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EAMT Sponsorship of Activities: Students’ edition (Deadline extended) Sponsorship of activities

EAMT Sponsorship of Activities: Students’ edition (Deadline extended)

Call for Proposals 

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including translators, users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.

As part of its commitment to promote research, development and awareness about translation technologies, the EAMT is launching a new call for proposals to fund MT-related activities led by students during 2022.

Purpose of the Call

The EAMT is planning to support various MT activities such as shared tasks, workshops, teaching and awareness initiatives, open-source initiatives, dataset creation and small research and development projects by its current student members. 

The EAMT particularly welcomes proposals from students in all levels of education, including undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Recent developments in MT research.
  • MT evaluation methodology, metrics and results.
  • Launch of MT-specific evaluation campaigns.
  • New or prospective commercial users of MT technology.
  • MT environments (workflow, support tools, etc.).
  • Interaction between users and MT systems.
  • MT combined with other technologies (translation memories, speech translation, cross-language information retrieval, multilingual text categorization, multilingual text summarization, etc.).
  • MT for less-resourced languages: development, usage, etc.
  • MT in the social internet: new uses, new modes of development.
  • MT for crisis management. 
  • Training events on MT, particularly on recent developments.
  • Events to disseminate MT, especially to the wider public (including shared tasks).
  • Creation of datasets for MT research.

All proposals will be screened by a review committee that consists of EAMT Executive Committee members and possibly a few appointed external experts if necessary.

Submission information

Eligibility requirements

In order to qualify for funding, the individual making the proposal must be a confirmed student member of the EAMT at submission time. Applicants will also need formal approval from their PhD supervisor.

Membership information: http://www.eamt.org/membership.php

Selection criteria

  • The proposed activity should be of direct interest to the MT community at large: researchers, developers, vendors translators and/or users of MT technologies.
  • The proposal shall clearly describe the purpose of the project and include measurable mid-project milestones for which a report should be submitted (see below).
  • Preference will be given to projects which by nature will involve and be beneficial for several persons, as for instance conferences, seminars, workshops, shared tasks and tutorials.
  • Proposals with a significant, clearly identified impact on the MT community (through the development, dissemination or use of project results) are those most likely to be accepted.
  • Proposals that bring together different aspects of MT will be especially valued.
  • The proposal should be clearly justified as being technically and/or scientifically sound.
  • The quality and efficiency of the implementation of the proposal will be evaluated.
  • The budget should be adequate for the proposed objectives and the actual implementation of the activity.

Budget

EAMT anticipates funding several proposals for various activities. 

The total foreseen EAMT Budget for this call is around €4,000 to cover all granted projects. The maximum amount EAMT can grant for a single project will be €4,000. During the negotiation stage, budget adjustments may be required by the EAMT executive committee. This means that the EAMT may only offer to partially fund a project. 

A project being granted financial support by EAMT according to this call will receive 50% of the granted amount at the start of the project. The proposer will receive the remaining 50% when the mid-project progress report has been received by the EAMT Secretary and substantiates that the mid-project milestones are met, and furthermore provided that the proposer is still a current member of the EAMT.

Contact for enquiries

Carolina Scarton

EAMT Secretary

e-mail: c.scarton@sheffield.ac.uk

Submission procedure

Overview

Candidates should submit their proposals as a single PDF file, written in English, that is composed of the elements described below.

  1. Proposal description: 2-page maximum
  2. Person/organization experience: 1-page maximum
  3. Budget and project planning overview: 1-page maximum
  4. Supervisor’s letter of approval: 1-page maximum

Proposals should be submitted no later than the deadline (see Important Dates below) through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2021 (Submission type: Project Proposals – Students 2022). Authors are encouraged to use the template available at http://www.eamt.org/eamt2020-projects.zip. Templates for both LaTeX and Microsoft Word are available.

Detailed description of sections of the proposal

  1. Proposal summary (two pages) in English
    1. Complete contact information of the candidate.
    2. A clear and detailed description of the proposed event or activity.
    3. A statement on why this event or activity would be helpful for the community and the development of your studies (you should establish a clear connection between this activity and your degree project). 
    4. A statement justifying why EAMT should support this event or activity.
  2. Experience of the proposing person in the field (up to one page)
    1. It may include a list of experience and related skills of the participants of the team (your team may be composed by your supervisors and potential collaborators).
  3. Budget and project planning overview (up to one page)
    1. A breakdown of the costs estimated for the entire activity or event.
    2. Clear milestones and deliverables must be indicated.
    3. An identification of the support requested from EAMT and possible other supporting funds.
  4. Supervisor’s letter of approval (up to one page)
    1. A letter from your supervisor stating that they approve your project submission and that they will act as fund manager if needed (please note that EAMT needs to make payments into a research account set up at your institution). 

