The Machine Translation Marathon

The Machine Translation Marathon takes places annually and at different European Universities involved in (open source) machine translation development. The last 6th Machine Translation Marathon took place in Trento, Italy, at the Fondazine Bruno Kessler (FBK) in September 2011 and it was promoted by the Moses EU programmes EuroMatrix and EuroMatrixplus. The 1st MT Marathon also took place at the University of Edinburgh several years ago, at the start of the EuroMatrix project. The project was responsible for the release of Moses and other tools, and the kick-start of many initiatives that have made machine translation as popular as it is today. Pangeanic was the first European company to report the successful implementation of the Moses open source release commercially, as reported by EuroMatrixplus. The results were published at the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) in 2010 and became the basis of the several PangeaMT flavors presented at Localization World Berlin, Localization World Barcelona,  TAUS conferences (in Tokyo 2009 and 2012, and shortly at the next TAUS User Conference in Seattle in October 2012), MosesCore Paris 2012, and many others. Pangeanic used its experience in modeling and multiple retrainings to launch its Machine Translation DIY feature, which is now a standard offering in the machine translation industry. The 7th edition comes back to Edinburgh and is organized by the Statistical MT group of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh. This time, the MosesCore consortium is sponsoring the week-long Machine Translation Marathon 2012, starting next Monday 3rd September at the University of Edinburgh through Saturday 8th September 2012. At this event, researchers, developers, students and MT practitioners meet and share experiences, with published results often a source of innovation and research among the increasingly avid MT community, both in academia and in commercial circles. There are several ways you can participate in the MT Marathon:

• attend lectures and labs ranging from beginners tutorials to showcase talks by leading researchers
• attend technical talks about open-source tools for MT
• take part in open source MT hacking projects, led by experienced developers and researchers

Click here to download the program.