[Air-L] Call for Participation in the Fourth Machine Translation Marathon

[MT Marathon 2010 Organising Committee]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The Machine Translation Marathon 2010, organised by the National Centre for Language Technology and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation at Dublin City University on behalf of the EuroMatrixPlus Consortium, is the fourth in a series of MT Marathons organised by the EU EuroMatrix and EuroMatrixPlus research projects on Machine Translation. The EuroMatrixPlus consortium invites researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation for participation.

The event will feature
 • Winter School classes on current methods in statistical MT with hands-on lab sessions (for novices and beginners)
 • Research showcase (invited talks by leading researchers)
 • Presentation of new open source tools for MT (separate call for papers will follow)
 • Work in small group on implementing new methods and features to improve open source MT tools (for more advanced researchers and developers)

 Where: Dublin City University, Ireland
 When: January 25-30, 2010
 How: On-line Registration
 How much: Attendance is free of charge, but limited.

For more information and online registration please go to http://mtmarathon2010.info

The MT Marathon consists of several events taking place at the same place to allow for free flow of thoughts and exchange of information and experience: a "winter school" with associated lab lessons, invited research talks, presentation of new open source machine translation tools.

The winter school will offer lectures on:
 • Introduction to MT and MT evaluation
 • Word alignment
 • Phrase-based models and decoding
 • Tree-based models and decoding
 • Advanced topics in statistical machine translation

Each lecture will accompanied by an afternoon lab session, in which participants will implement basic methods or work through hands-on tutorials on installing, training, and using statistical machine translation tool kits.

The open source convention allows participants in small groups to work on projects that advance existing machine translation tools, integrate new features, find new uses for machine translation, etc.

To give examples, recent projects included:
 • better search in machine translation ("cube pruning")
 • the implementation of a web page translation front end (<a href="http://demo.statmt.org/web.cgi" target="_blank">web.cgi</a>)
 • improving minimum error rate training
 • support authors who want to translate Wikipedia articles

Participants are encouraged to propose projects that could be carried out in small groups within the six days of Marathon. The main developers of the Moses and Joshua tool kits will attend the workshop, organise projects, and assist with extending these tool kits.


Program Committee:
Philipp Koehn
Chris Callison-Burch
Ventsislav Zhechev