Have you ever got to wondering during EAMT conferences what it would be like to host one at your own site? The organizers always seem very busy, but they are also clearly enjoying themselves. I can tell you from experience that it is an often crazy, sometimes daunting, but most of all exhilirating adventure.
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) has now opened the bidding for the site of the EAMT 2027 conference. The first step is an expression of interest, in which we ask you to gather the first members of a local planning team, do some research on what a conference on your site would look like, and send us the information.
We will evaluate the expressions of interest and then select a shortlist of potential sites. If selected, we will then work with you to create a final bid with a full proposal and budget. At the end of January we make the final selection for the conference.
The right location will be in Europe, the Middle East or Africa (EMEA), will be able to host a conference of 200+ participants for 4 days during May-June 2027, and will have an active and enthusiastic group to act as the local planning team.
Expressions of interest are free-form documents that outline your ideas for a conference. They should include the following:
Information on the proposed site and conference facilities
Location: city
Proposed conference venue (university, hotel or convention centre).
EAMT has been growing and the last 2 conferences had 190 participants, so the suggested location needs to accommodate 200+ people for the main conference sessions plus room for registration, a large poster or exhibit room, and at least 4 conference rooms for hosting parallel workshops and tutorials on the last day (about 100 people each).
Computing & audiovisual facilities at the venue
Proposed conference dates
It should take place during May – June 2027
3 days main conference + 1 day for workshops and tutorials
Choose dates that do not clash with other machine translation or translation studies events that might involve the same types of participants.
Catering and social events
Conference catering includes 2 coffee breaks + lunch for all conference days. Include a description of the service provider and their estimate of the cost per day per attendee
Each conference has a welcome reception on one evening and a conference dinner on another. Provide us with a description of your ideas for each along with a rough cost estimate.
Local planning team
Tell us what kind of team you will put together for your planning. Name the chair (or why not 2 co-chairs?) of the planning team and at least 3 other members.
Indicate whether any national or regional computational linguistics or translation studies associations would be on the team
Is it possible to have student volunteers during the conference? Include information on that.
About the cost estimates
A finalised budget is not expected at this stage, but we would like to see well-researched estimates with some level of detail on all requested estimates.
The schedule for the bidding process is:
December 1st, 2025: Bids submission deadline
December 15th , 2025: Shortlist and feedback to bidders
January 15th, 2026: Final bids due
January 30th, 2026: Final bid chosen
EAMT president Helena Moniz will serve as the conference’s General Chair and will collaborate with the local arrangements team to shape the conference.
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
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.
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
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)
EAMT conference