LINGUIST List 12.993

Tue Apr 10 2001

Calls: New Zealand Ling Society, Machine Translation

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, New Zealand Linguistic Society Conference
2. Dr. S. Bandyopadhyay, Example-Based Machine Translation

New Zealand Linguistic Society Conference, 30 August to 1 September 2001

SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

The sole (or main) venue will be College House, Ilam Road,
Christchurch (a hall of residence adjoining the campus of the
University of Canterbury). The conference will begin at about 9.00
am on 30 August and end about mid-afternoon on 1 September.

**Note that the deadline for paying the earlybird registration fee 
(NZ$90 for nonstudents, NZ$62 for students) is 1 May.** After that, 
the fees increase to NZ$100 and NZ$72 respectively. (Currently, NZ$1 
= US$0.43 approximately.) The fee includes morning and afternoon tea 
and lunch, and welcoming drinks and nibbles.

Our bank can handle cheques in most major currencies. Unfortunately 
we cannot accept payment by credit card. The alternatives are:
(a) ask your bank to supply a bank draft in NZ dollars, drawn on a NZ bank, or
(b) send a cheque for the appropriate amount in any other major 
currency, drawn on a bank of the country where the currency is used. 
(A personal cheque drawn on your own account would be suitable.) 
Please check the current exchange rate when working out how much to 
make the cheque out for. All cheques should be made out to 
'Linguistic Society of New Zealand, Canterbury Branch'.

Information on the conference is at the New Zealand Linguistic Society website:
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwlingui/NZLS/01Conf.html
Information about Christchurch, and the surrounding Canterbury region 
of the South Island of New Zealand, is at 
http://www.canterburypages.co.nz/

Please complete and return by email or snailmail the form 
incorporated on the 'tear-off portion' below (or the form on the 
website), sending it to:
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Department of Linguistics, University of
Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand (e-mail:
a.c-mccling.canterbury.ac.nz).

Papers are welcomed on any area of linguistics. We expect that most
papers will occupy 45-minute time slots (i.e. about 30 minutes plus
15 minutes for discussion), but we will be able to accommodate
shorter papers (30-minutes time slots), and perhaps also longer ones,
as well. Please indicate any special requirements below. You are
invited to indicate a provisional title now, and supply an abstract
before 7 June 2001.

Accommodation per night (bed and continental breakfast) at College
House will cost $38.00.

Dinner is not included in the registration fee or accommodation
charge. There will be a conference dinner on 31 August, costing 
NZ$32 (drinks not included). It will take place at the University 
Staff Club, where a bar service is available. The menu is:
*	Canap�s (in downstairs lounge and bar area)
*	Choice of main dishes (all served with new potatoes, 
vegetables, tossed salad):
	Chicken breast stuffed with pinenuts and brie, with cranberry sauce
or	Beef fillet on kumara cake, with a red wine and mushroom sauce
or	Kumara cake with grilled brown mushrooms, walnuts and gruy�re
*	Baked citrus cheesecake with a berry couli
*	Coffee or tea, after-dinner mints
On other nights, conference-goers will have the choice of dining at 
one of several venues on campus, or near the campus in Ilam, or 
elsewhere in Christchurch.

________ [tear-off portion, for return] _______

NEW ZEALAND LINGUISTIC SOCIETY, 30 AUGUST TO 1 SEPTEMBER 2001
FORM FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST (Please indicate YES/NO as appropriate)

Name:	 _____________________________________________________

Address: _____________________________________________________

	_____________________________________________________

	_____________________________________________________

Phone:	 _______________

E-mail:	 _____________________________________________________

Fax:	 _______________

I would like to give a paper YES/NO
Provisional title:

______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

I would like the time slot for the paper to be:
45 minutes YES/NO
other (please specify): ______________

I enclose my registration fee:
Student
 ($62.00 before 1 May 01, thereafter $72.00) YES/NO ____
Nonstudent
 ($90.00 before 1 May 01, thereafter $100.00) YES/NO ____
OR
I will pay my registration fee later YES/NO

I would like to reserve accommodation at College House ($38.00 per
night, including breakfast) YES/NO
for the night of:
	29 August	 ____
	30 August	 ____
	31 August	 ____
	1 September	 ____
OR
I will probably reserve accommodation at College House later YES/NO
OR
I will probably not need accommodation at College House YES/NO

I will attend the dinner, and enclose $32 	_____
OR
I will attend the dinner, but will pay lateR YES/NO

Total amount enclosed	 _____

Please return to:
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Department of Linguistics, University of
Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand (e-mail:
a.c-mccling.canterbury.ac.nz).

