Workshop on Crisis Machine Translation (“Crisis MT”) at MT Summit 2019 - First 
Call

Workshop Website: http://tinyurl.com/yyco764r <http://tinyurl.com/yyco764r>
We are pleased to make a call for submissions to the First Crisis MT Workshop, 
which will be held on Tuesday, 20th August, 2019 at the MT Summit 2019 in 
Dublin City University.

Workshop Context:

Timely and accurate information is known to save lives in crisis or disaster 
settings (Fischer 2008), and is now considered to be a human right (Greenwood 
et al. 2017; O’Brien et al. 2018). Crises (broadly understood) are known to 
have cascading effects (Pescaroli and Alexander 2015), to be transboundary, 
cross-cultural and cross-linguistic. However, the role of translation as an 
enabler for crisis communication, in all stages of a crisis (preparedness, 
resilience building, response, recovery) is rarely considered, and the role of 
technologies such as machine translation, to aid multilingual crisis 
communication has received even less attention. The proposed workshop seeks to 
address the many challenges of crisis MT and is open to all researchers 
interested in this topic, from areas such as NLP, translation studies, disaster 
and humanitarian response.

Call for Extended Abstracts
We call for extended abstracts (400–500 words). Abstracts must follow the 
structure below:
 
Title of talk; name and affiliation of contributors
Topic covered (from list below or additional topics)
Problem statement (what is the issue being tackled in the proposed talk?)
Design/method/approach (how did you investigate the topic?)
Findings (what findings do you propose to present?)
Contribution (what is the contribution to the field of crisis MT – note that 
there has to be clear and direct applicability to the topic)?
Topics can include, but are not limited to:

·       Machine translation for low-resource languages that may be needed in 
crisis, emergency or disaster settings, including topics such as:

o   Data curation for “readiness” or “preparedness” for disasters;

o   Challenges of rapid response MT engine creation and how these might be 
tackled;

o   Data sparsity challenges and how they can be overcome, e.g. domain tuning, 
pivoting, hybrid approaches, artificial data, back translated data etc.;

o   Evaluation challenges;

o   MT for mobile devices, including feature phones; 

o   MT for offline use;

o   Multimodal MT and how this might be of benefit to crisis settings;

·       Quality estimation or other techniques for triaging MT output in 
high-risk settings;

·       Quality assessment and quality assurance for MT in crisis settings; 

·       Ethical challenges of using MT and related technologies for timely and 
accurate crisis communication and how these might be overcome or tempered;

·       Genres of texts and communication that are included in crisis settings 
and the various challenges they introduce for MT (e.g. non-standardised writing 
systems, “textspeak”, typos, use of emoticons in text, cross-domain 
communication including medical, technical and general communication etc.);

·       MT for social media content in crisis settings;

·       Text to speech and vice versa with MT in the loop for crisis response;

·       Terminologies and their management and use in crisis translation 
settings;

·       Citizen post-editing;

·       Training for MT usage in crisis settings; 

·       Related translation technologies and their usefulness for crisis 
response (e.g. translation memory, terminology tools);

·       Simplification of crisis communication content and whether this has any 
impact on MT output;

·       Authorship, copyright and licensing of data needed to build crisis MT 
systems;

·       Best use of web-crawled monolingual, and parallel/comparable data for 
crisis MT systems;



Important Dates

·       Friday, 03rd May 2019: Submission deadline for extended abstracts 
(400-500 words)

·       Friday, 31st May 2019: Notification

·       Tuesday, 20th August 2019: Workshop

 
Workshop Format

This will be a full-day workshop composed of keynote addresses by Mirko Plitt 
and Eric DeLuca (Translators without Borders), accepted oral presentations, and 
an interactive, participative “think-in” on how the challenges raised might be 
tackled in the future. All participants should be willing to fully engage in 
the interactive session.

Submission Instructions:

Submit your 400-500 word abstract in PDF format to the following email address 
by 12 midnight GMT on 03 May: crisismtworkshop2...@gmail.com 
<mailto:crisismtworkshop2...@gmail.com> 

Please ensure that the abstract is structured using the headings listed above.



Local Organising Committee

·       Sharon O’Brien (DCU)

·       Gareth Jones (DCU)

·       Chao-Hong Liu (DCU)

·       Carla Parra Escartín (DCU)

·       Alessandra Rossetti (DCU)

·       Patrick Cadwell (DCU)

 
Programme Committee

Chao-Hong Liu (DCU)

Carla Parra Escartín (DCU)

Alessandra Rossetti (DCU)

Patrick Cadwell (DCU)

Helena Moniz (Unbabel)

Mirko Plitt (Translators without Borders)

Dimitar Shterionov (DCU)

Teresa Lynn (DCU)

Jane Dunne (DCU)

Federico Gaspari (DCU)

Rob Munro (FigureEight)

Andy Way (DCU)

Khetam al Sharou (UCL)

Federico Federici (UCL)

Alexandra Birch (University of Edinburgh)

 

-- 
*

*Séanadh Ríomhphoist/Email Disclaimer*

*Tá an ríomhphost seo agus aon 
chomhad a sheoltar leis faoi rún agus is lena úsáid ag an seolaí agus sin 
amháin é. Is féidir tuilleadh a léamh anseo.  
<https://www4.dcu.ie/iss/seanadh-riomhphoist.shtml>*

*This e-mail and any 
files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for use 
by the addressee. Read more here. 
<https://www4.dcu.ie/iss/email-disclaimer.shtml>*



*

-- 

 <https://www.facebook.com/DCU/> <https://twitter.com/DublinCityUni> 
<https://www.linkedin.com/company/dublin-city-university> 
<https://www.instagram.com/dublincityuniversity/?hl=en> 
<https://www.youtube.com/user/DublinCityUniversity>
_______________________________________________
Mt-list site list
Mt-list@eamt.org
http://lists.eamt.org/mailman/listinfo/mt-list

Reply via email to