International Conference

MACHINE TRANSLATION
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON

21-22 November 2009

Organised by: The Natural Language Translation Specialist Group of The British Computer Society (BCS-NLTSG)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Conference

The first Cranfield International Conference on Machine Translation, jointly organised by the BCS-NLTSG and Cranfield University, was held in 1984. A second Cranfield conference was held in 1994.
Machine Translation is now some 60 years old and in view of the success of the previous Cranfield conferences, we are marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first conference at Cranfield by holding another this November.

The title for the Conference is:

Machine Translation: Twenty-Five Years On

Papers are invited which centre on any aspect of translation by machine or aided by machine.

We are particularly interested in what has been achieved in Machine Translation (MT) and Machine Assisted Translation (MAT) in the twenty-five years from 1984, and also what is expected to happen in R & D in MT and MAT in the next twenty-five years.

Other aspects of translation are welcome too – for it is by the interchanging of ideas that progress is made.

We invite papers reporting on recent advances in all aspects of Machine Translation, Computer-aided translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing in general, including (but not limited to): terminology extraction and terminology management; electronic dictionaries; corpus-based language processing; word-sense disambiguation; machine translation; machine-aided translation; translation memory systems; translation aids and tools; cross-lingual information retrieval; text alignment; CALL; language resources; evaluation.

Emphasis at the Conference will be given to the latest research in MT and MAT, illustrated wherever possible by computer demonstrations of working systems.

Since the last conference, the influence of the Web cannot be ignored.

It is expected that the Conference will help to give an impetus for further research and development in MT and MAT in the coming years.

We think everyone agreed how successful and enjoyable both the '84 and ’94 Cranfield Conferences were. We are expecting the 2009 Cranfield Conference to be even better.

Scientific Committee Includes:

Margarita Alonso Ramos (University of Coruña, Spain)
Masoud Ashraf (BCS NLT SG, UK)
Mona Baker (Manchester University, UK)
Christopher Bates (BCS NLT SG, UK)
Christian Boitet (Université Joseph Fourier, France)
Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Michael Carl (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
Douglas Clarke (BCS NLT SG, UK)
Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga, Spain)
Atefeh Farzindar (NLP Technologies, Canada)
Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Mikel L.Forcada (University of Alicante, Spain)
Gabriela Gonzalez (ETRAD, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Veronique Hoste (University College Ghent, Belgium)
Diana Inkpen (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Alma Kharrat (Microsoft, USA)
Richard Kittredge (CoGenTex, Inc., USA)
Elina Lagoudaki (Imperial College, UK)
Veronica Lawson (BCS NLT SG, UK)
Derek Lewis (BCS NLT SG, UK)
Marie-Claude L'Homme (University of Montreal, Canada)
Elliot Macklovitch (University of Montreal, Canada
Belinda Maia (University of Porto, Portugal)
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton)
Paola Monachesi (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Jon Riding (British & Foreign Bible Society and Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Jörg Schütz (Bioloom Group)
Lucia Specia (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Mark Stevenson (University Of Sheffield)
Alfred Vella (Liverpool University and Open University, UK)
David Wigg (BCS NLTSG, UK)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)

Important Dates

Date for submission of draft papers/posters for review 24 August 2009

Deadline for submission of proposals for practical demonstrations 24 August 2009

Notification of acceptance for papers, posters and demonstrations no later than 15 September 2009

Deadline for final versions of Papers and posters 10 October 2009

Registration Deadline 10 October 2009

‘Machine Translation 25 Years on’ 21st and 22nd November 2009

Format of papers

The proceedings are being prepared by Alfred Vella, Derek Lewis and Douglas Clarke (editors of the previous sets of proceedings), Please see http://nltsg.bcs.org/mtconf2009/papers.html

Alternative Programme

An alternative programme can be arranged for persons accompanying delegates. Among places which can be visited are: Milton Keynes, The Open University, Cambridge, Oxford, Blenheim Palace, Bletchley Park Museum and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Fees are expected to be:

Conference: Covering attendance at sessions, banquet, exhibition, and receipt of proceedings from 350 GBP plus VAT. The price includes the registration fee of 50 GBP, but does not include accommodation and other meals. See the web page on fees for more details and a link to the BCS booking system.

Residential accommodation is available at Cranfield at 45.50 GBP + VAT per person per night for bed and breakfast.

Non-residential delegates may pay for individual meals separately.

Please send expressions of interest and/or abstracts of papers to: mtconf@bcs.org

For more information please go to http://nltsg.bcs.org/mtconf2009/