Bilgisayarlı Çeviri Özel Çalışma Grubu

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are contacting you to recruit your support for an initiative to create a new special interest group (SIG) for Machine Translation within the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).  MT is already a very active area of research within ACL, with significant representation within the various ACL meetings and conferences in the form of workshops, tutorials and tracks within the main conference research programs.  The WMT-08 workshop at ACL-08 in Columbus this year, for example, attracted an attendance of around 150 people, and was by far the most popular and highly attended satellite event at the conference.

The main rationale for establishing a new ACL SIG for MT is to create a central focal point for planning and coordinating this growing set of MT activities within ACL.  A secondary objective is to create a central entity within ACL that can explore opportunities for greater cooperation and collaboration with various other MT organizations, such as the regional MT associations in Europe (EAMT), Asia (AAMT) and North America (AMTA), as well as the growing commercial MT industry.  ACL SIGs that organize large events have some additional privileges.  One important advantage is that such SIGs receive preference in requests for scheduling SIG-sponsored annual workshops at specific ACL conferences.  

This should help us coordinate and schedule future MT workshops at ACL conferences.  SIGs also have some financial privileges.  They are allowed to have a "shadow account" at ACL, which can provide the SIG funds for special expenses at SIG-organized events, which are not normally covered by the main ACL organization.

The organizational structure that we are proposing for the ACL SIG-MT would consist of a SIG President, Secretary, and three Regional SIG officers (one for each of the three ACL regional chapters).  The primary responsibilities of the regional officers would be to promote SIG-MT activities in their region and to coordinate activities with the ACL regional chapters and with the regional MT associations (EAMT, AAMT and AMTA).  Elections for the officer positions would be held every three years.  A founding board of officers will run the operations of the SIG in the first year, until the first elections can be held.  Philipp Koehn, David Chiang and Chris Callison-Burch have agreed to serve in the positions of President, Secretary and Regional Officer for North America

(respectively) during this period.  We hope to select the other two regional officers as soon as possible.

We have already floated the idea of establishing a SIG-MT for ACL with several members of the ACL exec, and have received positive responses.  

In order to follow the formal procedure for proposing a new SIG, however, a formal proposal needs to be submitted to the ACL exec, with expressed support from at least 25 ACL members.  The proposal must also contain a proposed SIG constitution, consistent with ACL's general SIG guidelines.  A draft of such a constitution (based on constitutions of other ACL SIGs) is attached to this email message.

If you participated (and registered) in any ACL conference during 2008, you are considered a member of ACL in good standing.  To all such ACL members - we would appreciate an explicit response of support (or

disapproval) from each of you, along with any comments or suggestions regarding the above proposal.  If possible, please respond within the next week or so, as we would like to then proceed with formally proposing the SIG to the ACL exec.

Thanks,

Philipp Koehn

David Chiang

Chris Callison-Burch

Alon Lavie