Important Dates

  • Circulation of the Call: September 8, 2021
  • Submission deadline for proposals: October 15, 2021, 23:59 CEST October 30, 2021, 23:59 CEST
  • Acceptance notifications and negotiations to start on: December 14, 2021 December 21, 2021

In case of acceptance:

  • Mid-project progress report due: June 30, 2022, 23:59 CEST
  • Final report and deliverables due: January 31, 2023, 23:59 CET

Additional provisions

  • Only complete proposals will be reviewed.
  • All information submitted with proposals will be regarded as confidential and will only be used in the context of this project.
  • Following the recommendations from the reviewers and EAMT executive members, projects may be approved with amendments that will be discussed during the negotiation stage. 
  • The funded projects may be required to report at the EAMT events (e.g. Poster at the EAMT conference, a short progress report for the General assembly, etc.). If you think you will not have funds for attending the EAMT event you can add travel costs to your budget. 
  • The EAMT should be acknowledged in all materials related to the project, activity or initiative.

No obligation to award the proposal

The EAMT shall be under no obligation to fund the proposals pursuant to this call for proposals. EAMT shall not be liable for any compensation with respect to candidates whose proposals have not been accepted. Nor shall it be liable in the event of it deciding not to award the proposal.

Obituary: W. John Hutchins, librarian and historian of MT Latest

Obituary: W. John Hutchins, librarian and historian of MT

It is with deep sadness that I have just read that last January, 19, 2021, Dr. William John Hutchins passed away at the age of 81. 

John, a linguist and information scientist, was born in St. Pancras, London, on January 27, 1939. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in French and German at the University of Nottingham in 1960 and obtained a diploma in librarianship at University College London in 1962. 

He worked as assistant librarian at Durham University (1962–1965) and at the University of Sheffield (1965–1971), and then as assistant librarian (1971–1980) and sub-librarian (1980–1998) at the University of East Anglia.

In 2000 he obtained his PhD degree at the University of East Anglia. In addition to authoring numerous articles in journals and conferences about machine translation since 1963, he is particularly well known for the book An Introduction to Machine Translation (1992) which he co-authored with Harold Somers.

John’s service to the machine translation community, most of it after retirement, has been outstanding. After serving as editor of the UEA Papers in Linguistics, (1976–1982), he was editor of MT News International, the bulletin of the International Association for Machine Translation (1992–1997), president of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT, 1995–2004) and of the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT, 1999–2001), and editor of the Compendium of Translation Software (1992–2012).

John leveraged his experience as a librarian and machine translation scholar to become the librarian and the historian of the field of machine translation. In the last few decades, he was the curator of one of the best resources about machine translation, the Machine Translation Archive. The service is temporarily offline but the IAMT is working hard to host it again as soon as possible and has commissioned the transformation and transfer of a large part of the information to the ACL Anthology, some of which is already available there.

The International Association for Machine Translation has recognized John’s dedication twice, first with the IAMT Award of Honour (2001) and with a unique Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Harold (Harry) Somers, who was professor of Language Engineering at the University of Manchester and editor of the journal Machine Translation, says:

John was a truly great and important contributor to the field of machine translation, in his own unique way. I was fortunate enough to have him as a collaborator when we produced what was —I think— the first genuine text book for students of MT. I like to think that students found that book useful, even after the statistical MT revolution made a good number of the chapters fairly quickly out of date. What perhaps many did not realise is that John’s work on MT was entirely a labour of love, a kind of hobby, all completed in his own spare time: his job as a librarian did not include working on the MT Archive, nor I think did his employers properly realise and reward his fantastic contribution to the field. We were extremely fortunate to benefit from his skills: from a scientific viewpoint he was an informed observer free of any of the prejudices of the developer or researcher with his own theories and approaches to push. I have been away from the field for a good few years now, but working with John was certainly a highlight of my career, and I am sure his memory will be honoured far into the future.

Tony Clarke, treasurer of the EAMT for so many years, says:

I can only endorse all that has been already said about John and his academic achievements. I was always struck by his warmth and humility and his unassuming manner. Even though he was basically a fairly shy person, once you got talking to him, he could really open up and even surprise you with a joke or two. My wife, Susanne, used to talk to him about England and had some really interesting conversations.  I simply remember John as a warm-hearted and pleasant companion whom I am blessed and honoured to have known.  May he rest In peace.

Viggo Hansen, who has been part of EAMT for decades, as conference organizer, secretary, and recently as co-opted counsellor to the EAMT president adds:

I met John at the MT Summit in Luxembourg in 1995, when John was elected EAMT president. I am not a linguist but a user (at that time one of the few) using MT commercially. I had the pleasure to be the EAMT secretary during John’s nine years as EAMT President. When being with John you were in good company. He was an extremely interesting person and had a very broad range of interests. When we had talked enough about MT we could always relax in a good talk about football.

I met John in Exeter, in a workshop called MT 2000, which he had organized, and then many other times during these years. It was always a great pleasure to chat with such a nice, knowledgeable, and generous man. The last time I spent some time with John was at his home in Norwich, in 2017. He showed me how he planned to scan and catalogue shelves and shelves of historical machine translation publications and add them to the Archive. By the way, as my predecessor Andy Way points out, as a Norwich City FC season ticket holder, John would have been delighted to see the Canaries promoted again to the Premier League, after winning the Championship last Saturday.

I feel hugely indebted to John Hutchins, and I think many of you in the machine translation community do too. We will have to work together to preserve and continue his work on our behalf.

Sit ei terra levis.
Mikel L. Forcada
President of the European Association for Machine Translation
May 13, 2021

[UPDATED] The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2020 EAMT Best Thesis EAMT best thesis award

[UPDATED] The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2020…

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT, http://www.eamt.org) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including translators, users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.

