ACL 2014
NINTH WORKSHOP ON
STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION

26-27 June 2014
Baltimore, USA

[HOME] | [TRANSLATION TASK] | [METRICS TASK] | [QUALITY ESTIMATION TASK] | [MEDICAL TRANSLATION TASK] | [SCHEDULE] | [PAPERS] | [AUTHORS] | [RESULTS]

This workshop builds on eight previous workshops on statistical machine translation, which is one of the most prestigious venues for research in computational linguistics:

IMPORTANT DATES

Release of training data for translation taskEarly December 2013
Release of training data for quality estimation taskJanuary 15, 2014
Test set distributed for translation taskFebruary 24, 2014
Submission deadline for translation taskFebruary 28, 2014
System outputs distributed for metrics taskMarch 7, 2014
Test sets distributed for quality estimation taskMarch 7, 2014
Submission deadline for metrics taskMarch 28, 2014
Submission deadline for quality estimation taskApril 1, 2014
Start of manual evaluation periodMarch 11, 2014
End of manual evaluationApril 1, 2014
Paper submission deadlineApril 1, 2014
Notification of acceptanceApril 21, 2014
Camera-ready deadlineApril 28, 2014

OVERVIEW

This year's workshop will feature five shared tasks:

In addition to the shared tasks, the workshop will also feature scientific papers on topics related to MT. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

We encourage authors to evaluate their approaches to the above topics using the common data sets created for the shared tasks.

TRANSLATION TASK

The first shared task which will examine translation between the following language pairs:

Participants may submit translations for any or all of the language directions. In addition to the common test sets the workshop organizers will provide optional training resources, including a newly expanded release of the Europarl corpora and out-of-domain corpora.

All participants who submit entries will have their translations evaluated. We will evaluate translation performance by human judgment. To facilitate the human evaluation we will require participants in the shared tasks to manually judge some of the submitted translations. For each team, this will amount to ranking 300 sets of 5 translations, per language pair submitted.

We also provide baseline machine translation systems, with performance comparable to the best systems from last year's shared task.

QUALITY ESTIMATION TASK

A topic of increasing interest in MT is that of estimating the quality of translated texts. Different from MT evaluation, quality estimation (QE) systems do not rely on reference translations, but rather predict the quality of an unseen translated text (document, sentence, phrase) at system run-time. This topic is particularly relevant from a user perspective: among other applications, it can (i) help decide whether a given translation is good enough for publishing as is (Soricut and Echihabi, 2010); (ii) filter out sentences that are not good enough for post-editing (Specia, 2011); (iii) select the best translation among options from multiple MT and/or translation memory systems (He et al., 2010); and (iv) inform readers of the target language of whether or not they can rely on a translation (Specia et al., 2011).

Although still very recent, research in this topic has been showing promising results in the last couple of years. However, efforts are scattered around several groups and, as a consequence, comparing different systems is difficult as there are neither well established baselines nor standard evaluation metrics. In the Quality-Estimation track of the WMT workshop and shared-task, we will provide training and test sets, along with evaluation metrics and a baseline system. By providing a common ground for development and comparison, we expect to foster research in the topic, as well as to attract new people interested in the subject, who can build and evaluate new solutions using the provided resources.

EVALUATION TASK

The evaluation task will assess automatic evaluation metrics' ability to:

Participants in the shared evaluation task will use their automatic evaluation metrics to score the output from the translation task and the system combination task. They will be provided with the output from the other two shared tasks along with reference translations. We will measure the correlation of automatic evaluation metrics with the human judgments.

MEDICAL TEXT TRANSLATION TASK

See here.

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submissions will consist of regular full papers of 6-10 pages, plus additional pages for references, formatted following the ACL 2013 guidelines. In addition, shared task participants will be invited to submit short papers (4-6 pages) describing their systems or their evaluation metrics. Both submission and review processes will be handled electronically. Note that regular papers must be anonymized, while system descriptions do not need to be.

We encourage individuals who are submitting research papers to evaluate their approaches using the training resources provided by this workshop and past workshops, so that their experiments can be repeated by others using these publicly available corpora.

POSTER FORMAT

The posters will be attached to self standing posterboards measuring 3 ft high and 4 ft wide and sitting on top of tables so there will be laptop/handout space as well. We will provide pushpins, double-sided tape, that putty-like substance, and clips to affix the posters to the posterboards.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Subscribe to to the announcement list for WMT14 by entering your e-mail address below. This list will be used to announce when the test sets are released, to indicate any corrections to the training sets, and to amend the deadlines as needed.
Email:

You can read past announcements on the Google Groups page for WMT. These also include an archive of annoucements from earlier workshops. Google Groups

INVITED TALK

TBC

ORGANIZERS

Ondřej Bojar (Charles University in Prague)
Christian Buck (University of Edinburgh)
Christian Federmann (MSR)
Barry Haddow (University of Edinburgh)
Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh / Johns Hopkins University)
Matouš Macháček (Charles University in Prague)
Christof Monz (University of Amsterdam)
Pavel Pecina (Charles University in Prague)
Matt Post (Johns Hopkins University)
Herve Saint-Amand (University of Edinburgh)
Radu Soricut (Google)
Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

CONTACT

For questions, comments, etc. please send email to pkoehn@inf.ed.ac.uk.

Supported by the European Commision
under the
project (grant number 288487)