EAMT 2022 was a great success!

From 1-3 June, we organised the 23rd edition of the Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2022), together with our industry partner CrossLang. The LT3 team members in the organizing committee were Lieve (co-chair), Arda, Bram, Joke, and Margot. As this was the first big 'live' conference after covid for most of us, we were really excited we could host it here in Ghent, at the lovely Zebrastraat culture and event space.  

EAMT brings together everyone with an interest in machine translation (MT). It is not just a research conference, but there is room for presentations by users and translators, companies and developers, as well as for presenting new projects and products presented. This edition was no different. In total, there were 68 presentations and posters, divided over 4 tracks (17 research, 7 user, 3 translator, and 41 project/product). Additionally, our 130 attendees were spoiled by two keynote speeches (Jörg Tiedemann and Laura Rossi), one presentation of our platinum sponsor (Christian Federmann from Microsoft), and two talks by some of the best thesis award winners from 2020 and 2021 (Mattia Antonino Di Gangi and Danielle Saunders).  

Naturally, our own research was presented as well: 

• Margot Fonteyne presented her PhD project WiLMa, on the use of MT by second language learners during writing 

• Lieve Macken and Luca Desmet (3-time award winning master's student) presented a study with Bram Vanroy and Arda Tezcan on literary translation seen as a three-stage process from MT to post-editing to revision 

• Arda Tezcan presented his FWO postdoc project on dynamic adaptation of neural machine translation systems through translation exemplars 

• Joke Daems presented their new project DeBiasByUs with Janiça Hackenbuchner, the goal of which is to build a website and database for collecting cases of gender bias in MT 

We're very happy with the turnout and all would once again like to thank all our sponsors, everyone who helped with the organisation, and, of course, everyone who attended the conference and made it such a wonderful event. It was great seeing everyone in person, and we're looking forward to all these new collaboration plans turning into reality over the next few months! 

Some pictures from the event:

 

Our EM-TTI students were a great help during the event.

 

Bram Vanroy chairing a session. 

 

Margot Fonteyne presenting her PhD project. 

 

Lieve Macken (left) and Luca Desmet (right) presenting their poster. 

 

Arda Tezcan presenting.

 

Joke Daems (right) presenting their poster with Janiça Hackenbuchner (left).

A refreshing group picture to end a wonderful live event!