The EAMT invites entries for its ninth EAMT Best Thesis Award for a PhD or equivalent thesis on a topic related to machine translation.

Previous year winners can be found here.

Eligibility

Researchers who

  • have completed a PhD (or equivalent) thesis on a relevant topic in a European, Northern African or Middle Eastern institution within calendar year 2020,
  • have not previously won another international award for that thesis, and,
  • are members of the EAMT at the time of submission,

are invited to submit their theses to the EAMT for consideration.

Panel

The submissions will be judged by a panel of experts who will be specifically appointed, based on the EAMT 2020 program committee, and which will be ratified by the Executive Board of the EAMT.

Selection criteria

Each thesis will be judged according to how challenging the problem was, to how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and to the strength of their impact in terms of scientific publications.

Scope

The scope of the thesis does not need to be confined to a technical area, and applications are also invited from students who carried out their research into commercial and management aspects of machine translation.

Possible areas of research include:

  • development of machine translation or advanced computer-assisted translation: methods, software or resources
  • machine translation for less-resourced languages
  • the use of these systems in professional environments (freelance translators, translation agencies, localisation, etc.)
  • the increasing impact of machine translation on non-professional Internet users and its impact in communications, social networking, etc.
  • spoken language translation
  • the integration of machine translation and translation memory systems
  • the integration of machine translation software in larger IT applications
  • the evaluation of machine translation systems in real tasks such as those above
  • the cross-fertilisation between machine translation and other language technologies

Prize

The winner will be announced on the 5th of September 2021 and will receive a prize of €500, together with an inscribed certificate. The recipient of the award will be required to briefly present their research at EAMT 2022. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200 to enable the recipient of the award to attend the said conference. The prize includes complimentary membership in the EAMT for 2021 and 2022.

Submission

Candidates will submit using EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2021 (Submission type: Thesis Award), a single PDF file containing:

  • a 2-page summary of your thesis in English, containing:
    • your full contact details,
    • the name and contact details of your supervisor(s),
  • a copy of your CV in English (at most one page, plus a complete list of publications directly related to the thesis)
  • an electronic copy of your thesis
  • optionally, an appendix with any other relevant information on the thesis

By submitting their work, authors

  • agree that, in case they are granted the award, any subsequently published version of the thesis should carry the citation “The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2020 EAMT Best Thesis” and
  • acknowledge the right of the EAMT to publicize the granting of the award.

For this year Best Thesis Award we are requiring candidates to be an individual EAMT member at the time of submission. For EAMT memberships, please visit: http://www.eamt.org/membership.php.

The closing date for submissions will be the same as the deadline for EAMT 2021 research papers (to be announced).

Closing date

  • Submission deadline: June 30, 2021, 23:59 CEST.
  • Award notification: September 5, 2021.

[1] Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia.
[2] Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

EAMT 2021 Ghent postponed until spring 2022 EAMT conference

EAMT 2021 Ghent postponed until spring 2022

After evaluating the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, more specifically, the likelihood of unrestricted international travel, and after considering the limitations and inconvenience of yet another online meeting to the schedule of everyone interested, the Executive Committee of the European Association for Machine Translation and the organizing committee of EAMT 2021 Ghent have jointly decided to postpone the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2021) to the spring of 2022, when we expect that a large part of the European population will have been vaccinated and international travel regulations will make it possible to host an in-person conference in Ghent, Belgium. We are also very thankful to all six track co-chairs that had been appointed for agreeing to serve in EAMT 2022; therefore, we expect to issue a call for papers by the end of 2021. Please make sure to visit http://EAMT.org regularly to keep informed.

April 27, 2021

Mikel L. Forcada President,
EAMT General Chair,
EAMT 2021.

EAMT Sponsorship of Activities: Students’ edition (INSTRUCTIONS UPDATED) Sponsorship of activities

EAMT Sponsorship of Activities: Students’ edition (INSTRUCTIONS UPDATED)

Call for Proposals

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including translators, users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.

As part of its commitment to promote research, development and awareness about translation technologies, the EAMT is launching a new call for proposals to fund MT-related activities led by students during 2021.

Purpose of the Call

The EAMT is planning to support various MT activities such as shared tasks, workshops, teaching and awareness initiatives, open-source initiatives, dataset creation and small research and development projects by its current student members. 

The EAMT particularly welcomes proposals from students in all levels of education, including undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Recent developments in MT research.
  • MT evaluation methodology, metrics and results.
  • Launch of MT-specific evaluation campaigns.
  • New or prospective commercial users of MT technology.
  • MT environments (workflow, support tools, etc.).
  • Interaction between users and MT systems.
  • MT combined with other technologies (translation memories, speech translation, cross-language information retrieval, multilingual text categorization, multilingual text summarization, etc.).
  • MT for less-resourced languages: development, usage, etc.
  • MT in the social internet: new uses, new modes of development.
  • MT for crisis management. 
  • Training events on MT, particularly on recent developments.
  • Events to disseminate MT, especially to the wider public (including shared tasks).
  • Creation of datasets for MT research.

All proposals will be screened by a review committee that consists of EAMT Executive Committee members and possibly a few appointed external experts if necessary.

