The recurring translation task of the WMT workshops focuses on European language pairs. Translation quality will be evaluated on a shared, unseen test set of news stories. We provide a parallel corpus as training data, a baseline system, and additional resources for download. Participants may augment the baseline system or use their own system.

This year we also have a featured translation task: translating Haitian Creole SMS messages into English. This task includes real-world data in the form of emergency response messages that were sent in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haitian earthquake.

GOALS

The goals of the shared translation task are:

• To investigate the applicability of current MT techniques when translating into languages other than English
• To examine special challenges in translating between European languages, including word order differences and morphology
• To create publicly available corpora for machine translation and machine translation evaluation
• To generate up-to-date performance numbers for European languages in order to provide a basis of comparison in future research
• To offer newcomers a smooth start with hands-on experience in state-of-the-art statistical machine translation methods

TASK DESCRIPTION

We provide training data for four European language pairs, and a common framework (including a baseline system). The task is to improve methods current methods. This can be done in many ways. For instance participants could try to:

• improve word alignment quality, phrase extraction, phrase scoring
• add new components to the open source software of the baseline system
• augment the system otherwise (e.g. by preprocessing, reranking, etc.)
• build an entirely new translation systems

You may participate in any or all of the following language pairs:

• French-English
• Spanish-English
• German-English
• Czech-English

We also strongly encourage your participation, if you use your own training corpus, your own sentence alignment, your own language model, or your own decoder.

If you use additional training data or existing translation systems, you must flag that your system uses additional data. We will distinguish system submissions that used the provided training data (constrained) from submissions that used significant additional data resources. Note that basic linguistic tools such as taggers, parsers, or morphological analyzers are allowed in the constrained condition.

Your submission report should highlight in which ways your own methods and data differ from the standard task. We may break down submitted results in different tracks, based on what resources were used. We are mostly interested in submission that are constraint to the provided training data, so that the comparison is focused on the methods, not on the data used. You may submit contrastive runs to demonstrate the benefit of additional training data.

TRAINING DATA

The provided data is mainly taken from version 6 of the Europarl corpus, which is freely available. Please click on the links below to download the sentence-aligned data, or go to the Europarl website for the source release.

Additional training data is taken from the new News Commentary corpus. There are about 45 million words of training data per language from the Europarl corpus and 2 million words from the News Commentary corpus.

You may also use the following monolingual corpora released by the LDC:

• LDC2009T13 English Gigaword Fourth Edition
• LDC2007T07 English Gigaword Third Edition
• LDC2006T17 French Gigaword First Edition
• LDC2009T28 French Gigaword Second Edition
• LDC2006T12 Spanish Gigaword First Edition
• LDC2009T21 Spanish Gigaword Second Edition

Note that the released data is not tokenized and includes sentences of any length (including empty sentences). All data is in Unicode (UTF-8) format. The following tools allow the processing of the training data into tokenized format:

• Tokenizer tokenizer.perl
• Detokenizer detokenizer.perl
• Lowercaser lowercase.perl
• SGML Wrapper wrap-xml.perl

DEVELOPMENT DATA

To tune your system during development, we suggest using the 2008 test set of 2051 sentences. The data is provided in raw text format and in an SGML format that suits the NIST scoring tool. We also release the 2009 test set of 2525 sentences, a system combination tuning set of 502 sentences. and the 2010 test set.

DOWNLOAD

• Parallel corpus training data (612 MB) md5 sha1
• 10⁹French-English corpus (2.3 GB) ** md5 sha1
• Monolingual language model training data:
  • Download it all in one file (11 GB)
  • or download the data as separate files:
    • From Europarl (403MB) md5 sha1
    • From the News Commentary corpus (41MB) md5 sha1
    • From the News Crawl corpus (2007 only) (1.1 GB) md5 sha1
    • From the News Crawl corpus (2008 only) (3.4 GB) md5 sha1
    • From the News Crawl corpus (2009 only) (3.7 GB) md5 sha1
    • From the News Crawl corpus (2010 only) (1.4 GB) md5 sha1
    • From the News Crawl corpus (2011 only) (229 MB) md5 sha1
• UN corpus French-English (1.1 GB) md5 sha1
• UN corpus Spanish-English (961 MB) md5 sha1
• Development sets (5.3 MB) md5 sha1
• Tools (3 KB)
• Script to normalize punctuation encoding (2KB)
• Test sets (1.7 MB) md5 sha1

** NB Same file as last year

TEST SET SUBMISSION

To submit your results, please first convert into into SGML format as required by the NIST BLEU scorer, and then upload it to the website matrix.statmt.org.

SGML Format

Each submitted file has to be in a format that is used by standard scoring scripts such as NIST BLEU or TER.

This format is similar to the one used in the source test set files that were released, except for:

• First line is <tstset trglang="en" setid="newstest2011" srclang="any">, with trglang set to either en, de, fr, es, or cz. Important: srclang is always any.
• Each document tag also has to include the system name, e.g. sysid="uedin".
• CLosing tag (last line) is </tstset>

The script wrap-xml.perl makes the conversion of a output file in one-segment-per-line format into the required SGML file very easy:

Format: wrap-xml.perl LANGUAGE SRC_SGML_FILE SYSTEM_NAME < IN > OUT
Example: wrap-xml.perl en newstest2011-src.de.sgm Google < decoder-output > decoder-output.sgm

Upload to Website

Upload happens in three easy steps:

• Go to the website matrix.statmt.org.
• Create an account under the menu item Account -> Create Account.
• Go to Account -> upload/edit content, and follow the link "Submit a system run"
  • select as test set "newstest2011" and the language pair you are submitting
  • select "create new system"
  • click "continue"
  • on the next page, upload your file and add some description

If you are submitting contrastive runs, please submit your primary system first and mark it clearly as the primary submission.

EVALUATION

Evaluation will be done both automatically as well as by human judgement.

• Manual Scoring: We will collect subjective judgments about translation quality from human annotators. If you participate in the shared task, we ask you to commit about 8 hours of time to do the manual evaluation. The evaluation will be done with an online tool.
• As in previous years, we expect the translated submissions to be in recased, detokenized, XML format, just as in most other translation campaigns (NIST, TC-Star).

DATES

supported by the EuroMatrixPlus project
P7-IST-231720-STP
funded by the European Commission
under Framework Programme 7