The Fourth Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low-Resource Languages
(LoResMT 2021)
https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt/

@ MT Summit XVIII – 2021
The 18th biennial conference of the International Association of Machine Translation
16-20 August 2021, Orlando, Florida, USA

LoResMT 2021 Call for Papers
https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt/
Paper submission due: July 1, 2021

Invited Speakers (Listed alphabetically)
Barry Haddow
University of Edinburgh
Catherine Muthoni Gitau
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)
Mathias Müller
Institut für Computerlinguistik, Universität Zürich
Mona Diab
Facebook, George Washington University

LoResMT 2021 Shared Tasks
Registration open:
https://forms.gle/DbW6z94KuB2ZHWPp8
System submission due: July 01, 2021
(1) Taiwanese Sign Language () Traditional Chinese
(2) English () Irish
(3) English () Marathi

WORKSHOP SCOPE

Based on the success of past low-resource machine translation (MT) workshops at AACL-IJCNLP 2020 (http://aacl2020.org/), MT Summit 2019 (https://www.mtsummit2019.com) and AMTA 2018 (https://amtaweb.org/), we introduce the fourth LoResMT workshop at MT Summit 2021. Like its predecessors, this workshop will bring together researchers and translators of low-resource languages to compare and contrast how each uses digital technology for translation. Specifically, the workshop focuses on novel advances on the coverage of even more languages than past workshops with different geographical presence, degree of diffusion, and digitalization.

We solicit original work on low-resource translation which includes, but is not limited to, MT systems that include word tokenizers/de-tokenizers, word segmenters, morphological analyzers, and more. We furthermore invite work that includes MT systems based on neural networks along with their methods, natural language processing approaches, and overall coverage of low-resource languages. Additionally, novel work covering translations of COVID-related text and their practical use for low-resource communities is of high interest.

The goal of this workshop is to begin to close the gap between low-resource translation systems and their practical use in the real world. Online systems and original research that can be used by native speakers of low-resource languages is of particular interest. Therefore, It will be beneficial if the evaluations of these tools in research papers include their impact on the quality of MT output and how they can be used in the real world.

TOPICS

We are highly interested in (1) original research papers, (2) review/opinion papers, and (3) online systems on the topics below; however, we welcome all novel ideas that cover research on low-resource languages.
- COVID-related corpora, their translations and corresponding NLP/MT systems
- Neural machine translation for low-resource languages
- Work that presents online systems for practical use by native speakers
- Word tokenizers/de-tokenizers for specific languages
- Word/morpheme segmenters for specific languages
- Alignment/Re-ordering tools for specific language pairs
- Use of morphology analyzers and/or morpheme segmenters in MT
- Multilingual/cross-lingual NLP tools for MT
- Corpora creation and curation technologies for low-resource languages
- Review of available parallel corpora for low-resource languages
- Research and review papers of MT methods for low-resource languages
- MT systems/methods (e.g. rule-based, SMT, NMT) for low-resource languages
- Pivot MT for low-resource languages
- Zero-shot MT for low-resource languages
- Fast building of MT systems for low-resource languages
- Re-usability of existing MT systems for low-resource languages
- Machine translation for language preservation

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We are soliciting two types of submissions. For research, review, and position papers, the length of each paper should be at least four (4) and not exceed eight (8) pages, plus unlimited pages for references. For system demonstration papers, the limit is four (4) pages. Submissions should be formatted according to the official MT Summit 2021 style templates (PDF, LaTeX, Word). Accepted papers will be published online in the MT Summit 2021 proceedings and will be presented at the conference either orally or as a poster.

Submissions must be anonymized and should be done using the official conference management system (https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MTSUMMIT2021). Scientific papers that have been or will be submitted to other venues must be declared as such, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted and published at LoResMT. The review will be double-blind.

We would like to encourage authors to cite papers written in ANY language that are related to the topics, as long as both original bibliographic items and their corresponding English translations are provided.