Submission information

Eligibility requirements

In order to qualify for funding, the individual making the proposal must be a confirmed student member of the EAMT at submission time. Applicants will also need formal approval from their PhD supervisor.

Membership information: http://www.eamt.org/membership.php

Selection criteria

  • The proposed activity should be of direct interest to the MT community at large: researchers, developers, vendors translators and/or users of MT technologies.
  • The proposal shall clearly describe the purpose of the project and include measurable mid-project milestones for which a report should be submitted (see below).
  • Preference will be given to projects which by nature will involve and be beneficial for several persons, as for instance conferences, seminars, workshops, shared tasks and tutorials.
  • Proposals with a significant, clearly identified impact on the MT community (through the development, dissemination or use of project results) are those most likely to be accepted.
  • Proposals that bring together different aspects of MT will be especially valued.
  • The proposal should be clearly justified as being technically and/or scientifically sound.
  • The quality and efficiency of the implementation of the proposal will be evaluated.
  • The budget should be adequate for the proposed objectives and the actual implementation of the activity.

Budget

EAMT anticipates funding several proposals for various activities. 

The total foreseen EAMT Budget for this call is around €4,000 to cover all granted projects. The maximum amount EAMT can grant for a single project will be €4,000. During the negotiation stage, budget adjustments may be required by the EAMT executive committee. This means that the EAMT may only offer to partially fund a project. 

A project being granted financial support by EAMT according to this call will receive 50% of the granted amount at the start of the project. The proposer will receive the remaining 50% when the mid-project progress report has been received by the EAMT Secretary and substantiates that the mid-project milestones are met, and furthermore provided that the proposer is still a current member of the EAMT.

Contact for enquiries

Carolina Scarton
EAMT Secretary
e-mail: c.scarton@sheffield.ac.uk

Submission procedure

Overview

Candidates should submit their proposals as a single PDF file, written in English, that is composed of the elements described below.

  1. Proposal description: 2-page maximum
  2. Person/organization experience: 1-page maximum
  3. Budget and project planning overview: 1-page maximum
  4. Supervisor’s letter of approval: 1-page maximum

Proposals should be submitted no later than the deadline (see Important Dates below) through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2021 (Submission type: Project Proposals – Students). Authors are encouraged to use the template available at http://www.eamt.org/eamt2020-projects.zip. Templates for both LaTeX and Microsoft Word are available.

Detailed description of sections of the proposal

  1. Proposal summary (two pages) in English
    1. Complete contact information of candidate.
    2. A clear and detailed description of the proposed event or activity.
    3. A statement on why this event or activity would be helpful for the community and the development of your studies (you should establish a clear connection between this activity and your degree project).
    4. A statement justifying why EAMT should support this event or activity.
  2. Experience of the proposing person in the field (up to one page)
    1. It may include a list of experience and related skills of the participants of the team (your team may be composed by your supervisors and potential collaborators).
  3. Budget and project planning overview (up to one page)
    1. A breakdown of the costs estimated for the entire activity or event.
    2. Clear milestones and deliverables must be indicated.
    3. An identification of the support requested from EAMT and possible other supporting funds.
  4. Supervisor’s letter of approval (up to one page)
    1. A letter from your supervisor stating that they approve your project submission and that they will act as fund manager if needed (please note that EAMT needs to make payments into a research account set up at your institution).

Important Dates

  • Circulation of the Call: August 18, 2020
  • Submission deadline for proposals: October 16, 2020, 23:59 CEST *October 30, 2020, 23:59 CET*
  • Acceptance notifications and negotiations to start on: December 7, 2020 December 14, 2020

In case of acceptance:

  • Mid-project progress report due: June 30, 2021, 23:59 CEST
  • Final report and deliverables due: January 31, 2022, 23:59 CET

Additional provisions

  • Only complete proposals will be reviewed.
  • All information submitted with proposals will be regarded as confidential and will only be used in the context of this project.
  • Following the recommendations from the reviewers and EAMT executive members, projects may be approved with amendments that will be discussed during the negotiation stage.
  • The funded projects may be required to report at the EAMT events (e.g. Poster at the EAMT conference, a short progress report for the General assembly, etc.). If you think you will not have funds for attending the EAMT event you can add travel costs to your budget.
  • The EAMT should be acknowledged in all materials related to the project, activity or initiative.

No obligation to award the proposal

The EAMT shall be under no obligation to fund the proposals pursuant to this call for proposals. EAMT shall not be liable for any compensation with respect to candidates whose proposals have not been accepted. Nor shall it be liable in the event of its deciding not to award the proposal.

EAMT Sponsorship of Activities (DEADLINE EXTENDED) Sponsorship of activities

EAMT Sponsorship of Activities (DEADLINE EXTENDED)

Call for Proposals

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including translators, users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.

As part of its commitment to promote research, development and awareness about translation technologies, the EAMT is for the tenth consecutive year launching a call for proposals to fund MT-related activities during 2021.

Purpose of the Call

The EAMT is planning to support various MT activities such as tutorials, workshops, teaching and awareness initiatives, open-source initiatives, and small research and development projects by its current members.

The EAMT particularly encourages proposals from early career researchers.

