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The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
AMTA-2002 Conference
Location: Tiburon, California
Dates: October 8-12, 2002
The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is
pleased to announce its fifth biennial conference, planned for October
8-12, 2002, in Tiburon (near San Francisco), California.
Online registration is now available on the conference web site:
http://www.amtaweb.org/AMTA2002/
Register at a discounted rate until August 11, 2002!
A preliminary program, providing the schedule for tutorials, workshops,
exhibits, accepted papers, panels, and invited speakers for the
conference, is also now posted on the conference web site.
We look forward to seeing you in Tiburon!
CONFERENCE THEME: From Research to Real Users
Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade
ago at TMI-92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms for
MT, including data-driven approaches (e.g., statistical, example-based)
and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional rule-based
components.
During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer
architectures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated track,
increasing their coverage (primarily through manual update of their
lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and usage,
principally through the medium of the Internet. Web page translators
have become commonplace; a number of online translation services have
appeared, including in their offerings both raw and post-edited MT; and
large corporations have been turning increasingly to MT to address the
exigencies of global communication. Still, the output of the
transfer-based systems employed in this expansion represents but a small
drop in the ever-growing translation marketplace bucket.
Now, 10 years later, we wonder if this mounting variety of MT users is
any better off, and if the promise of the research technologies is being
realized to any measurable degree. In this regard, we pose the
following questions:
Why aren't any current commercially available MT systems primarily
data-driven? Do any commercially available systems integrate (or plan to
integrate) data-driven components? Do data-driven systems have
significant performance or quality issues? Can such systems really
provide better quality to users, or is their main advantage one of fast,
facilitated customization? If any new MT technology could provide such
benefits (somewhat higher quality, or facilitated customization), would
that be the key to more widespread use of MT, or are there yet other
more relevant unresolved issues, such as system integration? If better
quality, customization, or system integration aren't the answer, then
what is it that users really need from MT in order for it to be more
useful to them?
INVITED SPEAKERS
We are pleased to announce that invited speakers for the conference will
include Yorick Wilks and Ken Church, both notable participants at
TMI-92, and Jaap van der Meer, former CEO of ALPNET. We anticipate that
the speakers will provide a sharp and stimulating focus on the theme of
the conference.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS
Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair
Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Local Arrangements Chair
Bob Frederking, Workshops and Tutorials
Laurie Gerber, Exhibits Coordinator
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Arendse Bernth (IBM Research)
Christian Boitet (GETA, CLIPS, IMAG)
Ralf Brown (LTI, CMU)
Robert Cain (Foreign Broadcast Information Service)
Michael Carl (RALI)
Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research)
Laurie Gerber (Language Technology Broker)
Stephen Helmreich (CRL, NMSU)
Eduard Hovy (ISI, USC)
Pierre Isabelle (XRCE)
Christine Kamprath (Caterpillar)
Elliott Macklovitch (RALI)
Bente Maegaard (CST)
Michael McCord (IBM Research)
Robert C. Moore (Microsoft Research)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen)
Sergei Nirenburg (CRL, NMSU)
Franz Och (RWTH Aachen)
Joseph Pentheroudakis (Microsoft Research)
Jessie Pinkham (Microsoft Research)
Fred Popowich (Gavagai Technology Inc.)
Florence Reeder (MITRE)
Harold Somers (UMIST)
Keh-Yih Su (Behavior Design Corp.)
Eiichiro Sumita (ATR)
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI)
Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft Research)
Hideo Watanabe (TRL, IBM)
Andy Way (Dublin City Univ.)
Eric Wehrli (Univ. of Geneva)
John White (Northrop Grumman IT)
Jin Yang (SYSTRAN)
Ming Zhou (Microsoft Research)
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