Registration will be handled by the main conference. (To be announced)

IMPORTANT DATES

March 25, 2021 – Call for papers released
May 04, 2021 – Second call for papers
May 20, 2021 – Third call for papers
July 1, 2021 – Paper submissions due [Submission Deadline Extended]
July 8, 2021 – Notification of acceptance
July 15, 2021 – Camera-ready due
August 5, 2021 – Video recordings due
August 16, 2021 - LoResMT workshop

SHARED TASKS

We are happy to announce the introduction of new shared tasks focused on the building of MT systems for COVID-related texts. The task aims to encourage research on MT systems involving three low-resource language pairs:

(1) Taiwanese Sign Language () Traditional Chinese () 100,000 pairs)
(2) English () Irish
(3) English () Marathi

The training, development, and test sets for the three groups will be released shortly (please see the important dates). Updated information will be available on the LoResMT website (https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt/) and in the Google Group (https://groups.google.com/g/loresmt2021/).

Registration link: https://forms.gle/DbW6z94KuB2ZHWPp8

May 10, 2021: Release of training data
June 23, 2021: Release of dry-run test data
June 30, 2021: Release of test data
July 01, 2021: Submission of the systems
July 03, 2021: Notification of results
July 08, 2021: Submission of shared task papers
July 12, 2021: Notification of shared task papers
July 17, 2021: Camera-ready

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (listed alphabetically)

Atul Kr. Ojha DSI, National University of Ireland Galway & Panlingua Language Processing LLP
Chao-Hong Liu Potamu Research Ltd
Jade Abbott Retro Rabbit
John Ortega New York University
Jonathan Washington Swarthmore College
Katharina Kann University of Colorado at Boulder
Nathaniel Oco National University (Philippines)
Surafel Melaku Lakew Amazon AI
Tommi A Pirinen University of Hamburg
Valentin Malykh Huawei Noah’s Ark lab and Kazan Federal University
Varvara Logacheva Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology
Xiaobing Zhao Minzu University of China

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (listed alphabetically)

Alberto Poncelas, ADAPT, Dublin City University
Alina Karakanta, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Amirhossein Tebbifakhr, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Anna Currey, Amazon Web Services
Arturo Oncevay, University of Edinburgh
Atul Kr. Ojha, DSI, National University of Ireland Galway & Panlingua Language Processing LLP
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, DSI, National University of Ireland Galway
Beatrice Savold, University of Trento
Bogdan Babych, Heidelberg University
Chao-Hong Liu, Potamu Research Ltd
Duygu Ataman, University of Zurich
Eleni Metheniti, CLLE-CNRS and IRIT-CNRS
Francis Tyers, Indiana University
Kalika Bali, MSRI Bangalore, India
Katharina Kann University of Colorado at Boulder
Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Saarland University (Germany)
Jasper Kyle Catapang, University of the Philippines
John P. McCrae, DSI, National University of Ireland Galway
John Ortega, New York University
Liangyou Li, Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies
Maria Art Antonette Clariño, University of the Philippines Los Baños
Mathias Müller, University of Zurich
Nathaniel Oco, National University (Philippines)
Priya Rani, DSI, National University of Ireland Galway
Rico Sennrich, University of Zurich
Sangjee Dondrub, Qinghai Normal University
Santanu Pal, WIPRO AI
Sardana Ivanova, University of Helsinki
Shantipriya Parida, Idiap Research Institute
Sina Ahmadi, DSI, National University of Ireland Galway
Sunit Bhattacharya, Charles University
Surafel Melaku Lakew, Amazon AI
Tommi A Pirinen, University of Hamburg
Valentin Malykh, Huawei Noah’s Ark lab, and Kazan Federal University

CONTACT

LoResMT 2021 Workshop Chair: John Ortega (jortega@cs.nyu.edu)

Shared Task Chairs:
Atul Kr. Ojha (atulkumar.ojha@insight-centre.org), for inquiries on Marathi and Irish MT tasks
Chao-Hong Liu (ch.liu@acm.org), for inquiries on Sign Language MT task
Katharina Kann (katharina.kann@colorado.edu), for general inquiries