HiT-IT’2023 (HiT-IT conference: Human-informed Translation and Interpreting Technology)
Naples, Italy, 6-8 July 2023
First announcement
The conference
We are pleased to announce the first Conference on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology. HiT-IT 2023 is a follow-up of the successful HiT-IT workshops, which took place in Varna, Bulgaria in parallel to the international conferences RANLP 2017 and RANLP 2019.
The conference will take place on Naples, Italy, 6-8 July, 2023.
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.
Human translation and interpreting as well as Machine Translation (MT) (including Automatic Speech Translation) aim to solve the same problem (i.e. facilitate communication between different languages) but in most cases obtain 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. However, the quality of MT has been improving and MT now is part of the standard pipeline for many professional translators and CAT tools.
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 2023 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 conference also offers a discussion forum and publishing opportunity for professionals from the human translation and interpreting fields (e.g. translators including subtitlers, interpreters, respeakers, researchers in translation and interpreting studies) and for researchers and developers working on translation and interpreting technology and machine translation. The idea behind this conference 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.
We expect contributions to the following topics:
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
User papers – for industry and practitioners. References to related work are optional. Allowed paper length: between 1 and 4 pages (without references). 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 (without 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 (without references). * (academic) demo papers – describing working systems. Allowed paper length: maximum 4 pages (without references). In addition to the papers, the authors will be expected to demonstrate the systems at the conference.
Organisation HiT-IT is organised by the University of Wolverhampton, the University of Surrey (United Kingdom), the University of Malaga (Spain), and the University of Naples L ’Orientale (Italy), and the Association of Computational Linguistics (Bulgaria).
Conference Chairs Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga), Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton), Johanna Monti (University of Naples L’Orientale), Constantin Orasan (University of Surrey)
Venue The conference will take place at the Palazzo del Mediterraneo, University of Naples, https://www.unior.it/ateneo/253/1/palazzo-del-mediterraneo.html
Further information Further information and updates will be made available on the conference website http://hit-it-conference.org/. The Organising Committee can be reached by email on 2023@hit-it-conference.orgmailto:2023@hit-it-conference.org.