WMT

The Conference on Machine Translation


WMT is the main event for machine translation and machine translation research. The conference is held annually in connection with larger conferences on natural language processing.

The conference aims to bring together academic scientists, researchers and industry representatives to exchange and share their experiences and research results. WMT plays a key role for the entire industry of computational linguistics and machine translation.

In 2006, the first Workshop on Machine Translation was held at the NAACL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting).

In 2016, with the rise of neural machine translation, WMT became a conference of its own. The Conference on Machine Translation is still mainly known as WMT.

Universities, research laboratories and big technology companies consistently participate in the conference and are represented in the organising committee.

Table of contents
  1. Events
  2. Shared tasks
    1. Recurrent tasks
    2. Translation tasks
      1. Evaluation tasks
      2. Other tasks
      3. Discontinued tasks
  3. Organisers

Events

     
WMT22 Eighth Conference on Machine Translation EMNLP 2022
WMT21 Seventh Conference on Machine Translation EMNLP 2021
WMT20 Sixth Conference on Machine Translation EMNLP 2020
WMT19 Fourth Conference on Machine Translation ACL 2019
WMT18 Third Conference on Machine Translation EMNLP 2018
WMT17 Second Conference on Machine Translation EMNLP 2017
WMT16 First Conference on Machine Translation ACL 2016
WMT15 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation EMNLP 2015
WMT14 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation ACL 2014
WMT13 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation ACL 2013
WMT12 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation NAACL 2012
WMT11 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation EMNLP 2011
WMT10 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation ACL 2010
WMT09 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation EACL 2009
WMT08 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation ACL 2008
WMT07 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation ACL 2007
WMT06 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation NAACL 2006

Shared tasks

WMT includes competitions on different aspects of machine translation. These competitions are known as shared tasks.

Typically, the task organisers provide datasets and instructions. Teams submit the output of their systems. The submissions are ranked with human evaluation. The results of the competition are ready before the conference takes place.

During the main conference, researchers present the results of the shared tasks and winners are announced.

WMT started in 2006 with a translation task. In the following years, WMT included themes on all aspects of machine translation, corpus preparation, training, and evaluation.

The main task is the General machine translation task. Until 2022, it was known as the News task because traditionally the content to be translated was news articles.

Recurrent tasks

Translation tasks

  • General machine translation task (former News task)
  • Biomedical translation task
  • Multimodal translation task
  • Unsupervised and very low resource translation task
  • Lifelong learning in machine translation task
  • Chat translation task
  • Life-long learning in machine translation task
  • Machine translation using terminologies task
  • Sign language translation task
  • Robustness translation task
  • Triangular machine translation task
  • Large-scale multilingual machine translation task

Evaluation tasks

  • Metrics task
  • Quality estimation task

Other tasks

  • Automatic post-editing task

Discontinued tasks

  • Medical text translation task
  • Pronoun translation task
  • Bilingual document alignment
  • Similar language translation task
  • Multilingual low-resource translation task for Indo-European languages
  • Tuning task
  • Parallel corpus filtering task
  • Task on training of neural machine translation
  • Task on bandit learning for machine translation

The published results from the shared tasks and the data sets released for WMT are standard benchmarks across machine translation research.

Organisers

Organisers are the people responsible for the contents for the main event and the contents, guidelines, datasets and results for each shared task.

Some people have been organisers over many years:

  • Philipp Koehn
  • Barry Haddow
  • Loïc Barrault
  • Ondřej Bojar
  • Lucia Specia
  • Marco Turchi
  • Matt Post
  • Rajen Chatterjee
  • Christof Monz
  • Matteo Negri
  • Matthias Huck
  • Christian Federmann
  • Christof Monz
  • Yvette Graham
  • Mariana Neves
  • Tom Kocmi

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