AMTA's Special Interest Groups (SIGs) AMTA maintains a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), that enable members with interests in specific topics to share information. Each SIG maintains a mailing list on which members participate in ongoing discussions. Some SIGs organize regular one-day workshops. Interlinguas This SIG is the forum for discussing the issues of Interlingua, from such philosophical questions to concrete proposals for specific aspects of interlingua notation, concept representation items, and the ways in which items can be combined to represent meanings. The major discussion strands (and, if need be, partitioned discussions) are: Interlingua philosophy: What is an Interlingua? How many are there? How does one prove interlinguality? What role should an Ontology play? What components are there to Interlinguas? And so on. Interlingua practise: How can one build an Interlingua? What should the notational/formalism contain? Techniques to incrementally expand the concept "lexicon" and improve its contents, for example by employing existing KR resources such as WordNet as crude Interlingua concept definition frameworks. And so on. Interlingua methodology: How can one evaluate a candidate Interlingua concept -- multilingually, unilingually, by formal semantic analysis? How can one compare two putative Interlinguas for a given semantic domain? And so on. In addition to providing a forum for discussion, the SIG acts as a location for announcing interesting events, as well as a site for cross-posting listings with for example the recently formed Ontology discussion in the Artificial Intelligence / Knowledge Representation community. This SIG has organized special events at appropriate gatherings, such as one-day breakout workshops before the AMTA conferences in Mexico (2000), Philadelphia (1998), Montreal (1996), and the MT Summit in San Diego (1997). The next workshop will be held immediately prior to the NAACL-01 conference in Pittsburgh in June 2001. Contact the workshop chair, Stephen Helmreich (shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu) for more details. Moderator If you are interested in joining this SIG please send email to the moderator, Stephen Helmreich, at shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu. Special Interest Group on MTranslatability This SIG is devoted to MTranslatability, i.e. translatability seen in the context of MT. Relevant topics include--but are not limited to--document and text characteristics such as markup, spelling, grammar, style, and ambiguity, as well as tools to check for and improve these characteristics. Among these tools are Controlled Language checkers, grammar and spell checkers; dictionary management, annotation, and translatability scoring tools. Tutorial This tutorial on MTranslatability was presented at the AMTA-2000 conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Moderator If you are interested in joining this SIG please send email to the moderators, Arendse Bernth and Claudia Gdaniec, at arendse@ibm.us.com and cgdaniec@us.ibm.com. Standards and APIs for MT Systems This SIG is busy developing an API for machine translation systems. A draft API has been circulated after the meeting held at the AMTA Conference in Montreal, October 1996. The most recent meeting of this SIG took place at the MT Summit in San Diego, October 1997. Moderator If you are interested in joining this SIG please send email to the moderator, Steve Richardson, at steveri@microsoft.com. Evaluation of MT This SIG addresses the well-researched but little-understood and intricate questions of evaluating MT systems. Moderator If you are interested in joining this SIG please send email to the moderator, John White, at white_john@prc.com.