Joint Workshop on
Exploiting Synergies between Information Retrieval and
Machine Translation (ESIRMT)
and
Hybrid Approaches to Machine Translation (HyTra)


Co-located with EACL 2012 (http://eacl2012.org)
Avignon, France
April 23 and 24, 2012


Deadline for paper submissions: January 27, 2012

http://www-lium.univ-lemans.fr/esirmt-hytra


This two-day workshop addresses two specific but related research problems
in computational linguistics.

The ESIRMT event (1st day) aims at reducing the gap, both theoretical and
practical, between information retrieval and machine translation research
and applications. Although both fields have been already contributing to
each other instrumentally, there is still too much work to be done in
relation to solidly framing these two fields into a common ground of
knowledge from both the procedural and paradigmatic perspectives.

The HyTra event (2nd day) aims at sharing ideas among researchers developing
and applying statistical, example-based, or rule-based machine translation
systems and who wish to enhance their systems with elements from the other
approaches.

The joint workshop will provide participants with the opportunity of
discussing research related to technology integration and system combination
strategies at both the general level of cross-language information access
and the specific level of machine translation technologies.

Contributions are to be organized into two tracks, corresponding to ESIRMT
and HyTra, respectively. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

ESIRMT track:
* machine translation and information retrieval hybridization
* applications of MT and IR hybrid systems
* IR techniques integrated in MT systems
* MT techniques integrated in IR systems
* any kind of innovative approach exploiting synergies between MT and IR
* machine learning techniques for ranking

HyTra track:
* ways and techniques of MT hybridization
* architectures for the rapid development of hybrid MT systems
* hybrid systems dealing with underresourced languages and/or with
morphologically rich languages
* using linguistic information (morphology, syntax, semantics) to
enhance statistical MT
* bootstrapping rule-based systems from corpora
* hybrid methods in spoken language translation
* extraction of dictionaries from parallel and comparable corpora
* machine learning techniques for hybrid MT
* heuristics for limiting the search space in hybrid MT
* alternative methods for the fair evaluation of the output of
different types of MT systems
* system combination approaches
* open source tools and free language resources for hybrid MT

Submissions should follow EACL 2012 format, as specified in
http://eacl2012.org/information-for-authors/index.html (paper length: up to
9 pages plus references). Reviewing of papers will be double-blind, so the
submissions should not reveal the authors' identity.


Important Dates
-----------------------------
January 27, 2012: Paper submissions due
February 24, 2012: Notification of acceptance
March 9, 2012: Camera ready papers due
April 23-24, 2012: Workshop in Avignon


Organizers
--------------------
Contact person: Marta R. Costa-jussa (e-mail: marta.ruiz@barcelonamedia.org )

ESIRMT: Marta R. Costa-jussa (Barcelona Media Innovation Center),
Patrik Lambert (University of Le Mans), Rafael E. Banchs (Institute
for Infocomm Research)

HyTra: Reinhard Rapp (Universities of Mainz and Leeds), Bogdan Babych
(University of Leeds), Kurt Eberle (Lingenio GmbH), Tony Hartley
(Toyohashi University of Technology and University of Leeds), Serge
Sharoff (University of Leeds), Martin Thomas (University of Leeds)


Invited Speakers
------------------------------
Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh)
TBA


Programme Committee
------------------------------------------
Jordi Atserias, Yahoo! Research
Bogdan Babych, University of Leeds, CTS
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Nuria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Pierrette Bouillon, ISSCO/TIM/ETI, University of Geneva
Chris Callison-Burch, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Michael Carl, Copenhagen Business School
Oliver Culo, ICSI, University of California, Berkeley
Kurt Eberle, Lingenio GmbH, Heidelberg
Andreas Eisele, Directorate-General for Translation, European
Commission, Luxembourg
Marcello Federico, Fondazione Bruno Kessler.
Mikel Forcada, University of Alicante
Alexander Fraser, Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), Stuttgart
Johanna GeiÃ^ß, University of Cambridge and Lingenio GmbH
Mireia Ginesti-Rosell, Lingenio GmbH, Heidelberg
Silvia Hansen-Schirra, FTSK, University of Mainz
Tony Hartley, Toyohashi University of Technology
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University
Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore
Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essez
Yanjun Ma, Baidu Inc.
Haizhou Li, Institute for Infocomm Research
Reinhard Rapp, University of Mainz, FTSK
Paul Schmidt, Institut for Applied Information Science, Saarbrücken
Uta Seewald-Heeg, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Köthen
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, CTS
Wade Shen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fabrizio Silvestri, Instituto de Scienza e Tecnologia dell'Informazione
Harold Somers, CNGL, Dublin City University
Anders SÓ©gaard, University of Copenhagen
Martin Thomas, University of Leeds, CTS
Jörg Tiedemann, University of Uppsala
Zymunt Vetulani, University of Poznan