The EAMT particularly encourages proposals from young members.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Recent developments in MT research.
  • MT evaluation methodology, metrics and results.
  • Launch of MT-specific evaluation campaigns.
  • New or prospective commercial users of MT technology.
  • MT environments (workflow, support tools, etc.).
  • Interaction between users and MT systems.
  • MT combined with other technologies (translation memories, speech translation, cross-language information retrieval, multilingual text categorization, multilingual text summarization, etc.).
  • MT for less-resourced languages: development, usage, etc.
  • MT in the social internet: new uses, new modes of development.
  • MT for crisis management.
  • Training events on MT, particularly on recent developments.
  • Events to disseminate MT, especially to the wider public.

All proposals will be screened by a review committee that consists of EAMT Executive Committee members and possibly a few appointed external experts if necessary.

Submission information

Eligibility requirements

In order to qualify for funding, the institution(s) or the individual making the proposal must be a confirmed member of the EAMT at submission time.

Membership information: http://www.eamt.org/membership.php

Selection criteria

  • The proposed activity should be of direct interest to the MT community at large: researchers, developers, vendors translators and users of MT technologies.
  • The proposal shall clearly describe the purpose of the project and include measurable mid-project milestones for which a report should be submitted (see below).
  • Preference will be given to projects which by nature will involve and be beneficial for several persons, as for instance conferences, seminars, workshops and tutorials.
  • Proposals with a significant, clearly identified impact on the MT community (through the development, dissemination or use of project results) are those most likely to be accepted.
  • Proposals that bring together different aspects of MT will be especially valued.
  • The proposal should be clearly justified as being technically and/or scientifically sound.
  • The quality and efficiency of the implementation of the proposal will be evaluated.
  • The budget should be adequate for the proposed objectives and the actual implementation of the activity.

Budget

EAMT anticipates funding several proposals for various activities. There are two categories of proposals. The member institutions’ category and the individual members’ category.

The total foreseen EAMT Budget for this call is around €10,000 to cover all granted projects. The maximum amount EAMT can grant for a single project will be €10,000. During the negotiation stage, budget adjustments may be required by the EAMT executive committee. This means that the EAMT may only offer to partially fund a project.

A project being granted financial support by EAMT according to this call will receive 50% of the granted amount at the start of the project. The proposer will receive the remaining 50% when the mid-project progress report has been received by the EAMT Secretary and substantiates that the mid-project milestones are met, and furthermore provided that the proposer is still a current member of the EAMT.

Contact for enquiries

For general enquiries please contact:

Carolina Scarton
EAMT Secretary
e-mail: c.scarton@sheffield.ac.uk

Submission procedure

Overview

Candidates should submit their proposals as a single PDF file, written in English, that is composed of the elements described below.

  1. Proposal description: 2-page maximum
  2. Person/organization experience: 1-page maximum
  3. Budget and project planning overview: 1-page maximum

Proposals should be submitted no later than the deadline (see Important Dates below) through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2021 (Submission type: Project Proposals). Authors are encouraged to use the template available at http://www.eamt.org/eamt2020-projects.zip. Templates for both LaTeX and Microsoft Word are available.

Detailed description of sections of the proposal

  1. Proposal description (two pages) in English
    1. Complete contact information of candidate.
    2. A clear and detailed description of the proposed event or activity.
    3. A statement on why this event or activity would be helpful for the community.
    4. A statement justifying why EAMT should support this event or activity.
  2. Experience of the proposing person/organization in the field (up to one page).
    1. It may include a list of experience and related skills of the participants of the team.
  3. Budget and project planning overview (up to one page)
    1. A breakdown of the costs estimated for the entire activity or event.
    2. Clear milestones and deliverables must be indicated.
    3. An identification of the support requested from EAMT and possible other supporting funds.

Important Dates

  • Circulation of the Call: August 18, 2020
  • Submission deadline for proposals: October 16, 2020, 23:59 CEST October 30, 2020, 23:59 CEST
  • Acceptance notifications and negotiations to start on: December 7, 2020 December 14, 2020

In case of acceptance:

  • Mid-project progress report due: June 30, 2021, 23:59 CEST
  • Final report and deliverables due: January 31, 2022, 23:59 CET

Additional provisions

  • Only complete proposals will be reviewed.
  • All information submitted with proposals will be regarded as confidential and will only be used in the context of this project.
  • Following the recommendations from the reviewers and EAMT executive members, projects may be approved with amendments that will be discussed during the negotiation stage.
  • The funded projects may be required to report at the EAMT events (e.g. Poster at the EAMT conference, a short progress report for the General assembly, etc.), without any claim for additional funds.
  • The EAMT should be acknowledged in all materials related to the project, activity or initiative.

No obligation to award the proposal

The EAMT shall be under no obligation to fund the proposals pursuant to this call for proposals. EAMT shall not be liable for any compensation with respect to candidates whose proposals have not been accepted. Nor shall it be liable in the event of its deciding not to award the proposal.

2019 EAMT Best Thesis Awardee EAMT best thesis award

2019 EAMT Best Thesis Awardee

Ten PhD theses defended in 2019 were received as candidates for the 2019 edition of the Anthony C Clarke Award – EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all ten were eligible. 36 reviewers and six EAMT Executive Committee members were recruited to examine and score the theses, considering how challenging the problem tackled in each thesis was, how relevant the results were for machine translation as a field, and what the strength of its impact in terms of scientific publications was. Two EAMT Executive Committee members also analysed all theses.

