THIRD MACHINE TRANSLATION MARATHON 2009

The MT Marathon 2009, organized by the Institute of Formal and
Applied Linguistics of the Charles University in Prague, Czech
Republic, is the third in a series of MT Marathons organized by
the EU Euromatrix research project on Machine Translation.

The EuroMatrix consortium invites researchers, developers,
students, and users of machine translation for participation. The
event will feature

• Winter School classes on current methods in statistical MT



• Research showcase



• Open source convention on resources for machine translation,
  this time with an open call for papers (separate announcement
  will follow)



• Lab hands-on experience for system developers, students and
  programmers



• Workshop on evaluation of European language translation




• Where:
  Prague's Lesser Town, the newly renovated historical
  building of the Computer Science School of the Charles
  University in Prague



• When: January 26-31, 2009



• How: Registration is now possible!



• How much: Attendance is free of charge, but limited.

For more information and online registration please go to http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/euromatrix/mtmarathon.

About the MT Marathon

MT Marathon is organized yearly by the EuroMatrix machine translation research project funded by the European Union under its "Cooperation programme" as a STREP project FP6-IST-5-034291-STP. In January 2009, it will be third MT Marathon organized by EuroMatrix. MT Marathon consists of several events taking place at the same place to allow for free flow of thoughts and exchange of information and experience: a "spring school" (this time more like a "winter school") with associated lab lessons, invited research talks, and a hands-on experience with Open Source MT tools. Participants will also experience evaluating Machine Translation systems (with some hands-on experience in actual subjective evaluation of MT systems taking part in the WMT 2009 competition - see more at http://www.statmt.org/wmt09/). This year, talks presenting some of the available OpenSource tools in more detail will also be planned throughout the week (see the call for papers). Please find more about the current MT Marathon and the previous ones at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/euromatrix/mtmarathon.

About Euromatrix

The EuroMatrix project (http://www.euromatrix.net) aims at a major push in machine translation (MT) technology applying the most advanced MT technologies systematically to all pairs of EU
languages. Special attention is being paid to the languages of the new and near-term prospective member states. As part of this application development, EuroMatrix designs and investigates novel
combinations of statistical techniques and linguistic knowledge sources as well as hybrid MT architectures. EuroMatrix addresses urgent European economic and social needs by concentrating on
European languages and on high-quality translation to be employed for the publication of technical, social, legal and political
documents. EuroMatrix aims at enriching the statistical MT
approach with novel learning paradigms and experiment with new
combinations of methods and resources from statistical MT,
rule-based MT, shallow language processing and computational
lexicography/morphology.

The main objectives of the project are:

• Translation systems for all pairs of EU languages, with a
  special focus on the languages of new and near-term prospective
  member states



• Efficient inclusion of linguistic knowledge into statistical
  machine translation



• The development and testing of hybrid architectures for the
  integration of rule-based and statistical approaches



• Organization, analysis and interpretation of a competitive
  annual international evaluation of machine translation with a
  strong focus on European economic and social needs



• The provision of open source machine translation technology
  including research tools, software and data



• A systematically compiled and constantly updated detailed survey
  of the state of MT technology for all EU language pairs based on
  the developed systematic translation between all EU languages,
  the comparative MT evaluations and an inventory of available and
  needed tools, components, lingware and data.