19.040 workshop: Semantic Web Technologies for Machine Translation

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 40.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 06:36:47 +0100
         From: Cristina Vertan <cri_at_nats.informatik.uni-hamburg.de>
         Subject: Deadline Extension -Workshop Semantic Web Technologies
for MT at MT Summit X

            CALL FOR PAPERS
                      !!!! DEADLINE EXTENSION !!!!

*** apologize for multiple postings***
Semantic Web Technologies for Machine Translation
        Satellite Workshop at the MT Summit 2005
              12 September 2005
http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/view/MTSWK05/WebHome
By its aim to implement a semantic structure behind the content of the
World Wide Web, the Semantic Web activities recently attracted a large,
significant and specialized research community consisting of computer
scientists, computational linguists, logicians, knowledge and ontology
specialists, programmers, e-commerce, etc.

Semantic Web needs human language technology and human language technology
will highly benefit from the Semantic Web. However until now, research was
directed more to the first issue. Techniques from human language technology
were used to add meaning to the Web data and to make it usable for
automatic processing. The second issue, i.e. the use of the new Semantic
Web Technologies for improvement of natural language applications was
neglected. The development of ontologies for the Semantic Web, their search
mechanisms, and the standard formal (e.g. RDF) annotation of large pieces
of data on the web, are of high value for monolingual and multilingual
natural language (web)-applications
The current workshop focuses on this topic, more exactly on the
implications of such semantic web technologies on machine translation,
which is a representative sub-field of natural language processing. It is
well-known that multilinguality is one of the main challenges of Semantic
Web. The annotation mechanisms and the development of ontologies and search
procedures aim at
retrieving relevant information independently of the language in which it
was produced. On the other hand, Semantic Web activities will have major
impact on natural language applications based on training on large pieces
of corpora
Example-based machine translation is a relevant example: Up to now the
training is done on parallel aligned corpora, in the best case,
additionally annotated with syntactic information. However, big reliable
parallel corpora are available only for a few language pairs and domains.
In the absence of such corpora, the Web is the best source for parallel
aligned corpora. Aligned via
RDF(S) annotations, the web can be exploited as a multilingual corpus.
Moreover, this annotation will provide the semantic information attached to
the respective texts. This strategy can have significant implications on
example based machine translation.
Knowledge based machine translation is another technique which can benefit
from Semantic Web activities. Until now KB-MT systems were based mainly on
the development of domain-dependent ontologies and on mapping the source
language onto the target language via these ontologies. It was proved that
KBMT can be very successful when applied to restricted domains, but
encounters severe problems with translations of general texts. The Semantic
Web activities (will) provide a large amount of ontologies in various
domains and bridges between these ontologies. In this new context, KBMT
could become a powerful mechanism for on-line machine translation.

The goal of the workshop is twofold:
- to discuss the implications of semantic web-technologies for machine
translation, namely on example based and knowledge-based machine translation,
- to contrast the two main technologies of Semantic Web: topic maps and
RDFS in machine translation of on-line texts.

We welcome original papers related (but not limited) to following topics
- on-line Machine Translation
- semantic web annotations for multilingual corpora
- use of semantic web annotations for corpus based machine translation
- integration of semantic information in example based machine translation
- use of semantic web ontologies for machine translation
- semantic web and on-line translation tools
- integration of semantic web technologies in CAT tools.

We also encourage demonstrations of developed tools. Submissions for a
demonstration session should include a 2 page demo-note describing the
system-architecture and performance as well as technical requirements.

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Received on Wed May 18 2005 - 02:01:11 EDT