WAT 2019

The 6th Workshop on Asian Translation

November 4, 2019
Hong Kong, China

[SPONSOR] | [TIMETABLE] | [INVITED TALK] | [IMPORTANT DATES] | [POLICY] | [RESEARCH PAPER] | [TRANSLATION TASK] | [EVALUATION] | [BASELINE SYSTEM] | [PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION] | [REGISTRATION] | [PROCEEDINGS] | [CONTACT] | [RELATED LINK] | [PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS]

NOTICE: The date of WAT2019 has been changed from 3rd to 4th of November.

The submission, evaluation, and baseline pages have been opened.

The policy for participants has been added.

INTRODUCTION

Many Asian countries are rapidly growing these days and the importance of communicating and exchanging the information with these countries has intensified. To satisfy the demand for communication among these countries, machine translation technology is essential.

Machine translation technology has rapidly evolved recently and it is seeing practical use especially between European languages. However, the translation quality of Asian languages is not that high compared to that of European languages, and machine translation technology for these languages has not reached a stage of proliferation yet. This is not only due to the lack of the language resources for Asian languages but also due to the lack of techniques to correctly transfer the meaning of sentences from/to Asian languages. Consequently, a place for gathering and sharing the resources and knowledge about Asian language translation is necessary to enhance machine translation research for Asian languages.

The Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT), the world's largest machine translation workshop, mainly targets on European languages and does not include Asian languages. The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) has spoken language translation tasks for some Asian languages using TED talk data, but these is no task for written language.

The Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT) is an open machine translation evaluation campaign focusing on Asian languages. WAT gathers and shares the resources and knowledge of Asian language translation to understand the problems to be solved for the practical use of machine translation technologies among all Asian countries. WAT is unique in that it is an "open innovation platform": the test data is fixed and open, so participants can repeat evaluations on the same data and confirm changes in translation accuracy over time. WAT has no deadline for the automatic translation quality evaluation (continuous evaluation), so participants can submit translation results at any time.

Following the success of the previous WAT workshops (WAT2014 -- WAT2018), WAT2019 will bring together machine translation researchers and users to try, evaluate, share and discuss brand-new ideas about machine translation. For the 6th WAT, we will include 5 new translation subtasks:

• Japanese --> English timely disclosure documents task
  
• Khmer <--> English Mixed-domain task
  
• Tamil <--> English Mixed-domain task
  
• Russian <--> Japanese News Commentary task
  
• English --> Hindi multimodal task
  

In addition to the shared tasks, the workshop will also feature scientific papers on topics related to the machine translation, especially for Asian languages. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• analysis of the automatic/human evaluation results in the past WAT workshops
  
• word-/phrase-/syntax-/semantics-/rule-based, neural and hybrid machine translation
  
• Asian language processing
  
• incorporating linguistic information into machine translation
  
• decoding algorithms
  
• system combination
  
• error analysis
  
• manual and automatic machine translation evaluation
  
• machine translation applications
  
• quality estimation
  
• domain adaptation
  
• machine translation for low resource languages
  
• language resources
  

SPONSOR

SunFlare Co., Ltd.

Japan Exchange Group, Inc. (JPX)

AAMT

Kawamura International

INVITED TALK

IMPORTANT DATES

TIMETABLE

POLICY

• There is no limitation on the number of teams from one laboratory to register WAT2019.
• From one laboratory (not one team), at most two submissions are allowed for human evaluation in each sub-task.
• If a team takes part in human evaluation, it is required to submit its system description paper and to attend the workshop.
• A team can submit its system description paper even only taking part in automatic evaluation.
• In the case that a team taking part in human evaluation but does not submit their system description paper, the evaluation results, including automatic and by human, will not be presented in the overview paper provided by the organizers.

RESEARCH PAPER

• Word-/phrase-/syntax-/semantics-/rule-based, neural, and hybrids machine translation
  
• Asian language processing
  
• Incorporating linguistic information into machine translation
  
• Decoding algorithms
  
• System combination
  
• Error analysis
  
• Manual and automatic machine translation evaluation
  
• Machine translation applications
  
• Quality estimation
  
• Domain adaptation
  
• Machine translation for low resource languages
  
• Language resources
  

TRANSLATION TASK

Tasks:

• Scientific paper tasks: Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus (ASPEC)
  
  • English <--> Japanese
    
  • Chinese <--> Japanese
    
• Patent tasks: Japan Patent Office Patent Corpus 2.0 (JPC2)
  
  • Chinese <--> Japanese
    
  • Korean <--> Japanese
    
  • English <--> Japanese
    
  • Chinese -> Japanese expression pattern task
    
• Timely Disclosure tasks: Timely Disclosure Documents Corpus (NEW!!)
  
