LINGUIST List 13.1628

Sat Jun 8 2002

Calls: Portuguese Language, Machine Translation

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Dr Chrys Chrystello, CONFERENCE PORTUGAL OCT 2002
2. Jessie Pinkham, AMTA workshop call for abstracts AMTA workshop call for abstracts

A two-day international Colloquium organised by SLP, to debate
questions related to the dissemination, expansion and revival of the
Portuguese language in the World, will be held at Oporto on 11-12
October 2002.

This Colloquium will exploit and canvass those questions as a
contemporary debate on language. The aim is not only the historical
and theoretical problems of the Portuguese language in the world, but
to analyse its practical modalities in conjunction with other
cultural, historical and linguistic Lusophone communities, as a means
of promoting and drawing near different peoples and cultures. The
Colloquium will have the participation of representatives of
Portuguese-speaking countries, in all its varieties, as well as
Portuguese-speaking people from any other country, in order to rethink
the debate on Lusophonia.

 Areas/Sub themes:
 1. Language, Multimedia & Mass media
 2. Curricular Development
 3. Citizenship and Political Participation
 4. Translation and Culture (Intercultural and Transcultural),
Intercultural studies
 5. Cultural Diversity
 
We aim to receive as many proposals as possible covering
geographically nd thematically the widest possible range. We aim at a
globalising and comprehensive picture of the theme. Apart from
individual proposals, we might consider, if its number so justifies,
the inclusion of a round table discussion. All proposals should be
addressed to the Executive Secretary, specifying the sub theme, and
including an abstract not exceeding 300 ords, in electronic format
(MSWord preferred, any version). All proposals will be considered, and
a selection of presented papers may be included in a uture issue of
Revista da L�ngua, da Sociedade de L�ngua Portuguesa.

If you are interested in receiving further information on this
onference or if you want to make a 20-minute presentation, please
contact the Executive Secretariat, at the addresses below.

Deadline for Registration: 15 July 2002
Deadline for Submissions: 15 July 2002
Notification of Submissions approved 31 August 2002
Deadline for Confirmation of acceptance: 27 September 2002
Fees: 1. Participants (SLP Members) presenting papers: EURO 15.00 2.
Participants (non-SLP Members) presenting papers: EURO 30.00
3. Participants after the deadline (15 July 2002): EURO45.00

 Addresses: Dr. Chrys Chrystello or
 c/o Isabel Ara�jo/Ricardo Correia - Executive Secretariat
 Col�quio Anual da Lusofonia - SLP
 Apartado 6196 4461-803 Senhora da Hora Codex, Portugal
 E-mail: npo28840mail.telepac.pt
 Fax: (00)1 775 205 4419 or + 351 228314786

Call for Abstracts for the AMTA workshop on Customization Strategies
for MT

Machine translation systems must have customization capabilities in
order to claim success as a commercial product or a research
prototype. Minimally, these include the ability to add translations
for new words and phrases, but may also include more sophisticated
functionality such as adapting to new syntactic structures or writing
styles, and may even be the means of acquiring all the system's
translation knowledge (e.g., in statistical systems), We propose to
bring MT developers and researchers together to discuss the
customization capabilities of their systems, with an emphasis on using
common data for the discussion.

This workshop is intended to cover all types of customization
strategies, although preference in selection will be given to novel
strategies. We encourage participation from MT developers of
commercial systems, and researchers working on all types of MT systems
(traditional transfer, interlingua, example-based, or statistical).

To make the discussion more interesting, we request that participants
demonstrate the customization capabilities of their system using data
freely available to everyone, such as Hansard data for French-English
or other data available from ELRA or LDC. Microsoft has also agreed
to make technical manual data available for several language pairs
(English and any of these: French, Spanish, German, Japanese) for
purposes of research related to this workshop. (For access to this	
data please send email to CustomWSmicrosoft.com.)
	We request that interested parties submit a two page abstract with the
	following information:
	- overview of your MT system
	
	- description of customization capabilities
	
	- comparison of this strategy to other known strategies
	
	- data that will be used to test capability
	
	- proposed evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the
	customization
	
	- estimate of time that would be required to customize for the
	chosen domain, based on your sample run.
	
	- 
	
	Dates:
	
	 Call for participation: June 8
	
	 Abstract submission deadline: July 7
	
	 Acceptance notification: July 22
	
	 Early registration for AMTA: July 31
	
	 Papers due:	 September 6
	
	 AMTA workshop October 6 or 7
	
	
	
	Instructions for submission:
	
	All submissions should be in English, and it is recommended that they
	be submitted in one of the following three formats: PDF (preferred);
	PostScript; Microsoft Word. All submissions will be received and
	processed using the Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) located at
	http://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CustomWS.
		
	Authors should follow the instructions at the CMT web site to
	register, enter information about themselves and their abstract, and
	upload a copy of their abstract in one of the acceptable formats by
	the submission deadline. Report any problems with the website to
	CustomWSmicrosoft.com.
		
	For information on obtaining Microsoft Data to participate in the
	workshop, please contact CustomWSmicrosoft.com
		
	Organizers: Jessie Pinkham, Deborah Coughlin, Bill Dolan