Second International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-based Machine Translation

20th--21st January 2011 - Barcelona, Spain

http://www.uoc.edu/freerbmt11/index.html

Important dates (deadlines has been extended):

* 22th November - Submission deadline
* 6th December - Notification to authors
* 20th December - Deadline for camera-ready copy
* 20th-21st January - Workshop

Description:

The free/open-source development model has been adopted by many machine
translation (MT) researchers and developers who are opening their code
to the community. This benefits, on the one hand, machine translation
users who have access to machine translation software that they can
adapt to suit their needs, and, on the other hand, to machine
translation researchers and developers who get valuable feedback to
improve their systems.

Machine translation systems mainly depend on both algorithms
(translation engines) and data (linguistic rules, parallel corpora,
etc.). Hence, not only the implementation of the algorithms must be
free/open-source, but also the data themselves. Nowadays, there are many
machine translation packages of this type available, but most of them
are corpus-based, and, in particular, statistical machine translation
systems (SMT): rule-based (RBMT) systems built on these principles are
still not so widely known. Both SMT and RBMT paradigms have benefits and
drawbacks and none of them can be identified as inherently better than
the other; in fact, hybridisation is currently an active field of research.

An advantage of having free/open-source licences for rule-based machine
translation is that the linguistic knowledge can be reused to build
knowledge for other language pairs or even for other human language
technologies besides machine translation, and, conversely, linguistic
knowledge from other sources may be reused to build machine translation
systems. The free and open scenario makes this reuse easier, and, if
copylefted licences are used, builds a commons of knowledge and
resources that benefits all the language communities involved, and
specially less-resourced languages, for which large bilingual corpora
are not available, and morphologically rich languages, which even with
large corpora suffer from data sparseness.
With the aim of gathering together free/open-source rule-based machine
translation practitioners and users, the First International Workshop on
Free/Open-Source Rules-Based Machine Translation was held in November
2009 at Universitat d'Alacant (Spain). After the success of the first
edition, a second edition will be held at Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain) in January 2011.

Scope:

The main areas of interest for the workshop are as follows:

* Language-independent toolkits, platforms, and frameworks for
rule-based machine translation
* Language-specific machine translation systems
* Hybrid systems where RBMT is the main component
* Manual and automated evaluation of machine translation systems,
comparative evaluation of RBMT and SMT/hybrid systems.
* Linguistic resources for RBMT (machine-readable dictionaries,
part-of-speech taggers, word-sense disambiguators, morphological
analysers, parsers, etc.)
* Methods for inducing/inferring data for RBMT systems (supervised,
semi-supervised or unsupervised)
* Interoperability between systems, tools, and data
* Practical descriptions of RBMT integration and usage (in publishing,
by professional translators, for free/open-source software, etc.)

Note that this is intended as a guideline, and we welcome submissions on
other aspects of free/open-source rule-based machine translation.

Submissions:

All submissions should be made through the conference management system,
the url of which is: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=freerbmt11

Submissions should describe original work, completed or in progress, be
anonymous (no authors, affiliations or addresses, and no explicit
self-reference), be no longer than eight (8) pages of A4, and be in PDF
format. Initial versions of papers must conform to the conference format
(http://www.uoc.edu/freerbmt11/freerbmt11.tar.gz).

Where a submission discusses software or data, in final publication it
will be required to include information on how both the software and the
data can be publicly accessed. The software and data should be clearly
licensed under an approved licence. A list of free software licences may
be found at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html.

Contact:

If you have questions regarding the submission, please feel free to
contact the programme committee at submission-freerbmt11@dlsi.ua.es

For any other question, please feel free to contact the organisers at
local-freerbmt11@uoc.edu

Local organising committee:
* Lluís Villarejo, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
* Mireia Farrús, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Co-chairs:
* Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant

Programme committee:
* Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant
* Mikel L. Forcada, Universitat d'Alacant
* Trond Trosterud, Romssa Universitehta
* Kevin P. Scannell, Saint Louis University
* Hrafn Loftsson, Háskólinn í Reykjavík
* Kepa Sarasola, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
* Lluís Padró, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
* Antonio Toral, Dublin City University