  • Japanese --> English
    
• Newswire tasks: JIJI Corpus
  
  • Japanese <--> English
    
• News Commentary task: (NEW!!)
  
  • Japanese <--> Russian
    
• Mixed-domain tasks:
  
  • UCSY and ALT corpora: Myanmar <--> English
    
  • ECCC and ALT corpora: Khmer <--> English (NEW!!)
    
• Indic tasks:
• IIT Bombay (IITB) corpus: Hindi <--> English
  
• UFAL (EnTam) corpus: Tamil <--> English (NEW!!)
  
• Multimodal : English --> Hindi (NEW!!)
  

Dataset:

• Scientific paper tasks:
  WAT uses ASPEC for the dataset including training, development, development test and test data. Participants of the scientific paper tasks must get a copy of ASPEC by themselves. ASPEC consists of approximately 3 million Japanese-English parallel sentences from paper abstracts (ASPEC-JE) and approximately 0.7 million Japanese-Chinese paper excerpts (ASPEC-JC)
• Patent tasks:
  WAT uses JPO Patent Corpus, which is constructed by Japan Patent Office (JPO). This corpus consists of 1 million English-Japanese parallel sentences, 1 million Chinese-Japanese parallel sentences, and 1 million Korean-Japanese parallel sentences from patent description with four categories. Participants of patent tasks are required to get it on WAT2019 site of JPO Patent Corpus.
  • English/Chinese/Korean <--> Japanese:
    These tasks evaluate performance of a translation model similarly as the other translation tasks. Differing from the previous tasks at WAT2015, WAT2016 and WAT2017, new test sets of these tasks consists of (a) patent documents published between 2011 and 2013, which were used in the past years' WAT, and (b) ones published between 2016 and 2017 for each language pair. We will also evaluate performance of the section (a) so as to compare systems submitted in the past years' WAT.
  • Chinese -> Japanese expression pattern task:
    This task evaluates performance of a translation model for each predifined category of expression patterns, which corresponds to title of invention (TIT), abstract (ABS), scope of claim (CLM) or description (DES). Test set of this task consists of sentences each of which is annotated with a corresponding category of expression patterns.
• Timely Disclosure tasks:
  
  WAT uses Timely Disclosure Documents Corpus, which is constructed by was constructed by Japan Exchange Group (JPX). This corpus consists of a Japanese-English timely disclosure corpus of 1.4M parallel sentences. Participants of Timely Disclosure tasks are required to get it on WAT2019 site of Timely Disclosure Documents Corpus.
• Newswire tasks:
  
  WAT uses JIJI Corpus, which is constructed by Jiji Press Ltd. in collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). This corpus consists of a Japanese-English news corpus of 200K parallel sentences, from Jiji Press news with various categories. Participants of newswire tasks are required to get it on WAT2019 site of JIJI Corpus.
• News Commentary task:
  
  In WAT 2019 we will evaluate Japanese <--> Russian translation. WAT provides a manually aligned, cleaned and filtered Japanese <--> Russian, Japanese <--> English and English <--> Russian train, development and test corpus to study extremely low resource situations for distant language pairs. The training data in this repository is from Global Voices domain whereas the development and test sets are from the News Commentary Domain. We also provide approximately 230,000 lines of filtered Russian <--> English corpus from News Commentary domain. Additionally, we encourage the use of large out-of-domain corpora from: KFTT, JESC, TED, ASPEC, UN and Yandex. We encourage participants to explore multilingual solutions that also incorporate domain adaptation
• Mixed-domain tasks:
  • Myanmar (Burmese) <--> English
    WAT uses UCSY Corpus and ALT Corpus. The UCSY corpus and a portion of the ALT corpus are use as training data, which are around 220,000 lines of sentences and phrases. The development and test data are from the ALT corpus.
  • Khmer <--> English
    WAT uses ECCC Corpus and ALT Corpus. The ECCC corpus and a portion of the ALT corpus are use as training data, which are around 120,000 lines of sentences and phrases. The development and test data are from the ALT corpus.
• Indic Task :
  
