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Translating documents from foreign languages into English (or between any two languages) by computer is one of the oldest goals in computational linguistics. Now, armed with vast amounts of digitally available translated text and powerful computers, we are witnessing significant progress toward achieving that goal. Statistical methods allow the analysis of parallel text corpora and the automatic construction of machine translation systems. Already, for some language pairs such as Chinese-English or Arabic-English, statistical machine translation (SMT) systems built at research labs outperform commercial systems.
The focus of this workshop is to use parallel corpora for machine translation. It can be seen as an attempt to repeat the success of the 2005 ACL Workshop on Parallel Text, organized last year, which featured a track on statistical machine translation and a shared task on building machine translation systems.
Recent experimentation has shown that the performance of SMT systems varies greatly with the source language. In this workshop we would like to encourage researchers to investigate ways to improve the performance of SMT systems for diverse languages, including morphologically complex languages (e.g., Finnish) and languages with partial free word order (e.g., German). These issues lie on the border of linguistic analysis and statistical modeling, and the ACL conference is the most appropriate forum to investigate them, as ACL has a long tradition of hosting high-quality research in both areas. Besides experimental work and system building, we also encourage linguistic analysis of problems of the current state of the art in statistical machine translation, as showcased by last year's ACL 2005 Workshop on Parallel Text shared task.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
A more detailed description of the shared task, the test and training corpora, a freely available MT system, and a number of other resources are available from http://www.statmt.org/wmt06/shared-task/. We also provide a baseline machine translation system, whose performance matches the best systems from last year's shared task.
| Regular paper submissions | March 17 |
| Notification | April 7 |
| (shared task) Results submissions | March 31 |
| (shared task) Short paper submissions | April 7 |
| (shared task) Notification | April 24 |
| Camera-ready papers | May 2 |