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WAT 2021

The 8th Workshop on Asian Translation


August 6, 2021
Bangkok, Thailand
(Hosted by the ACL-IJCNLP 2021)

SPONSOR | [TIMETABLE] | [INVITED TALK] | [IMPORTANT DATES] | [POLICY] | [RESEARCH PAPER] | [SHARED TASKS] | [EVALUATION] | [BASELINE SYSTEM] | [PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION] | [APPLICATION] | [CONTACT] | [RELATED LINK] | [PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS]

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.

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:

SPONSOR

SunFlare Co., Ltd.
AAMT
Kawamura International

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INVITED TALKS

Dr. Francisco Guzmán and Dr. Angela Fan
Research Scientist at the Appled Machine Learning department at Facebook
Title: Massively Multilingual Translation and Evaluation
[Abstract]

Dr. Graham Neubig
Associate Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University
Title: Understanding and Improving Context Usage in Context-aware Translation
[Abstract]
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IMPORTANT DATES

UPDATED!!
Shared Task Submission DeadlineApril 26, 2021May 3, 2021
Research Paper Submission DeadlineApril 26, 2021May 3, 2021
System Description Paper for Shared Tasks Submission DeadlineMay 17, 2021May 24, 2021
Notification of Acceptance for Research PapersMay 28, 2021May 31, 2021
Review Feedback of System Description PapersMay 28, 2021May 31, 2021
Camera-ready Deadline (both Research and System Description Papers)June 7, 2021
Workshop DatesAugust 6, 2021

