Tenjinno

You have found the website of the Tenjinno machine translation competition held in conjunction with the 8th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI 2006). This competition aims to measure and improve upon the current state-of-the-art in grammatical inference. Tenjinno is the successor to the earlier Abbadingo, Gowachin and Omphalos competitions.

At the ICGI 2004 it was decided that for future grammatical inference competitions it would be desirable to have a competition task that more closely resembles a real world application. Hence the task of machine translation was chosen.

Although this competition is described as a machine translation competition, it is in fact a transducer inference competition. The aim of the competition is to improve the state-of-the art in the inference of formal models that can translate from one language into another. This competition differs from other machine translation competitions such as the DARPA machine translation competitions in the following important ways.

• Our languages are artificial and are derived from formal models.
• The expectation is that competitors will infer the model used to derive the data exactly and thus the metric used to measure the winner will reflect this.

Although machine translation has obvious applications in the translation of human languages, the problem of transduction is more general and has applications beyond natural language. For instance it is a cornerstone of genomics that the translation of DNA into living things is a predominately deterministic process. This process can be viewed as transduction. For this reason we encourage submission from practitioners from all areas of computer science including machine learning, natural language processing, formal languages, machine translation and bioinformatics. In addition there exists a range of formal models that can be used to perform transduction such as finite state transducers, augmented context free grammars and rewriting systems.

Please select a topic in the menu on the left to find out more about the competition, how to participate or what the current status of the competition is.