The year of 2019 was again a very good year for PhD theses in machine translation. The scores of the best theses were very close, which made it very hard to select a winner. A panel of five EAMT Executive Committee members (André Martins, Lucia Specia, Khalil Sima’an, Carolina Scarton, and Mikel L. Forcada) was assembled to process the reviews and select a winner.

The panel has then decided to grant the 2019 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award to Felix Stahlberg’s thesis “The Roles of Language Models and Hierarchical Models in Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Prediction” (University of Cambridge — now at Google), supervised by Bill Byrne and with Phil Woodland as advisor.

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Stahlberg has been invited to present a summary of his thesis at the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2020: https://eamt2020.inesc-id.pt) which will take place in November (dates to be confirmed).

Mikel L. Forcada

EAMT President

Carolina Scarton

EAMT Secretary

Program committee

We would like to thank our reviewers that, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, still gave their time to review the theses and help us select the winner. Specially, Julia Ive, Iacer Calixto, José G. C. de Souza, and Jesús González Rubio that also acted as emergency reviewers.

  • Alon Lavie, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Andreas Maletti, Universität Leipzig
  • André Martins, Unbabel
  • Andy Way, Dublin City University
  • Antonio Toral, University of Groningen
  • Barry Haddow, University of Edinburgh
  • Celia Rico, Universidad Europea de Madrid
  • Christian Hardmeier, Uppsala University
  • Cristina España-Bonet, UdS and DFKI
  • Daniel Beck, University of Melbourne
  • Dimitar Shterionov, Dublin City University
  • Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunsk, Saarland University
  • Federico Gaspari, Dublin City University
  • Francisco Casacuberta, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • François Yvon, Université Paris-Sud
  • Frederic Blain, University of Sheffield
  • Iacer Calixto, University of Amsterdam
  • Jan Niehues, Maastricht University
  • Jesús González Rubio, WebInterpret
  • Joke Daems, Ghent University
  • José G. C. de Souza, Unbabel
  • Julia Ive, Imperial College London
  • Lieve Macken, Ghent University
  • Loïc Barrault, University of Sheffield
  • Longyue Wang, Tencent AI Lab
  • Lucia Specia, Imperial College London
  • Maja Popovic, Dublin City University
  • Marcello Federico, Amazon AI
  • Markus Freitag, Google AI
  • Matteo Negri, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
  • Mauro Cettolo, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
  • Miguel Domingo, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Miquel Esplà, Universitat d’Alacant
  • Patrick Simianer, Lilt Inc.
  • Pavel Pecina, Charles University
  • Philipp Koehn, Johns Hopkins University
  • Qun Liu, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab
  • Rico Sennrich, University of Zurich
  • Sharon O’Brien, Dublin City University
  • Sheila Castilho, Dublin City University
  • Vincent Vandeghinste, KU Leuven
The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2019 EAMT Best Thesis EAMT best thesis award

The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2019 EAMT…

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT, http://www.eamt.org) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.

The EAMT invites entries for eighth EAMT Best Thesis Award for a PhD or equivalent thesis on a topic related to machine translation.

Eligibility

Researchers who

  • have completed a PhD (or equivalent) thesis on a relevant topic in a European, Northern African[1] or Middle Eastern[2] institution within calendar year 2019 and
  • have not previously won another international award for that thesis,

Panel

The submissions will be judged by a panel of experts who will be specifically appointed as part of the EAMT 2020 programme committee and which will be ratified by the Executive Board of the EAMT.

Selection criteria

Each thesis will be judged according to how challenging the problem was, to how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and to the strength of their impact in terms of scientific publications.

Scope

The scope of the thesis need not be confined to a technical area, and applications are also invited from students who carried out their research into commercial and management aspects of machine translation.

Possible areas of research include:

  • development of machine translation or advanced computer-assisted translation: methods, software or resources
  • machine translation for less-resourced languages
  • the use of these systems in professional environments (freelance translators, translation agencies, localisation, etc.)
  • the increasing impact of machine translation on non-professional Internet users and its impact in communications, social networking, etc.
  • spoken language translation
  • the integration of machine translation and translation memory systems
  • the integration of machine translation software in larger IT applications
  • the evaluation of machine translation systems in real tasks such as those above
  • the cross-fertilisation between machine translation and other language technologies

Prize

The winner will be announced at the same time as accepted papers for the EAMT 2020: the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Lisbon, Portugal, dates to be confirmed), and will receive a prize of €500, together with an inscribed certificate. The recipient of the award will be required to briefly present their research at EAMT 2020. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200 to enable the recipient of the award to attend the said conference. The prize includes complimentary membership in the EAMT for 2020 and 2021.

Submission

Candidates will submit using EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2020 (Submission type: Thesis Award), a single PDF file containing, in this order:

  • a 2-page summary of your thesis in English, containing:
    • your full contact details,
    • the name and contact details of your supervisor(s),
  • a copy of your CV in English (at most one page, plus a complete list of publications directly related to the thesis)
  • an electronic copy of your thesis
  • optionally, an appendix with any other relevant information on the thesis

By submitting their work, authors

  • agree that, in case they are granted the award, any subsequently published version of the thesis should carry the citation “The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2019 EAMT Best Thesis” and
  • acknowledge the right of the EAMT to publicize the granting of the award.

