First Call For Papers: NAACL 2016 Workshop on Semantics-Driven Machine Translation at San Diego

[Deyi Xiong]

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies and please share with your colleagues and students]

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                                   Call for Papers

 The 2nd Workshop on Semantics-Driven Machine Translation (SedMT)

   in conjunction with NAACL, San Diego, California, USA

   More info: hlt.suda.edu.cn/workshop/sedmt2016/
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Important Dates
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Paper submission: March 8, 2016
Notification of acceptance: March 25, 2016
Camera-ready papers due: April 7, 2016
Workshop: June 16, 2016


QTLeap Best Paper Award
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SedMT 2016 will award a best paper award to papers that advance MT with lexical semantics and deep language processing.
The award is sponsored by QTLeap (http://qtleap.eu/), a 3-year European Union FP7 project, with the goal to research on
deep language engineering approaches in view of breaking the way to translations of higher quality. The award will consist on a 500€ voucher.


Overview
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It is widely recognized that machine translation inherently requires semantics to obtain
meaning representations of source sentences and to generate meaning-preserving
target translations. Recent years have witnessed a resurgent huge interest in exploring
semantics for machine translation, e.g., employing lexical semantics for word sense
and semantic role disambiguation in machine translation, using compositional semantics
for phrasal translation, incorporating discourse semantics into document-level machine
translation and so on. The emerging neural machine translation (NMT) is also
naturally born as semantic machine translation since it heavily relies on distributional
semantic representations.

This workshop seeks to build on the success of its precursor S2MT 2015 (http://
hlt.suda.edu.cn/workshop/s2mt/index.html), which was held in conjunction
with ACL 2015 in Beijing. S2MT 2015 brought together a large number of
researchers from the machine translation and semantics community. Its program included
high-quality papers examining and exploring semantics in machine translation
from different angles and perspectives. It also featured 4 keynote speeches covering
topics that cross boundaries of semantics and machine translation, as well as a
thought-provoking panel discussion on the gaps and challenges between semantics and
statistical machine translation.

This workshop will continue efforts of promoting the shift of interest from syntax
to semantics in machine translation, exploring new horizons and cultivating ideas of
cutting-edge models and algorithms for semantic machine translation.


Topics
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Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Theoretic study on semantic machine translation
- Semantic representations for machine translation
- lexical semantics for machine translation
- compositional semantics for machine translation
- discourse semantics for machine translation
- Distributional semantics for machine translation
- Semantic knowledge based machine translation
- Neural machine translation
- New frameworks, models and algorithms for semantic machine translation
- Semantically motivated machine translation evaluation and error analysis
- Mining semantic knowledge from corpus for translation
- Applications of semantic machine translation in related areas, e.g., cross-lingual
information retrieval, speech translation


Submission Instructions
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We invite authors to submit the following 3 types of papers on topics listed above to the workshop:
- Full papers (maximum 8 content pages + 2 pages for references) that report solid and
  completed work with new experiments, findings and/or approaches.
- Short papers (maximum 4 content pages + 2 pages for references) that report
    - a small, focused contribution
    - work in progress
    - a negative result
    - an interesting application nugget
- Opinion papers (2-8 content pages + 2 pages for references) that provide
  the authors' opinions/thoughts on semantics-driven machine translation from the following view
  angles (but not limited to)
    - a critical perspective
    - future directions
    - summary of past work
    - comments on current work

Submitted papers should be substantially original and unpublished. The
reviewing process will be double-blind. Therefore papers must not include
authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
authors' identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be
avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991)
..." Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without
review. In addition, please do not post your submissions on the web until after
the review process is complete.

Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters. The decision as to
which papers will be presented orally and which as posters will be made by the
program committee based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work.

Multiple Submission Policy: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other
meetings or publications are acceptable, but authors must indicate this
information at submission time. If accepted, authors must notify the organizers
(dyx...@suda.edu.cn) as to whether the paper will be presented at the workshop
or elsewhere.

Submission format: All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the
official NAACL 2016 style guidelines.

Submission website: it will be available soon.



Organizers
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Deyi Xiong (Soochow University)
Kevin Duh (Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence)
Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country)
Nora Aranberri (University of the Basque Country)
HoufengWang (Peking University)


Programme Committee
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Rafael E. Banchs (Institute for Infocomm Research)
Johan Bos (University of Groningen)
Boxing Chen (National Research Council Canada)
David Chiang (University of Notre Dame)
Michael Goodman (Nanyang Technological University)
Jan Hajic (Charles University in Prague)
Zhongjun He (Baidu)
Shujian Huang (Nanjing University)
Kevin Knight (ISI)
Philipp Koehn (Johns Hopkins University)
Qun Liu (Dublin City University)
Yang Liu (Tsinghua University)
Chi-kiu Lo (National Research Council Canada)
Wei Lu (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Zhengdong Lu (Noahs Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies)
Minh-Thang Luong (Stanford University)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute)
Hwee-Tou Ng (National University of Singapore)
Martha Palmer (University of Colorado)
Lane Schwartz (University of Illinois)
Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam)
Jinsong Su (Xiamen University)
Hans Uszkoreit (Saarland University)
Tong Xiao (Northeastern University)
Frances Yung (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
Dongdong Zhang (Microsoft Research Asia)
Jiajun Zhang (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Yue Zhang (Singapore University of Technology and Design)