EAMT conference

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

  • March 5, 2020 (updated on January 14, 2022)

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.

EAMT best thesis award

2018 EAMT Best Thesis Awardee

  • May 8, 2019 (updated on January 14, 2022)

Seven PhD theses defended in 2018 were received as candidates for the 2018 edition of the Anthony C Clarke Award – EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all seven were eligible. A panel of 29 reviewers was recruited to examine and score the theses, considering how challenging the problem tackled in each thesis was, how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and what the strength of its impact in terms of scientific publications was. Two EAMT Executive Committee members (Mikel L. Forcada and Lucia Specia) have also reviewed the theses and provided an additional review.

The year of 2018 was again a very good year for PhD theses in machine translation. The scores of all theses were very high, although one thesis was scored considerably higher than the others. A panel of two EAMT Executive Committee members (Mikel L. Forcada and Carolina Scarton) verified that all reviews were consistent and that we had a clear winner.

The panel has then decided to grant the 2018 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award to Longyue Wang’s thesis “Discourse-Aware Neural Machine Translation” (Dublin City University – now at Tencent AI Lab), supervised by Andy Way and Qun Liu (now at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab).

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Wang has been invited to present a summary of his thesis at the 17th Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit 2019: https://www.mtsummit2019.com) which will take place in Dublin (Ireland), August 19-23, 2019. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200.

Mikel L. Forcada

EAMT President

Carolina Scarton

EAMT Secretary

EAMT best thesis award

The Anthony C Clarke Award: the 2018 EAMT best thesis award

  • August 30, 2018 (updated on January 14, 2022)

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 the Anthony C Clarke award: the fifth 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 2018 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 2018 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 MT Summit XVII: the 17th Machine Translation Summit (Dublin, Ireland, Aug 19–23, 2019), 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 MT Summit XVII. 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 2019 and 2020.

Submission

Candidates will submit using EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eamt2019 (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)
  • submission form explaining how your thesis fulfills the selection criteria
  • 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 “Winner of the 2018 European Association for Machine Translation Best Thesis Award” 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 research papers at MT Summit XVII: April 12th, 2019.

[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 conference

17th Machine Translation Summit: First Call for Papers

  • August 24, 2018 (updated on January 14, 2022)

The Helix Theatre, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland, August 19—23, 2019

https://www.mtsummit2019.com/
Twitter: @MTSummitXVII

Call for Papers

We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for MT Summit XVII: the 17th Machine Translation Summit, which will take place in the Helix Theatre at Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland, from 19-23 August 2019.

The conference is organised by the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT: http://eamt.org), and overall chair of the conference is Andy Way (ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland), supported by the following track chairs:

  • Research track co-chairs: Barry Haddow & Rico Sennrich (University of Edinburgh, UK)
  • User track: John Tinsley (Iconic Translation Machines, Ireland)
  • Translator track: Celia Rico (Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain)

We are keen to solicit novel, original contributions in each of these three areas that will advance the field of MT. In addition to regular contributions, we are also seeking extended abstracts for the User and Translator tracks, which can report work-in-progress, or novel applications of technology to real application scenarios. Submissions must be unpublished, and written in English.

We seek submissions across the entire spectrum of MT-related research activity. Traditionally, the MT Summit is the place where researchers, developers, users and vendors all get together under one roof to discuss the issues of the day. Accordingly, we are especially interested in papers which demonstrate a clear interaction between researchers and practitioners who are applying MT technology to their specific use-cases. Thus, we particularly encourage submissions that are oriented towards building robust and practical systems, including systems where there is a user-in-the-loop, adaptation to particular domains or usage scenarios, and utilization of available resources in real production scenarios. There is little doubt that the quality of MT systems has improved significantly in recent years. In line with general overhyping of AI, we have seen some extraordinary claims about the capability of MT, so much so that translators have had cause to worry about the impact of this improved technology on their profession. In response, and as a clear attempt to bring translators and system developers closer together, the 2019 MT Summit will also feature a Translators track, where we get to hear what the issues of the day are for perhaps the largest set of users of the technology.

As well as the three main tracks, the conference will also feature invited talks, panel discussions, a technology showcase, tutorials and workshops, presentation of the 2019 EAMT Best Thesis Award, and presentation of the IAMT 2019 Award of Honour. More information about each of these will follow in due course.

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: Friday, 12th April 2019
  • Notification of acceptance: Friday, 17th May 2019
  • Final camera-ready versions: Friday, 21st June 2019

Notification comes a full three months before the conference takes place, which should be plenty of time for conference attendees who need visas.

Research Track

Full papers must not exceed 10 (ten) pages plus unlimited pages for references, and must be formatted according to the MT Summit 2019 style guide (PDF version / LaTeX version / MS Word version). These papers will be rigorously reviewed for novelty and impact, and published in the conference proceedings. They will be presented at the conference as either oral presentations or as posters.

Translator Track

For the translator track, we will be accepting submissions of short papers of no more than 6 (six) pages, plus unlimited pages for references, reporting professional translators’ experiences with MT on issues such as the following:

  • Productivity measurements and their impact on MT adoption
  • Impact of MT on translators& work (pricing issues, post-editing tasks assignment and their acceptance among translators)
  • Ethical and confidentiality issues when using MT
  • Psycho-social aspects of MT adoption (translator attitudes and (pre-)conceptions)
  • Types of MT errors which influence quality acceptance/rejection
  • Discussions on the role of professional translators in MT development
  • The business side of MT
  • Integration of MT in large-scale production processes
  • The importance of translator feedback in MT
  • The role of the freelance translator in MT
  • The eruption of neural MT and its effect on the translation profession

User Track

For the user and translator tracks, we will be accepting submissions of short papers of no more than 6 (six) pages, plus unlimited pages for references, which report analyses of the effects of applying research technology to practical application scenarios, or descriptions of demonstrations appearing at the technology showcase.

Submissions to the user track are particularly encouraged from industry. Submissions from academic institutions should endeavour to include a user partner or collaborator as co-author where possible.

All Tracks

Submitted papers must be in PDF. To allow for blind reviewing, please do not include author names and affiliations within the paper, and avoid obvious self-references. Papers must be submitted to the Easy Chair/START system (to be determined shortly).

Topics of interest, across all tracks, include but are not limited to:

  • Advances in various MT paradigms: data-driven, rule-based, and hybrid MT
  • Incorporating external knowledge (e.g. document, image, metadata etc) into MT models
  • MT applications and embedding: translation/localization aids, speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, OCR, MT for communication (chats, blogs, social networks), multilingual applications, etc.
  • Technologies for MT deployment: quality estimation and domain adaptation
  • MT in special settings: low resources, massive resources, high volume, low computing resources, crisis scenarios, etc.
  • Human factors in MT and user interfaces for MT
  • Ethical issues in translation
  • Linguistic resources for MT: dictionaries, terminology banks, corpora
  • MT evaluation techniques and evaluation results
  • Empirical studies on translation data

Multiple Submissions

Full and short papers that will appear in the MT Summit proceedings 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. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time in the EasyChair/START submission form. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at MT Summit must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings.

Authors submitting more than one paper to MT Summit must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results. Track chairs have the right to redirect papers to other tracks if deemed appropriate.