MUMTTT 2013 - MUMTTT 2013 : Multi-word Units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology

Multi-word Units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology
Call for Papers
Workshop at MT Summit XIV in Nice, France
September 3, 2013
Submission deadline: 15 June 2013 at 24:00 CET (GMT+1)
Machine Translation (MT) has evolved along with different types of computer-assisted translation tools and a notable progress has been achieved in improving the quality of translations. However, in spite of the recent positive developments in translation technologies, not all problems have been solved and in particular the identification, interpretation and translation of multi-word units (MWUs) still represent open challenges, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. The low standard of analysis and translation of MWUs in translation technologies suggest that there is the need to invest in further research with the goal of improving the performance of the various translation applications.
Multi-word units (MWUs) are a complex linguistic phenomenon, ranging from lexical units with a relatively high degree of internal variability to expressions that are frozen or semi-frozen. Such units are very frequent both in everyday language and in languages for special purposes. Their interpretation and translation sometimes present unexpected obstacles even to human translators, mainly because of intrinsic ambiguities, structural and lexical asymmetries between languages, and, finally, cultural differences.
The current theoretical work on this topic deals with different formalisms and techniques relevant for MWU processing in MT as well as other translation applications, such as: automatic recognition of MWUs in a monolingual or bilingual setting; alignment and paraphrasing methodologies; development, features and usefulness of handcrafted monolingual and bilingual linguistic resources and grammars; use of MWUs in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) domain adaptation, as well as empirical work concerning their modelling accuracy and descriptive adequacy across various language pairs. At the practical level, the issue of MWU has been addressed in various MT approaches, whether knowledge-based, statistical (word-based, phrase-based or factored-based) or hybrid. In general, MWU identification and translation problems are far from being solved and there is still considerable room for improvement. There is a recent growing attention to MWU processing in MT and Translation Technologies, as it has been acknowledged that it is not possible to create large-scale applications without properly handling MWUs of all kinds.
The focus of this workshop is to address the MWU issue in a synergetic way, taking advantage of the recent developments in disciplines such as Linguistics, Translation Studies, Computational Linguistics, and Computational Phraseology.
The main aim of the Workshop is, therefore, to bring together researchers working on various aspects of MWU processing in different disciplines, in order to discuss and propose innovative ideas and methods in relation to MT and Translation Technologies. In particular, this workshop welcomes the exchange of interactions between researchers in NLP working on the computational treatment of multi-word units, experts in phraseology (including computational phraseology) working on challenging topics of their discipline, as well as translation practitioners, to the benefit of applying their latest results to advance the state of the art in MWU translation.
TOPICS
We invite the submissions of papers reporting original and unpublished research on multi-word unit (MWU) processing in Machine Translation and Translation Technologies. We encourage the representation of a broad range of areas including, but not limited to, the following:
Lexical, syntactic, semantic and translational aspects in MWU representation
Identification and acquisition of multi-word terms and their variants
Automatic extraction of (multilingual) MWU resources
MWUs in Computer-Assisted Translation
Development and use of handcrafted MWU linguistic resources in MT
Paraphrasing of MWUs applied to improving MT
MWUs and word alignment techniques
Identification and acquisition of non-compositional items
Learning semantic information about MWUs from monolingual, parallel or comparable corpora
Multilingualism and MWU processing
Integration of MWUs into rule-based and statistical MT
MT evaluation focused on MWUs and novel automatic metrics handling MWUs
Creation of MWU-annotated corpora with a focus on translation aspects
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Iñaki Alegria (University of the Basque Country, Spain)
Giuseppe Attardi (University of Pisa, Italy)
Doug Arnold (University of Essex, United Kingdom)
Francis Bond (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Bruno Cartoni (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Jean-Pierre Colson (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Béatrice Daille (Nantes University, France)
Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA)
Gaël Dias (University of Caen Basse-Normandie, France)
Dmitrij O. Dobrovol'skij (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)
Annibale Elia (University of Salerno, Italy)
Thierry Fontenelle (Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union, Luxembourg)
Roxana Girju (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Barry Haddow (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Ulrich Heid (Universität Hildesheim, Germany)
Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Valia Kordoni (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany)
Koenraad Kuiper (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
Guy Lapalme (University of Montreal, Canada)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Foundation, Qatar)
Pavel Pecina (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Carlos Ramisch (University of Grenoble, France)
Johann Roturier (Symantec Ltd., Ireland)
Gilles Serasset (University of Grenoble, France)
Max Silberztein (University of Franche-Comté, France)
Dan Tufis (Romanian Academy, Romania)
Agnes Tutin (University of Grenoble, France)
Michael Zock (Aix-Marseille University, France)
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom)
Johanna Monti (University of Sassari, Italy)
Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Málaga, Spain)
Violeta Seretan (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
CONTACT
For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to Johanna Monti (jmonti-AT-uniss.it).