Call for abstracts and participation:

CONTEXT IN MACHINE TRANSLATION
META-NET workshop in ICANN 2011 conference
Espoo, Finland, 14th of June, 2011

=== BACKGROUND: ICANN CONFERENCE ===

ICANN 2011 conference brings together researchers from computational
modeling, including machine learning and neural networks as well as
different scientific disciplines in which these methods are applied.
In the ICANN 2011 conference, there will be six keynotes by
renowned scientists:

- Tom Griffiths, University of California Berkeley,
- Riitta Hari, Aalto University,
- Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto,
- Aapo Hyvärinen, University of Helsinki,
- John Shawe-Taylor, University College London, and
- Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

=== MACHINE TRANSLATION RESEARCH AND CONTEXT ===

Machine Translation can be considered to be one of the most
challenging tasks computer science has ever taken. Statistical methods
have been increasingly successful in providing efficiently MT
solutions for many language pairs. However, there is a lot of room for
improvement regarding the quality of translations. Prototypical
sentences are translated well but in certain situations the end result
is far from expected. One central reason for the failures is that
current systems take the context into account only in a limited
manner.

In natural language processing, the context of use has a considerable
impact on the understanding process. It can refer to multiple kinds of
meta-data, including information on the document type, domain, genre
and medium used. Automatic machine translation systems typically
restrict the considered context to one sentence or smaller parts of
it.

=== WORKSHOP INFORMATION ===

META-NET Network of Excellence organizes a workshop on Context in
Machine Translation to foster exchange of ideas and results in this
area. The notion of context is meant to be understood broadly,
including other modalities (like vision) in addition to the textual
contexts. Therefore, we expect participants, e.g., from machine
translation, machine learning, vision research and cognitive systems
communities.

The workshop takes place on Tuesday, 14th of June, 2011 at Aalto
University School of Science as a part of ICANN 2011 conference
programme (see http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann11/ for details).

In the workshop, the task and data for Context in Machine Translation
Challenge will be introduced.

=== CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ===

We expect participants, e.g., from machine learning, machine translation, vision research and cognitive systems communities. The workshop is intended for anyone interested in the area as well as for those who plan to participate in the challenge.

The registration information to ICANN 2011 including conference fees
is available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann11/.

If you wish to participate to the workshop without a presentation,
please register normally to the ICANN 2011 workhops.

=== PRELIMINARY TIMETABLE ===

Tuesday, 14th of June, Computer Science Building, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland

* 13.00-13.15 Welcome and participant introductions
* 13.15-13.30 Timo Honkela: Objectives of the workshop
* 13.30-14.00 Jaakko Väyrynen: Presentation of the Context in MT challenge and data
* 14.00-14.45 Katerina Pastra: Bridging language, action and perception: the cognitive context of machine translation
* 14.45-15.00 Coffee break
* 15.00-16.00 Expert talks on different aspects of contextuality
* 16.00-16.50 Discussion