  • Hindi <--> English
    WAT uses IITB Corpus for the dataset for training, development, development test and test data. The training corpus is mixed domain and contains around 1 million lines of sentences and phrases. In order to access the corpus participants should sign the following agreement, scan and send it to the addresss mentioned in it. The training corpus is a mixed domain corpus. The development and test set are from the News domain and are exactly the same as the ones in WMT 2014.
  • Tamil <--> English
    WAT will use the EnTam Corpus corpus collected by researchers at UFAL. The training data contains around 160,000 lines of parallel corpora. The data belongs to three domains: Cinema, News and Bible.
  • Multimodal Task:
    For the first time WAT will be organizing a multimodal English --> Hindi translation task where the input will be text and an Image and the output will be a caption (text). The training set contains around 30,000 segments (Visual Genome). For additional details related to the task kindly visit the link provided.

Baseline system:

Baseline systems site is now open.

TRANSLATION TASK EVALUATION

We will evaluate the translation performance of the results submitted through automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

Automatic evaluation:
We will prepare an automatic evaluation server. You will be able to evaluate the translation results at any time using this server.

• Metric:
  BLEU, RIBES, and AM-FM^*
  * A two-dimensional automatic evaluation metric for machine translation, designed to operate at the sentence level.
  * It is based on adequacy and fluency, to decouple semantic and syntactic components of the translation process to provide a balanced view on translation quality.
  
• Format:
  The submission format and the submission method are given at the submission site below.
• Notice:
  When submitting, participants have to agree that the submitted results are attributed to JST and NICT. The results will be used and distributed for research by JST and NICT.
  Thanks to the technical collaborators: Luis Fernando D'Haro, Rafael E. Banchs and Haizhou Li.
  

Human evaluation:
Human evaluation will be carried out with two kinds of method, which are Pairwise Crowdsourcing Evaluation and JPO Adequacy Evaluation.
The detailed regulations of the human evaluation will be announced soon.

Submission:
Submission site is now open.
(User Name and Password is necessary to access.)

Evaluation results:
Evaluation results site is now open.

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Participants who submit results for human evaluation are required to submit description papers of their translation systems and evaluation results. All submissions and feedback are handled electronically as below.

• Format and Template:
  Participants must use the same format as EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 and follow the same instructions in terms of the format.
  We ask you to use the EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word template that are available on the EMNLP-IJCNLP2019 conference web site.
• Submission site:
  https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2019/ws-WAT2019/

REGISTRATION

The application site for task participants of WAT2019 is now open.

ORGANIZERS

• Toshiaki Nakazawa, The University of Tokyo, Japan
• Chenchen Ding, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
• Raj Dabre, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
• Anoop Kunchukuttan, Microsoft AI and Research, India
• Win Pa Pa, University of Computer Studies, Yangon (UCSY), Myanmar
• Nobushige Doi, Japan Exchange Group (JPX), Japan
• Yusuke Oda, Google, Japan
• Ondřej Bojar, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
• Shantipriya Parida, Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland
• Isao Goto, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Japan
• Hidaya Mino, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Japan
• Hiroshi Manabe, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
• Katsuhito Sudoh, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan
• Sadao Kurohashi, Kyoto University, Japan
• Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IITP), India

TECHNICAL COLLABORATOR

• Luis Fernando D'Haro, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
• Rafael E. Banchs, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Haizhou Li, National University of Singapore, Singapore

CONTACT

For questions, comments, etc. please email to "wat-organizer -at- googlegroups -dot- com".

RELATED LINK

Japan Patent Office
The Association for Natural Language Processing (Japanese Page)
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)
Japanese Exchange Group (JPX)
Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT)

PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS

• WAT 2018
  The 5th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2018) was held in December 2018 in Hong Kong, China.
• WAT 2017
  The 4th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2017) was held in November 2017 in Taipei, China.
• WAT 2016
  The 3rd Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2016) was held in December 2016 in Osaka, Japan.
• WAT 2015
  The 2nd Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2015) was held in October 2015 in Kyoto, Japan.
• WAT 2014
  The 1st Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2014) was held in October 2014 in Tokyo, Japan.

CHANGE LOG

2019-07-23: submisson, evaluation, baseline opened
2019-06-10: policy added
2019-04-26: task updated
2019-04-12: updated
2019-02-01: site opened

NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Kyoto University
Last Modified: 2019-06-10