The EuroMatrix projects organizes its first MT Marathon at Edinburgh University from April 16 to April 20. This event is mostly targeted at graduate students, but also other researchers interested in the latest technology in machine translation. The event is part summer school, part workshop, part open source convention. Registration is free, but limited.

On-Site Registration

The MT Marathon starts on Monday with a registration period from 9:00-9:30am in the HCRC conference room at 2 Buccleuch place.

Research talks

The MT Marathon will feature a series of research talks, between 11:00am and 12:30am.

• Monday, 11:00: "Efficient handling of n-gram LMs for SMT" by Marcello Federico, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy
  

• Monday, 11:45: "Smoothed Bloom filter language models", by David Talbot, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

• Tuesday, 11:00: "Statistical machine translation using tectogrammatical structures", by Jan Hajic and Ondrej Bojar, Charles University, Prague

• Tuesday, 11:45: "Hybrid machine translation: combining rule-based and statistical systems", by Andreas Eisele, Saarland University, Germany

• Wednesday, 11:00: "Machine translation as tree labeling", by Mark Hopkins, University of Potsdam, Germany

• Wednesday, 11:45: "Hierarchical and syntax structured translation models", by Ashish Venugopal, CMU, Pittsburgh, USA

• Thursday, 11:00: "Factored Translation Models", by Hieu Hoang, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

• Thursday, 11:45: "Discriminative training for machine translation", by Abhishek Arun, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

• Friday, 11:00: "Spoken language translation through confusion network decoding", by Nicola Bertoldi, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy

• Friday, 11:45: "Decoder-guided backoff: using word lattices to improve translation from morphologically complex languages", by Chris Dyer, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Spring School

Interested in the state of the art in statistical machine translation and related technology? The MT Marathon offers a four day summer school event that features lectures and hands-on lab excercises to get you up to speed.

Lectures take place from 9am to 10:30am, the lab session starts with an introduction at 2pm, and lab time until 5pm (or longer for the truly dedicated).

• Monday: Introduction to machine translation and machine translation evaluation, presented by Chris Callison-Burch

• Tuesday: Statistical machine translation: IBM Models and word alignment, presented by Alexandra Birch-Mayne

• Wednesday: Decoding: Algorithms for translating using statistical translation models, presented by Philipp Koehn

• Thursday: Phrase-based statistical machine translation: How it works, and how to build systems using the open source Moses software, presented by Josh Schroeder and Hieu Hoang

Open source convention

A fraction of the developer group behind the open source Moses system, which is developed under the EuroMatrix project, will be present at the MT Marathon. Join their discussions on improving machine translation quality, speed, and efficiency.

Venue

The MT Marathon is hosted by the University of Edinburgh at its central compus in the center of Scotland's capital. Lectures will take place at 2 Buccleuch Place, and the lab sessions will take place at the Appleton tower.

On the university's central area map, 2 Buccleuch place is next to building 32 and Appleton tower is building 24 (circled).

Social program

Social events accompaning the event will be announced shortly.

Accommodation

You will have to arrange your accommodation yourself. Edinburgh is a very walkable city, so there are plenty of hotels, guest houses and hostels in close vicinity of the university.

As a suggestion, a list of guest houses near the venue:

• Shalimar Guest House: 35 GBP per person per night. 0.4 miles from the department.
• Newington Guest House: 25-55 GBP per person per night. 0.4 miles from the department.
• Southside Guest House: 70 GBP per night. 0.4 miles from the department.
• Aros House: 25-30 GBP per person per night. 0.5 miles.
• The Salisbury Guest House: 45 - 70 GBP per night. 0.5 miles.
• Sherwood Guest House: 45 GBP per person per night. 0.55 miles.
• Strathallan Guest House: 30 GBP per person per night. 0.55 miles.
• Other guest houses nearby
• Less expensive hostels