Closing date

The closing date for submissions will be the same as the deadline for EAMT 2020 research papers: TBA.

[1] Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia.
[2] Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

EAMT 2020 Postponed Until November EAMT conference

EAMT 2020 Postponed Until November

It is with great reluctance that we announce today the decision to postpone our annual conference in Lisbon on the week of November 2 to 6, 2020. The exact dates will be announced soon. In light of the current COVID-19 outbreak in Europe and subsequent travel and congregation restrictions being imposed by governments, after much deliberation, we felt the best solution would be to act without further delay and find a date later in the year with our current hosts, Unbabel.

Our obligation is to ensure a safe and successful conference for our members and the EAMT community. We strongly believe that moving the conference to November will allow us to achieve that.

What if you have submitted a paper?

The proceedings will be published in May as originally scheduled. This allows authors of accepted papers to have their current work published in the community as planned without waiting until November. At least one author per accepted paper must register for the November conference in order to have their work published in the May proceedings, as usual.

In addition, under the current circumstances we have decided to extend the call for papers deadline for another 2 weeks, until 25 March 2020. Those who have already submitted papers have the opportunity to revise their work if they wish to do so. Others who may not have submitted because of COVID-19 travel restrictions can submit their papers for the November conference and inclusion in the proceedings published in May.

If your paper is accepted for publication at the actual event in November, you will be able to include an update on your research during the presentation.

What if you have already made travel arrangements?

If you have already made travel arrangements and cannot cancel or rebook, please contact us at eamt2020@inesc-id.pt.

We apologize for any inconvenience this postponement may cause you. We feel that this is in the best interests of our community and are grateful for your understanding.

We hope to see you in November, and to receive your submission by 25th March.

Sincerest regards,

Mikel L. Forcada
EAMT President
General Chair of EAMT 2020

EAMT 2020: The 22th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation EAMT conference

EAMT 2020: The 22th Annual Conference of the European…

Centro de Congressos do IST
Instituto Superior Técnico
Campus Alameda
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1, 1049-001 LISBOA, Portugal
May 4 to 6, 2020
https://eamt2020.inesc-id.pt/

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) invites everyone interested in machine translation and translation-related tools and resources ― developers, researchers, users, translation and localization professionals and managers ― to participate in this conference. If you envisage an information world in which language barriers become less visible to the information consumer, submit a paper on the topic that drives you and your work. Driven by the state of the art, the research community will demonstrate their cutting-edge research and results, and professional MT users in the language industry will provide insight into successful MT implementation in business scenarios. Translation studies scholars and translation practitioners are also invited to share their first-hand MT experience, which will be addressed in a special Translators’ track.

We expect to receive submissions in these four categories:

(R) Research papers

Submissions (up to 10 pages, including references) are invited for reports of significant research results in any aspect of machine translation and related areas. Such reports should include a substantial evaluation component, or have a strong theoretical and/or methodological contribution where results and in-depth evaluations may not be appropriate. Papers are welcome on all topics in the areas of machine translation and translation-related technologies, including:

  • Novel deep-learning approaches for MT and MT evaluation
  • Advances in classical MT paradigms: statistical, rule-based, and hybrid approaches
  • Comparison of various MT approaches
  • Technologies for MT deployment: quality estimation, domain adaptation, etc.
  • MT in special settings: low resources, massive resources, high volume, low computing resources
  • MT applications: translation/localisation aids, speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, OCR, MT for user generated content (blogs, social networks), etc.
  • Linguistic resources for MT: dictionaries, terminology, corpora, etc.
  • MT evaluation techniques, metrics, and evaluation results
  • Human factors in MT and user interfaces
  • Related multilingual technologies: natural language generation, information retrieval, text categorisation, text summarisation, information extraction, etc.

Papers should describe original work. They should emphasise completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Where appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included.

Papers should be anonymized, prepared according to the templates specified below , and no longer than 10 pages (including references); the resulting PDFs submitted to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2020 (Submission type: EAMT2020 Research).

(U) User studies

Submissions (up to 10 pages, including references) are invited for reports on case studies and implementation experience with MT in small or medium-size businesses in the language industry, as well as implementation scenarios involving large corporations, governments, or NGOs. Contributions are welcome on the following topics:

  • Integrating MT and computer-assisted translation into a translation production workflow (e.g. transforming terminology glossaries into MT resources, optimizing TM/MT thresholds, mixing online and offline tools, using interactive MT, dealing with MT confidence scores);
  • Use of MT to improve translation or localisation workflows (e.g. reducing turnaround times, improving translation consistency, increasing the scope of globalisation projects);
  • Managing change when implementing and using MT (e.g. switching between multiple MT systems, limiting degradations when updating or upgrading an MT system);
  • Implementing open-source MT in the SME or enterprise (e.g. strategies to get support, reports on taking pilot results into full deployment, examples of advanced customisation sought and obtained thanks to the open-source paradigm, collaboration within open-source MT projects);
  • Evaluating MT in a real-world setting (e.g. error detection strategies employed, metrics used, productivity or translation quality gains achieved);
  • Post-editing strategies and tools (e.g. limitations of traditional translation quality assurance tools, challenges associated with post-editing guidelines);
  • Legal issues associated with MT, especially MT in the cloud (e.g. copyright, privacy);
  • Use of MT in social networking or real-time communication (e.g. enterprise support chat, multilingual content for social media);
  • Use of MT to process multilingual content for assimilation purposes (e.g. cross-lingual information retrieval, MT for e-discovery or spam detection, MT for highly dynamic content);
  • Implementing MT standards.

