Constantin Orasan's page

All kind of random stuff on NLP, AI, photography and who knows

8-Minute Read

HiT-IT 2019: Final call for papers

HiT-IT 2019 logo

Extended deadline for all the submissions: 19th July 2019

Two confirmed invited speakers: Yves Champollion from WordFast and Vilelmini Sosoni from Ionian University, Greece.

We are pleased to announce the Second Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology. HiT-IT 2019 is a follow-up of the successful first edition of the workshop (HiT-IT 2017) which took place in Varna, Bulgaria in 2017. HiT-IT2019 will be held in conjunction with the influential conference RANLP 2019.

This year, in addition to the academic papers, we welcome submissions also from industry (translation agencies or companies developing translation and interpreting technologies) and practitioners (translators and interpreters).

HiT-IT seeks to act as a meeting point for (and invites) researchers working in translation and interpreting technologies, practicing technology-minded translators and interpreters, companies and freelancers providing services in translation and interpreting as well as companies developing tools for translators and interpreters. In addition to the accepted papers for presentation, HiT-IT will feature invited talks by prominent experts as well as presentations and panels hosted by practitioners. The workshop will also include a round table which will discuss how the communities of academics and practitioners can collaborate and could be of greater benefit to each other.

Human translation and interpreting as well as Machine Translation (MT) (including Automatic Speech Translation) aim to solve the same problem (i.e. translate from one language into another) but obtain somewhat different results. While human translation so far is largely preferred by businesses and individuals in terms of quality, it requires high cognitive efforts and a lot of time. MT is much faster and can process large amounts of textual data in no time, but its results have obvious shortcomings for the average human.

Translation Technology (TT) has the objective of speeding up and easing the translation process, and more specifically, of assisting human translators. The emerging field of Interpreting Technology seeks to support the work of interpreters too. TT relies heavily on methods developed in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) (and Computational linguistics). Typical examples are Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools, electronic dictionaries, concordancers, spell-checkers, terminological databases, terminology extraction tools, translation memories, partial machine translation of template documents, speech recognition systems for automatic subtitling, to name just a few. However, quite often these tools do not address the actual needs of translation and interpreting professionals.

In turn, the NLP and MT make use of the knowledge and expertise of professional translators and interpreters in order to build and improve models for automatic translation – e.g. by using parallel aligned human translations and speech interpretation corpora for machine learning, human evaluation of machine translation outputs and human annotations.

Most of the existing conferences are either focused too much on the automatic side of translation or concentrate largely on translators’ and interpreters’ professions. HiT-IT seeks to fill in this gap by allowing the discussion, the scientific comparison, and the mutual enrichment of professionals from both fields. HiT-IT 2019 addresses the development of translation tools and the experience translators and interpreters have with these tools as well as the development of machine translation engines, incorporating human (translators and interpreters’) expertise. The workshop also offers a discussion forum and publishing opportunity for professionals from the human translation and interpreting fields (e.g. translators including subtitlers, interpreters, researchers in translation and interpreting studies) and for researchers and developers working on translation and interpreting technology and machine translation. The idea behind this workshop attendees to hear the other side’s position and to voice their opinions on how to make translation technologies closer to what would be accepted by large audiences, by incorporating human expertise into them.

TOPICS

We invite papers on the following four main themes, however submissions on related themes/topics will also be considered. Both theoretical ideas and practical applications are welcome. Position papers promoting new ideas, challenging the current status of the fields and proposing how to take them forward are also encouraged.

User needs:

  • analysis of translators’ and interpreters’ needs in terms of translation and interpreting technology
  • user requirements for interpreting and translation tools
  • incorporating human knowledge into translation and interpreting technology
  • what existing translators’ (including subtitlers’) and interpreters’ tools do not offer
  • user requirements for electronic resources for translators and interpreters
  • translation and interpreting workflows in larger organisations and the tools for translation and interpreting employed

Existing methods and resources

  • latest developments in translation and interpreting technology
  • electronic resources for translators and interpreters
  • annotation of corpora for translation and interpreting technology
  • crowdsourcing techniques for creating resources for translation and interpreting
  • latest advances in pre-editing and post-editing of machine translation
  • human-informed (semi-)automatic generation of interlingual subtitles
  • technology for subtitling

Evaluation

  • (human) evaluation of translation and interpreting technology
  • crowdsourcing techniques for evaluating translation and interpreting
  • evaluation of discourse and other linguistic phenomena in (machine) translation and interpreting
  • evaluation of existing resources for translators and interpreters
  • human evaluation of neural machine translation

Other

  • position papers discussing how machine translation should be improved to incorporate translators’/interpreters’ expertise
  • translation and interpreting technologies’ impact on the market
  • comparison between human and machine translation
  • changes in the translators and interpreters’ professions in the new technology era especially as a result of the latest developments in Neural Machine Translation

Besides the above topics, submissions from industry and practitioners could discuss: distinctive work experience, ongoing practical work, in-house procedures or software, in-house processing pipelines, technology needs, managing a translation (technology) company, interpreters in the technology era, IP issues or any topic related to their professional activities in the field of (technology for) translation and interpreting, etc.

SUBMISSIONS INFORMATION:

This year, in addition to the academic papers, we welcome submissions also from industry (translation agencies or companies developing translation and interpreting technologies) and practitioners (translators and interpreters).

We welcome two main types of submissions:

User papers – for industry and practitioners. They should not follow any formatting requirements except for having a title, authors’ names, and authors’ affiliations. References to related work are optional. Allowed paper length: between 1 and 4 pages.

