The goal of the 5th Workshop on Interlinguas and Interlingual Approaches to MT is to bring together specialists to work out a practical, cross-language system of semantic relations for use in representing events and states of affairs including, but not limited to, participant relations (e.g., agent, patient, recipient, benefactee, instrument, etc.), spatial relations (e.g., anterior, posterior, superior, inferior, interior, etc.) and temporal relations (e.g., prior-to, following, concurrent, etc.).
Papers are invited on:
Preference will be given to contributions that relate to actual research and development projects focusing on interlingual approaches to MT or NLP. In addition, we encourage discussions which provide abundant multilingual evidence or address the use of multilingual parallel corpora.
Background
Interlingual approaches to MT have as a central goal providing natural language expressions with representations that capture those aspects of a communication which permit the generation of an equivalent expression in some other language (i.e., representations of communicative intent). Any particular interlingual representation should ideally represent what was said by whom and to whom and any relevant information about where, when, why and how it was said.
Such approaches include those developed for
the Mikrokosmos
knowledge-based MT system
(http://crl.nmsu.edu/Research/Projects/mikro/index.html),
ISI's GAZELLE MT project
(http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/interlingua.html),
the KANT
system at the Language Technologies Institute
(http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/IRW/),
or the Consortium for Speech
Translation Advanced Research
(http://www.c-star.org).
Interlingual representations are usually very rich and producing them may be extremely knowledge intensive. Unfortunately, many aspects of such representation systems are unknown or underdeveloped. Nonetheless, interlingual approaches offer powerful semantics-based and pragmatics-based solutions to any number of MT and NLP problems (disambiguation, reference resolution, interpretation of figurative speech).
This workshop will focus on content development and in particular on identifying and defining a basic set of relations for representing events and states of affairs including participant relations (such as agent, patient, instrument, recipient, etc.), spatial relations (such as superior, inferior, anterior, posterior, interior, etc.) and temporal relations (such as prior-to, following, concurrent-with, etc.).
The workshop will be the 6th in a series sponsored in part by the Special Interest Group on Interlinguas of AMTA. The initial meeting was a pre-workshop held in Montreal in conjunction with AMTA-96 at which a range of position papers were presented providing future themes. The 1st Workshop took place in 1997 at the MT Summit VI in San Diego. It addressed two issues: the question of how deep and complex to make an ontology and the question of the need to represent language particular information in the interlingua. The 2nd Workshop took place in Philadelphia at AMTA-98 and focused on issues of interlingual content given the task of accounting for a set of translations of a UNESCO Courier article in a number of different languages. The 3rd Workshop, which took place at the NAACL/ANLP-2000 Conference in Seattle, focused on the application of interlinguas and interlingual approaches to other NLP tasks such as reference resolution, web search, information retrieval, multimodal (text and graphic animation) processing and so on. The 4th Workshop took place at the AMTA-2000 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and dealt with a comparison of three current interlingual approaches to a few MT tasks (the representation of tense and aspect, lexical disambiguation and the treatment of cross-language mismatches).
Format of the workshop
The workshop will consist of 10 20-minute presentations, each followed by a 15-minute discussion, beginning with informal critical responses from reviewers followed by a short rebuttal by the author and, finally, open discussion. A multilingual corpus of translations in some 17 languages of an article from the UNESCO Courier may serve as a context for discussion for both authors and reviewers. Each translation is glossed and translated into English.
Contributions will be selected from the submissions on the basis of the recommendations and comments from two reviewers from the program committee. At least one critique of each accepted contribution will then be solicited from program committee members and other MT specialists who have in one way or another been involved in interlingual MT.
Deadlines for submission, notification and camera-ready copy
Paper Requirements
Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less, including references). Please send papers and submission questions to shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu.
Submissions should follow the submission guidelines for papers to the regular sessions of the MT Summit. See http://www.eamt.org/summitVIII/author.html for details.
The differences between the Summit submission guidelines and those for
this workshop are as follows:
Please send electronic version (rtf-format) to shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu.
Please send a hardcopy of your paper to:
Registration and Fees
Registration forms and fees have yet to be determined. A banquet for the participants and guests will be organized separately from the the workshop for the evening of the 22nd. Registration for the workshop is part of the general registration for the conference at http://www.eamt.org/summitVIII/register.html
Contacts:
David Farwell/Steve Helmreich
Computing Research Laboratory
New Mexico State University
Box 30001/3CRL
Las Cruces, New Mexico
USA
Tel: 505 646 5108/505 646 2141
Fax: 505 646 6218
e-mail: david@crl.nmsu.edu/shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu
Comments/questions may be mailed to Steve Helmreich at: shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu
Copyright 2001 Computing Research Lab.