Papers should highlight problems and solutions in addition to describing MT integration processes and project settings. Where solutions do not seem to exist, suggestions for MT researchers and developers should be clearly emphasised. For user papers produced by academics, we require co-authorship with the actual users.

Papers should be formatted according to the templates specified below, no longer than 10 pages (including references), and submitted as PDF files to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2020 (Submission type: EAMT2020 User)

(P) Project/Product description

Submissions (2 pages, including references) are invited to report new, interesting:

  • Tools for machine translation, computer aided translation, and the like (including commercial products and open-source software). The authors should be ready to present the tools in the form of demos or posters during the conference;
  • Research projects related to machine translation. The authors should be ready to present the projects in the form of posters during the conference. This follows on from the successful ‘project villages’ held at the last EAMT conferences.

Abstracts should be formatted according to the templates specified below , no longer than 2 page (including references), and submitted as PDF files to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2020 (Submission type: EAMT2020 Products-Projects).

(T) Translators’ track

The use of machine translation by professional translators has an important social and economic impact due to the multilinguality of globalized societies. Translation practitioners deal with MT output in a wide variety of environments (inside or outside CAT tools, post-editing or drafting for inspiration, managing projects, training and improving engines) and, for this reason, they play a key role in the translation workflow and in the advance of MT.

This conference invites translation practitioners and translation scholars to share their views and observations based on their day-to-day experience through submissions reporting on issues such as:

  • Measurements of comparative effort (time/keystrokes/cognitive) in translation practices involving MT and their impact on the profession;
  • Impact of MT on translators’ work: processes, new invoicing methods (for example, using TER for matching), applicability;
  • Error analysis and post-editing strategies (including automatic post-editing and automation strategies);
  • Psycho-social aspects of MT adoption (ergonomics, motivation, and social impact on the profession);
  • The use of translators’ metadata and user activity data in MT development;
  • Freelance translators’ independent use of MT (e.g. for individual productivity and not necessarily a customer requirement);
  • MT and usability;
  • MT in literary, audiovisual, game localisation and creative texts;
  • MT and interpreting;
  • Ethical and confidentiality issues when using MT;
  • MT in various scenarios including health care communication, crisis translation, and climate change;
  • MT in the translation/interpreting classroom.

Accepted translator track papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Please make sure to consult and cite previously published work before submitting your paper.

Submissions (up to 10 pages, including references) should be formatted according to the templates specified below and submitted as PDF files to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2020 (Submission type: EAMT2020 Translator). Please note that 10 pages is the maximum number of pages. Submissions of any length will be evaluated by the committee.

Paper templates

Use the LaTeX, Microsoft Word and LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org templates available at https://eamt2020.inesc-id.pt/#templates to prepare your submission.

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in an electronic book of proceedings with an ISBN number.

In addition, the best accepted papers will be invited to submit an extended version undergoing a lighter reviewing process, as regular papers in the Springer journal Machine Translation.

Programme

In addition to an invited talk (to be announced), the programme of the Research, User, and Translators’ tracks will include oral presentations and poster sessions. Accepted papers may be assigned to an oral or poster session, but no differentiation will be made in the conference proceedings.

There will also be a special Translators’ track, which will mostly take place on Wednesday. It will be organized around selected, very short oral contributions by individual translators, and will end with round table where the voice of individual translators will be heard along those of researchers, developers and companies using machine translation.

Conference chairs

Research track co-chairs:

  • Arianna Bisazza, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands
  • Marco Turchi, FBK, Trento, Italy

User track co-chairs:

  • Mary Nurminen, Tampere University
  • Lena Marg, Welocalize

Translators’ track co-chairs:

  • Ana Guerberof, University of Surrey
  • Joss Moorkens, Dublin City University

Local organizing chairs:

  • André Martins, IST and Unbabel, Lisbon, Portugal
  • Helena Moniz, INESC-ID and Unbabel, Lisbon, Portugal

General chair: Mikel L. Forcada, EAMT President, Universitat d’Alacant, Spain (also Project/Product chair).

Best Thesis Award

The EAMT Best Thesis Award 2020 for PhD theses submitted during 2019 will be awarded at the conference, together with a presentation of the winner’s work. Information for candidates to the award is available at: http://www.eamt.org/news/news_best_thesis2019.php. The deadline is the same as for the paper submission. Theses should be submitted to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2020 (Submission type: Thesis Award)

Important Dates

  • Paper submission: March 6, 2020.
  • Notification to authors: April 3, 2020.
  • Camera-ready deadline: April 10, 2020.
  • Early-bird registration: April 17, 2020.
  • Conference: May 4—6, 2020.

All deadlines are at 23.59 CEST.