Academic submissions, in three different categories (have to follow formatting requirements, references to related work are required):

  • (academic) full papers – describing original completed research. Allowed paper length: maximum 8 pages + 2 for references.
  • (academic) work-in-progress papers – describing work in progress, late breaking research, papers at a more conceptual stage, and other types of papers that do not fit in the ‘full’ papers category. Allowed paper length: maximum 6 pages + 2 for references.
  • (academic) demo papers – describing working systems. Allowed paper length: maximum 4 pages + 2 for references. In addition to the papers, the authors will be expected to demonstrate the systems at the workshop.

The HiT-IT 2019 submissions will be maintained by the conference management system START (https://www.softconf.com/ranlp2019/HiT-IT2019/).

The templates for the academic submissions and an example template for the user submissions are available at http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/hit-it2019/submission-information/. Please note that neither the user papers, nor the academic papers are anonymous. In both cases, the names of authors and their affiliations should be listed.

If you have any queries, please contact us at [email protected] or at [email protected].

All submissions will be reviewed by experts in the field and the best ones will be accepted for presentation at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES:

  • Submissions deadline: 19 July 2019
  • Acceptance notifications: 5th August 2019
  • Camera-ready versions due: 20 August 2019
  • Workshop dates: 5 and 6 September 2019

LOCATION AND TRAVEL:

The Second Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology will be held in conjunction with the influential conference RANLP 2019 in Hotel “Cherno More” in Varna, Bulgaria. Varna, the largest city on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, is easily reachable via the Varna International Airport.

For more information regarding traveling to Varna and the venue, visit the RANLP conference website (http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2019/venue.php).

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

  • Irina Temnikova (Sofia University, Bulgaria;
  • Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton, UK;
  • Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, UK;
  • Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga, Spain;

MEMBERS OF THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE

  • Souhila Djabri (University of Alicante, Spain)
  • Rocío Caro (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
  • Encarnación Núñez (University of Malaga, Spain)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

  • Anja Rütten (Conference Interpreter, Member of AIIC, Germany)
  • Anna Zaretskaya (TransPerfect, Spain)
  • Bart Defrancq (Ghent University, Belgium)
  • Carla Parra (Unbabel, Portugal)
  • Claudia Angelelli (Heriot-Watt University, UK)
  • Claudio Bendazzoli (Università Degli Studi di Torino, Italy)
  • Claudio Fantinuoli (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz/Germersheim, Germany)
  • David Orrego-Carmona (Aston University, UK)
  • Dicken Minta (Televic, UK)
  • Dragos Ciobanu (University of Leeds, UK)
  • Eleanor Cornelius (University of Johannesburg, South Africa)
  • Eleni Zisi (EL-Translations, Greece)
  • Eva Dolezalova (MemSource, Czech Republic)
  • Federico Gaspari (ADAPT Centre, Ireland)
  • Filip Šanca (Memsource, Czech Republic)
  • Gabriela Gonzales (E-Trad, Argentina)
  • Haris Ghinos (ELIT Language Services, Greece)
  • Hendrik J. Kockaert (Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar)
  • Janice Jun Pan (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong)
  • Johanna Monti (“L’Orientale” University of Naples, Italy)
  • Joss  Goldsmith (AIIC Interpreter, Geneve)
  • Joss Moorkens (Dublin City University, Ireland)
  • Juanjo Averallilo (HERMES Traducciones, Spain)
  • Kim Ludvigsen (Interprefy, Switzerland)
  • Lieve Macken (University of Ghent, Belgium)
  • Maja Popovic (ADAPT, DCU, Ireland)
  • Manuel Herrandez (Pangeanic, Spain)
  • Marcello Federico (Amazon, USA)
  • Maria Kunilovskaya (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
  • María Mercedes Enríquez Aranda (University of Malaga, Spain)
  • Maria Stambolieva (New Bulgarian University, Sofia)
  • Maria Stasimioti (Ionian University, Greece)
  • Mark Shuttleworth (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong)
  • Masaru Yamada (Kansai University, Japan)
  • Mercedes Garcia Martinez (Pangeanic ,Spain)
  • Michael Carl (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
  • Michael Ustaszewski (Universität Innsbruck, Austria)
  • Mina Ilieva (Mitra Translations, Bulgaria)
  • Nannan Liu (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
  • Nieves Jiménez Carra (University of Malaga, Spain)
  • Omar Atari (University of Petra, Jordan)
  • Peter Reynolds (MemoQ, Hungary)
  • Pieter Demuytere (Televic, Belgium)
  • Pierrette Bouillon (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
  • Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar)
  • Raisa McNab (Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd, UK) 
  • Rozane Rebechi (University Rio Grande do Sur, Brazil)
  • Sabrina Baldo (University of Evry Val d’Essonne, France)
  • Santanu Pal (Saarland University, Germany)
  • Sara Moze (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
  • Sharon O’Brien (Dublin City University, Ireland)
  • Sheila Castilho (ADAPT Centre, Ireland)
  • Silvia Bernadini (University of Bologna, Italy)
  • Sin-Wai Chan (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
  • Stephen Doherty (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
  • Veronique Hoste (Ghent University, Belgium)
  • Verónica Pérez Guarnieri (Colegio de Traductores, Argentina)
  • Vilelmini Sosoni (Ionian University, Greece)
  • Yota Georgakopoulou (Athena Consultancy, Greece)
  • Yves Champollion (Wordfast, US/France)
Last Modified: 1 January 0001
More about my research