Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-word Units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology (MUMTTT 2015)

This volume documents the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multi-word Units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology (MUMTTT 2015), held on 1-2 July 2015 as part of the EUROPHRAS 2015 conference: "Computerised and Corpus-based Approaches to Phraseology: Monolingual and Multilingual Perspectives" (Málaga, 29 June – 1 July 2015). The workshop was sponsored by European COST Action PARSing and Multi-word Expressions (PARSEME) under the auspices of the European Society of Phraseology (EUROPHRAS), the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (SIGLEX), and SIGLEX's Multiword Expressions Section (SIGLEX-MWE). The workshop was co-chaired by Gloria Corpas Pastor (Universidad de Málaga), Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton), Johanna Monti (Università degli Studi di Sassari), and Violeta Seretan (Université de Genève). It received the support of the Advisory Board, composed of Dmitrij O. Dobrovol'skij (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), Kathrin Steyer (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim), Agata Savary (Université François Rabelais Tours), Michael Rosner (University of Malta), and Carlos Ramisch (Aix-Marseille Université).
The topic of the workshop was the integration of multi-word units in machine translation and translation technology tools. In spite of the recent progress achieved in machine translation and translation technology, the identification, interpretation and translation of multi-word units still represent open challenges, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. The idiosyncratic morpho-syntactic, semantic and translational properties of multi-word units poses many obstacles even to human translators, mainly because of intrinsic ambiguities, structural and lexical asymmetries between languages, and, finally, cultural differences. After a successful first edition held in Nice on 3 September 2013 as part of the Machine Translation Summit XIV, the present edition provided a forum for researchers working in the fields of Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Translation Studies and Computational Phraseology to discuss recent advances in the area of multi-word unit processing and to coordinate research efforts across disciplines.
The workshop was attended by 53 representatives of academic and industrial organisations. The programme included 11 oral and 4 poster presentations, and featured an invited talk by Kathrin Steyer, President of EUROPHRAS. We received 23 submissions, hence the MUMTTT 2015 acceptance rate was 65.2%. The papers accepted are indicative of the current efforts of researchers and developers who are actively engaged in improving the state of the art of multi-word unit translation.