--- PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ---
      The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas

AMTA-2002 Conference
Location:  Tiburon, California
Dates:  October 8-12, 2002

The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is
pleased to announce its fifth biennial conference, planned for October
8-12, 2002, in Tiburon (near San Francisco), California.

Conference theme: From Research to Real Users

Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade
ago at TMI-92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms for
MT, including data-driven approaches (e.g., statistical, example-based)
and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional rule-based
components.

During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer
architectures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated track,
increasing their coverage (primarily through manual update of their
lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and usage,
principally through the medium of the Internet. Web page translators
have become commonplace; a number of online translation services have
appeared, including in their offerings both raw and post-edited MT; and
large corporations have been turning increasingly to MT to address the
exigencies of global communication.  Still, the output of the
transfer-based systems employed in this expansion represents but a small
drop in the ever-growing translation marketplace bucket.

Now, 10 years later, we wonder if this mounting variety of MT users is
any better off, and if the promise of the research technologies is being
realized to any measurable degree.  In this regard, we pose the
following questions:

Why aren't any current commercially available MT systems primarily
data-driven?

Do any commercially available systems integrate (or plan to integrate)
data-driven components?

Do data-driven systems have significant performance or quality issues?

Can such systems really provide better quality to users, or is their
main advantage one of fast, facilitated customization?

If any new MT technology could provide such benefits (somewhat higher
quality, or facilitated customization), would that be the key to more
widespread use of MT, or are there yet other more relevant unresolved
issues, such as system integration?

If better quality, customization, or system integration aren't the
answer, then what is it that users really need from MT in order for it
to be more useful to them?

We solicit participation on these and other topics related to the
research, development, and use of MT in the form of original papers,
demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and panels. We invite all who are
interested in MT to participate, including developers, researchers, end
users, professional translators, managers, and marketing experts. We
especially invite users to share their experiences, developers to
describe their novel systems, managers and marketers to talk about what
is happening in the marketplace, researchers to detail new capabilities
or methods, and visionaries to describe the future as they see it.  We
also welcome and encourage participation by members of AMTA's sister
organizations, AAMT in Asia and EAMT in Europe.=20

For planning purposes, preliminary dates for submissions are as follows:

Submissions due:                        April 15, 2002 (Monday)
Notification of acceptance:             May 31, 2002 (Friday)
Final versions due:                     July 15, 2002
(Monday)

Details regarding the conference, including submission guidelines, will
be provided shortly on the AMTA Web site:
http://www.amtaweb.org

Elliott Macklovitch, General Chair
Stephen D. Richardson, Program Chair