First Call for Proposals

A virtual one-day event under the auspices of AMTA
Thursday, 25 September 2025

The Board of Directors of AMTA (the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas) is pleased to announce the first call for proposals for Emerging AI Breakthroughs and Challenges in Translation Automation, a one-day virtual event to be held on Thursday, 25 September 2025.

While the demand for accurate, nuanced, and scalable multilingual communication continues to increase, the language services industry is scrambling to adopt technology that is advancing at such a rate that today’s solutions are quickly outdated. At the heart of this evolution lies a technological revolution: Generative AI, Agentic AI, and Reasoning-enabled Large Language Models (LLMs). These technologies are not only reshaping the landscape of translation automation—they are also redefining what’s possible in cross-lingual understanding and interaction.

The event will focus on advances in technologies and processes that leverage generative AI, agentic AI, Large Language Models, reasoning LLMs, Machine Translation, and any combination of them, that address challenges in multilingual communication and the provisioning of high-quality translation or interpretation. Moving beyond the explosion of hype that began with the general availability of ChatGPT in November 2022, this event is intended as a forum for a thoughtful exchange of ideas informed by successes and failures in applying these technologies to the challenges of cross-lingual communication and data processing.

We invite researchers, developers, and practitioners to contribute to a substantive dialogue at the intersection of AI innovation and multilingual challenges. This conference will explore cutting-edge approaches leveraging the power of generative and agentic AI models to tackle real-world translation issues, enhance automation pipelines, and build smarter, context-aware, and culturally sensitive systems. From low-resource language solutions to adaptive workflows and autonomous reasoning in translation tasks, this conference is a chance to exchange bold ideas, explore novel methodologies, and present impactful case studies.

Like all AMTA conferences, this event will bring together researchers, practitioners, and providers of cross-lingual technology from academia, industry, and government and will include a keynote talk, an expert panel discussion, individual presentations, succinct tutorials, and demonstrations from technology providers.

The organizing committee is seeking proposals for presentations and tutorials on all topics related to research, development, application, and evaluation of these technologies as they apply to cross- and multilingual technology(ies). Our goal is to have a program that brings real value to the various constituents of the MT community (researchers, developers, users, and language professionals). We welcome not only proposals on technical research and development topics but also on, for instance, the collection and curation of training data, best practices in training models, human/computer interaction among translators, interpreters, and the evolution of translation automation in the commercial translation production pipeline.

Developers, practitioners, and analysts from the R&D community, language services industry, and public sector are encouraged to submit proposals that cover leading-edge R&D and practical applications of MT, LLMs, and agentic AI as they relate to the creation or processing of cross- and multilingual content.

Members of the research community are encouraged to submit proposals to this non-archival event that address recent research directions, trends and concerns about the use of generative AI or suggestions for research projects.

We seek submissions for:

• 20-minute talks (15 minute presentations, plus 5 minutes for questions),

• 40-minute tutorials (practical descriptions or exercises concerning the use of generative AI, agentic AI, Machine Translation, and/or related tools, processes and technologies for cross- and multilingual tasks.

Topics of interest might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The use of Large Language Models for Translation, Transcreation, and other cross- and multilingual tasks: development, deployment, and adaptation to specific use-cases.

• Application of agentic and reasoning LLMs to translation automation: case studies and experiments describing the application of agentive and reasoning LLMs to the generation and execution of dynamic translation workflows that optimize translation quality and/or other objectives.

• Adaptation and customization of large language models for cross- and multilingual use cases: case studies on applying few-shot learning, RAG, prompt-tuning and fine-tuning, comparison of methodologies used to adapt and customize foundation models for specific tasks with respect to business, technical and linguistic requirements.

• Combining narrow and large models to improve performance of specific tasks, such as translation, OCR, ASR and others.

• Augmenting MT systems and other Human Language Technologies (HLT) with AI: including approaches to leveraging TM and end-user feedback, classification, context awareness, content moderation, sentiment analysis, domain-specificity, geolocation, summarization.

• Integrating MT into AI-powered TRS workflows: transcription translation and optimization, domain-specific processing, multilingual entity intelligence, summarization and roundup, etc.

• Training Data: data sources, data preparation, terminology, knowledge graphs, data augmentation, multimodal data, etc.

• Output quality and confidence scoring for cross- and multilingual tasks: tools, methods and metrics, such as human evaluations, automatic scoring, reference-based and source-only scoring.

• Challenges to adopting AI in cross- and multilingual use cases: Responsible deployment and regulatory considerations of generative AI (such as technical, ethical, social, legal, and environmental challenges).

• Generative and agentive AI use for professional translation: Approaches, success and failure stories, fair pricing models, and cognitive load.

• Business Cases: making the business case for or against adopting AI to drive business requirements.

• Future research directions: open problems that researchers are/should be considering in this area.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: 23 June 2025

• Notification of acceptance: 21 July 2025

Submission Instructions

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format by 23 June 2025, to submissions@amtaweb.org and include:

• Title of proposed session

• Type of proposed session (20-minute presentation or 40-minute tutorial)

• A 250-500 word description of the proposed session

• Name and e-mail address of the person who is submitting the proposal

• Name(s) and e-mail address(es) of proposed speakers

• A short (<100 words) biographical introduction to the proposed presenter(s)

• Any special technical requirements you may have

Publication and recording

Presentation proposals will be reviewed and selected by an AMTA-selected program committee based on submitted, non-anonymous abstracts. Accepted abstracts will be available to conference attendees on the conference platform and will otherwise not be published.  Any research papers submitted for presentation will also follow this same process and will not follow a double-blind peer review process. Video recordings will be made of each presentation and will be made available to association members on the AMTA website. Submission of a proposal will be understood by the Organizing Committee as your tacit permission for AMTA to create an audio and video recording of your presentation and make it available to conference attendees and, through archiving, to members of AMTA, EAMT, and AAMT.

Background

AMTA, the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, is well known for its biennial conferences, held since 1994, and for its sponsorship and organization of the MT Summit in 1991, 1997, 2003, 2009, 2015, and 2021. Although the next in-person AMTA conference will not be held until 2026, the board of directors unanimously agreed that the pace of development in and rapid adoption of AI warranted the organizing and hosting of our second one-day virtual event.

We look forward to receiving your proposal!

AMTA Board of Directors

Contacts: Jay Marciano, President (president@amtaweb.org)
Alex Yanishevsky, Vice President (vicepresident@amtaweb.org)
Marianna Martindale, Secretary (secretary@amtaweb.org)