This report describes the findings of the machine translation team from the first Summer Camp for Applied
Language Exploration (SCALE) hosted at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence located
at Johns Hopkins University. This intensive, eight week workshop brought together 20 students, faculty
and researchers to conduct research on the topic of Semantically Informed Machine Translation (SIMT).
The type of semantics that were examined at the SIMT workshop were “High Information Value Elements,”
or HIVEs, which include named entities (such as people or organizations) and modalities (indications that
a statement represents something that has taken place or is a belief or an intention). These HIVEs were
examined in the context of machine translation between Urdu and English. The goal of the workshop was
to identify and translate HIVEs from the foreign language, and to investigate whether incorporating this sort
of structured semantic information into machine translation (MT) systems could produce better translations.