- 
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Professor and Acting Head of Department
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 
4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108
fax +64-3-364 2969
e-mail a.c-mccling.canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html

WORKSHOP ON EXAMPLE BASED MACHINE TRANSLATION

Workshop on Example-Based Machine Translation: Last Call for Papers

Hosted by MT-SUMMIT VIII
Santiago de Compostella, Spain,
September 18-22, 2001
http://www.eamt.org/summitVIII/index.html
http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~away/EBMT.html
Co-chairs: Michael Carl, IAI, Saarbr=FCcken; Andy Way, Computer 
Applications, Dublin City University=20

In recent years, corpora of multilingual translated texts have become 
widely available for a number of languages. Notwithstanding the seminal 
paper by Nagao (84), it is primarily since the early 90's that such 
bilingual texts have been exploited in the area of Machine Translation 
(MT).

The two main paradigmatic approaches which have been proposed are 
Statistics-based Machine Translation (SBMT) and Example-Based Machine 
Translation (EBMT). A related variant of EBMT that we ignore here, 
despite being widely used in the localisation area, is that of 
Translation Memories (TM). No new translations are created afresh from 
previously existing examples in the system database: rather, the closest 
translation matches are proposed to the user for post-editing into the 
correct translation.

While translation memory systems are used in restricted domains, SBMT 
systems require training on huge, good quality bilingual corpora. As a 
consequence TMs can hardly be applied as a general purpose solution to 
MT and SBMT as yet cannot produce complex translations to the desired 
quality, even if such translations are given to the system in the 
training phase. EBMT seeks to exploit and integrate a number of 
knowledge resources, such as linguistics and statistics, and symbolic 
and numerical techniques, for integration into one framework. In this 
way, rule-based morphological, syntactic and/or semantic information is 
combined with knowledge extracted from bilingual texts which is then 
re-used in the translation process.

However, it is unclear how one might combine the different knowledge 
resources and techniques in an optimal way. In EBMT, therefore, the 
question is asked: what can be learned from a bilingual corpus and what 
needs to be manually provided? Furthermore, we remain uncertain as to 
how far the EBMT methodology can be pushed with respect to translation 
quality and/or translation purpose. Finally, one wonders what the 
implications and consequences are for size and quality of the reference 
translations, (computational) complexity of the system, sizeability and 
transportability, if such an approach is taken.

Given this background, we propose to organize a workshop in order to 
shed some light on these open questions, among others. We are seeking 
contributions which go beyond the purely statistical and/or rule-based 
approaches to MT. We welcome visionary and technical descriptions, 
reports of empirical research as well as feasibility studies and system 
demonstrations. We would welcome contributions on any of the following 
topics and sub-headings:

 a.. (semi-)automatic preparation of existing bi/multilingual corpora 
for EBMT
 a.. extraction of bi/multilingual texts from the web
 b.. preparation of treebanks for EBMT
 c.. bi/multilingual alignment/bracketing/parsing
 d.. inference of bi/multilingual grammar and transfer rules
 b.. description of `pure' EBMT systems
 a.. knowledge resources used
 b.. representation of numeric and symbolic knowledge
 c.. descriptions of `hybrid' systems integrating EBMT with rule-based 
or other methodologies
 d.. evaluation of EBMT results and/or comparison with other MT systems 

 e.. considerations on domain-(in)dependence of EBMT systems
 f.. computational and/or system complexity of EBMT systems

Submissions
Submitted papers must describe original, previously unpublished work. 
Submissions must not exceed 12 pages. Contributions should be submitted 
to Michael Carl. Conference stylesheets are now available. Deadlines 
appear below.

There may also be poster sessions, subject to demand. We also strongly 
encourage system demonstrations, either in conjunction with contentful 
paper presentations or as stand-alone demos during the lunch and coffee 
intervals. Please make it clear in your submissions whether you plan to 
demonstrate your system, either as part of a paper presentation, or as a 
stand-alone demo.



Publication
There will be a common publication format for all workshops in line with 
the main conference proceedings. Please follow the guidelines for the 
main conference. However, it is anticipated that relevant publishers 
will be approached to see if there would be interest in publishing the 
proceedings more widely.


Important Dates

 a.. January 2001 First call for papers/demos
 b.. 15.4.2001 Deadline for receipt of papers
 c.. 31.5.2001 Notification of acceptance
 d.. 15.7.2001 Final Paper due
 e.. 18.9.2001 Workshop takes place
Attendance Fee
Details of registration procedures, including registration fees, have 
just been announced. The attendance fee for our workshop is Euro 50.


Organizing Committee

 a.. Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, India
 b.. Ralf Brown, USA
 c.. Michael Carl, Germany
 d.. Ilyas Cicekli, Turkey
 e.. Brona Collins, Belgium
 f.. Oliver Streiter, Taiwan
 g.. Stephan Vogel, Germany
 h.. Andy Way, Ireland