* All deadlines are calculated at 11:59PM UTC-12

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TIMETABLE

Tentative program of WAT2021 Date: 6th (Fri.), August
Time zone: UTC+9
7:00-7:05Welcome (Nakazawa)
7:05-7:45Invited Talk I (Chair: Dabre) 40 mins.
7:05-7:45Massively Multilingual Translation and Evaluation
Francisco Guzmán and Angela Fan
7:45-7:50Short Break
7:50-9:30Shared Task I - Restricted / ALT+UCSY / NICT-SAP (Chair: Eriguchi, Ding, Dabre) 20 mins. + 10 mins. * 8
7:50-8:10Task Descriptions and Results: Restricted (Eriguchi) / ALT+UCSY (Ding) / NICT-SAP (Dabre)
8:10-8:20NHK’s Soft Lexically Constrained Neural Machine Translation at WAT 2021
Hideya Mino, Kazutaka Kinugawa, Hitoshi Ito, Isao Goto, Ichiro Yamada and Takenobu Tokunaga
8:20-8:30Input Augmentation Improves Constrained Beam Search for Neural Machine Translation: NTT at WAT 2021
Katsuki Chousa and Makoto Morishita
8:30-8:40NICT's Neural Machine Translation Systems for the WAT21 Restricted Translation Task
Zuchao Li, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita and Hai Zhao
8:40-8:50Machine Translation with the Pre-specified Target-side Words Using a Semi-autoregressive Model
Seiichiro Kondo, Aomi Koyama, Tomoshige Kiyuna, Tosho Hirasawa and Mamoru Komachi
8:50-9:00NECTEC’s Participation in WAT-2021
Zar Zar Hlaing, Ye Kyaw Thu, Thazin Myint Oo, Mya Ei San, Sasiporn Usanavasin, Ponrudee Netisopakul and Thepchai Supnithi
9:00-9:10Hybrid Statistical Machine Translation for English-Myanmar: UTYCC-Team1 Submission to WAT-2021
Ye Kyaw Thu, Thazin Myint Oo, Hlaing Myat Nwe, Khaing Zar Mon, Nang Aeindray Kyaw, Naing Linn Phyo, Nann Hwan Khun and Hnin Aye Thant
9:10-9:20NICT-2 Translation System at WAT-2021: Applying a Pretrained Multilingual Encoder-Decoder Model to Low-resource Language Pairs
Kenji Imamura and Eiichiro Sumita
9:20-9:30Rakuten's Participation in WAT 2021: Examining the Effectiveness of Pre-trained Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation
Raymond Hendy Susanto, Dongzhe Wang, Sunil Yadav, Mausam Jain and Ohnmar Htun
9:30-9:35Short Break
9:35-10:15Invited Talk II (Chair: Goto) 40 mins.
9:35-10:15Understanding and Improving Context Usage in Context-aware Translation
Graham Neubig
10:15-10:20Short Break
10:20-11:40Research Paper / Findings I (Chair: Mino) 20 mins. * 4
10:20-10:40BTS: Back TranScription for Speech-to-Text Post-Processor using Text-to-Speech-to-Text
Chanjun Park, Jaehyung Seo, Seolhwa Lee, Chanhee Lee, Hyeonseok Moon, Sugyeong Eo and Heuiseok Lim
10:40-11:00Zero-pronoun Data Augmentation for Japanese-to-English Translation
Ryokan Ri, Toshiaki Nakazawa and Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
11:00-11:20Evaluation Scheme of Focal Translation for Japanese Partially Amended Statutes
Takahiro Yamakoshi, Takahiro Komamizu, Yasuhiro Ogawa and Katsuhiko Toyama
11:20-11:40Joint Optimization of Tokenization and Downstream Model
Tatsuya Hiraoka, Sho Takase, Kei Uchiumi, Atsushi Keyaki and Naoaki Okazaki
11:40-13:00Lunch Break
13:00-14:40Shared Task II - JPC / Hindi&Malayalam Multimodal / Japanese Multimodal (Chair: Higashiyama, Parida, Nakayama, Chu) 20 mins. + 10 mins. * 8
13:00-13:20Task Descriptions and Results: JPC (Higashiyama) / Hindi&Malayalam Multimodal (Parida) / Japanese Multimodal (Nakayama, Chu)
13:20-13:30TMU NMT System with Japanese BART for the Patent task of WAT 2021
Hwichan Kim and Mamoru Komachi
13:30-13:40System Description for Transperfect
Wiktor Stribiżew, Fred Bane, José Conceição and Anna Zaretskaya
13:40-13:50Bering Lab’s Submissions on WAT 2021 Shared Task
Heesoo Park and Dongjun Lee
13:50-14:00NLPHut’s Participation at WAT2021
Shantipriya Parida, Subhadarshi Panda, Ketan Kotwal, Amulya Dash, Satya Ranjan Dash, Yashvardhan Sharma, Petr Motlicek and Ondřej Bojar
14:00-14:10Improved English to Hindi Multimodal Neural Machine Translation
Sahinur Rahman Laskar, Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman Khilji, Darsh Kaushik, Partha Pakray and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay
14:10-14:20IITP at WAT 2021: System description for English-Hindi Multimodal Translation Task
Baban Gain, Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay and Asif Ekbal
14:20-14:30ViTA: Visual-Linguistic Translation by Aligning Object Tags
Kshitij Gupta, Devansh Gautam and Radhika Mamidi
14:30-14:40TMEKU System for the WAT2021 Multimodal Translation Task
Yuting Zhao, Mamoru Komachi, Tomoyuki Kajiwara and Chenhui Chu
14:40-14:45Short Break
14:45-15:45Research Paper / Findings II (Chair: Parida) 20 mins. * 3
14:45-15:05Optimal Word Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation into Dravidian Languages
Prajit Dhar, Arianna Bisazza and Gertjan van Noord
15:05-15:25Itihasa: A large-scale corpus for Sanskrit to English translation
Rahul Aralikatte, Miryam de Lhoneux, Anoop Kunchukuttan and Anders Søgaard
15:25-15:45IndoCollex: A Testbed for Morphological Transformation of Indonesian Word Colloquialism
Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Made Nindyatama Nityasya, Afra Feyza Akyüek, Suci Fitriany, Alham Fikri Aji, Radityo Eko Prasojo and Derry Tanti Wijaya
15:45-15:50Short Break
15:50-17:20Shared Task III - MultiIndicMT (Chair: Dabre) 20 mins. + 10 mins. * 8
15:50-16:00Task Descriptions and Results: MultiIndicMT (Parida)
16:00-16:10NICT-5's Submission To WAT 2021: MBART Pre-training And In-Domain Fine Tuning For Indic Languages
Raj Dabre and Abhisek Chakrabarty
16:10-16:20How far can we get with one GPU in 100 hours? CoAStaL at MultiIndicMT Shared Task
Rahul Aralikatte, Héctor Ricardo Murrieta Bello, Daniel Hershcovich, Marcel Bollmann and Anders Søgaard
16:20-16:30IIIT Hyderabad Submission To WAT 2021: Efficient Multilingual NMT systems for Indian languages
Sourav Kumar, Salil Aggarwal and Dipti Sharma
16:30-16:40Language Relatedness and Lexical Closeness can help Improve Multilingual NMT: IITBombay@MultiIndicNMT WAT2021
Jyotsana Khatri, Nikhil Saini and Pushpak Bhattacharyya
16:40-16:50Samsung R&D Institute Poland submission to WAT 2021 Indic Language Multilingual Task
Adam Dobrowolski, Marcin Szymański, Marcin Chochowski and Paweł Przybysz
16:50-17:00Multilingual Machine Translation Systems at WAT 2021: One-to-Many and Many-to-One Transformer based NMT
Shivam Mhaskar, Aditya Jain, Aakash Banerjee and Pushpak Bhattacharyya
17:00-17:10IITP-MT at WAT2021: Indic-English Multilingual Neural Machine Translation using Romanized Vocabulary
Ramakrishna Appicharla, Kamal Kumar Gupta, Asif Ekbal and Pushpak Bhattacharyya
17:10-17:20ANVITA Machine Translation System for WAT 2021 MultiIndicMT Shared Task
Pavanpankaj Vegi, Sivabhavani J, Biswajit Paul, Chitra Viswanathan and Prasanna Kumar K R
17:20-17:25Closing (Nakazawa)
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POLICY

Shared task participation policy:

Research paper and system description paper submission policy:

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RESEARCH PAPER

WAT2021 invites researchers to submit their original work on machine translation for Asian languages. The scope covers studies and reports on theories, techniques, and resources to improve the machines translation of Asian languages. All submitted research papers will be examined under a double-blind peer-reviewing to decide if they will appear at the workshop. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

The format of research paper is identital to the format of system description, please refer to the section of PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION.

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SHARED TASK

Tasks:

Baseline system:

Baseline systems site is now open.

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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.

Human evaluation:
Human evaluation will be carried out with two kinds of method, which are Pairwise Crowdsourcing Evaluation and JPO Adequacy Evaluation.

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

Evaluation results:
Evaluation results site is now open.

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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.

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APPLICATION for Shared Tasks

The application site for task participants of WAT2021 is now open.

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ORGANIZERS

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS

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TECHNICAL COLLABORATOR

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CONTACT

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

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

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PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS

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CHANGE LOG

2020-12-21: site opened

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NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Kyoto University
Last Modified: 2020-12-21