translation, which is purely based on neural networks. Neural machine translation radically departs from the existing, widely-used, […]

MT Summit XV | Full Program

August 16th, 2017 / Darius Hughes / 0 comments

Come to MT Summit XV to see all of these events: Schedule-MTSummit2015_oct7 Keynote Speakers Papers in the MT Researchers’ Track Presentations in the Commercial MT Users & Translators’ Track Presentations in the Government MT Users’ Track Tutorials Workshops Technology Showcase Social Program: Banquet at the Rusty Pelican, Sunday November 1 at 6:30 PM

MT Summit XV | Commercial MT Users presentations accepted

August 16th, 2017 / Darius Hughes / 0 comments

These presentations were accepted for the Commercial MT Users & Translators track: Farkhat Aminov Yandex.Translate approach to the translation of Turkic languages Nikhil Bojja Machine Translation in Mobile Games – Augmenting Social Media Text Normalization with Incentivized Feedback Robin Bonthrone, Konstantin Lakshin Why are we (still) waiting? What premium translators need to use MT effectively. […]

MT Summit XV | Tutorials

August 16th, 2017 / Darius Hughes / 0 comments

  Friday, October 30 Morning Session Introduction to Machine Translation — Jay Marciano, Lionbridge Target Audience:  Translators and other translation industry professionals This tutorial is for people who are beginning their journey with machine translation and want an overview of what it is, how it works, how it can be used, and whether it can […]