UPDATE

• July 18, 2022: System submission deadline has been extended to July 25, 2022. Please check the important date section below.
• July 11, 2022: Released test sets

OVERVIEW

The 8^th round of the APE shared task follows the success of the previous rounds organized from 2015 to 2021. The aim is to examine automatic methods for correcting errors produced by an unknown machine translation (MT) system. This has to be done by exploiting knowledge acquired from human post-edits, which are provided as training material.

Goals

The aim of this task is to improve MT output in black-box scenarios, in which the MT system is used "as is" and cannot be modified. From the application point of view, APE components would make it possible to:

• Cope with systematic errors of an MT system whose decoding process is not accessible
• Provide professional translators with improved MT output quality to reduce (human) post-editing effort
• Adapt the output of a general-purpose system to the lexicon/style requested in a specific application domain

Task Description

This year the language setting shifts to Indian languages focusing on English --> Marathi language pair. The provided data cover several domains like healthcare, tourism, general/news. In these datasets, the source sentences have been translated into the target language by using a state-of-the-art neural MT system unknown to the participants (in terms of system configuration) and then manually post-edited.

At the training stage, the collected human post-edits have to be used to learn correction rules for the APE systems. At the test stage they will be used for system evaluation with automatic metrics (TER and BLEU).

DIFFERENCES FROM THE 7th ROUND (WMT 2021)

Compared to the previous round, the main differences are:

• Focus on Indian language (Marathi) as target language
• Use of new domains healthcare and tourism for the selected target language

Data

Training, development and test data consist in (source, target, post-edit) triplets. The source sentences in English come from the healthcare, tourism, and general/news domains. The target sentences are automatic translations to Marathi. The post-edits are human revisions of the target elements.

To download the data, click on the links in the table below:

⁺: This synthetic training data is prepared as a part of the 2022 APE shared task. The data is created by taking a parallel corpus, where the source data is translated using an MT system, and the references are considered as post-edits.

NOTE:
Participants are allowed to use any additional data for systems training.

Data Citation

Evaluation

Systems' performance will be evaluated with respect to their capability to reduce the distance that separates an automatic translation from its human-revised version.

Such distance will be measured in terms of TER, which will be computed between automatic and human post-edits in case-sensitive mode.

Also, BLEU will be taken into consideration as a secondary evaluation metric. To gain further insights on final output quality, a subset of the outputs of the submitted systems will also be manually evaluated like in previous rounds.

The submitted runs will be ranked based on the average HTER calculated on the test set by using the tercom software.

The HTER calculated between the raw MT output and human post-edits in the test set will be used as baseline (i.e. the baseline is a system that leaves all the test instances unmodified).

The evaluation script can be downloaded here

Submission Format

Participants' submissions should contain automatic post-edits of the target sentences in the test set. The submission format is as follows (each column is tab separated):

<METHOD NAME>   <SEGMENT NUMBER>   <APE SEGMENT>

• METHOD NAME is the name of your automatic post-editing method.
• SEGMENT NUMBER is the line number of the plain text target file you are post-editing (starting index is 1).
• APE SEGMENT is the automatically post-edited version of the particular segment.

Submission Requirements

Each participating team can submit at most 2 systems, but they have to explicitly indicate which of them represents their primary submission. In the case that none of the runs is marked as primary, the latest submission received will be used as the primary submission.

Submissions should be sent via email to wmt-ape-submission@fbk.eu. Please use the following pattern to name your files:

INSTITUTION-NAME_METHOD-NAME_SUBTYPE, where:

INSTITUTION-NAME is an acronym/short name for your institution, e.g. "UniXY"

METHOD-NAME is an identifier for your method, e.g. "pt_1_pruned"

SUBTYPE indicates whether the submission is primary or contrastive with the two alternative values: PRIMARY, CONTRASTIVE.

You are also invited to submit a short paper (4 to 6 pages) to WMT describing your APE method(s). You are not required to submit a paper if you do not want to. In that case, we ask you to give an appropriate reference describing your method(s) that we can cite in the WMT overview paper.

Results

Important dates

Organizers

Contact

For any information or question about the task, please send an email to:wmt-ape@fbk.eu.
To be always updated about this year's edition of the APE task, you can also join the wmt-ape group.