WAT 2024
The 11th Workshop on Asian Translation
November 15 or 16, 2024
(Hosted by the EMNLP 2024)
[IMPORTANT DATES]
| [INVITED TALK]
| [POLICY]
| [SHARED TASKS]
| [RESEARCH PAPER]
| [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:
- 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
IMPORTANT DATES
| Shared Task Submission Deadline | TBA |
|
| Research Paper Submission Deadline | August 30, 2024 |
|
| System Description Paper for Shared Tasks Submission Deadline | August 30, 2024 |
|
| Notification of Acceptance for Research Papers | September 27, 2024 |
|
| Review Feedback of System Description Papers | September 27, 2024 |
|
| Camera-ready Deadline (both Research and System Description Papers) | October 4, 2024 |
|
| Workshop Dates | November 15 or 16, 2024 |
|
* All deadlines are calculated at 11:59PM UTC-12
INVITED TALK
POLICY
Shared task participation policy:
- There is no limitation on the number of teams from one laboratory to apply for WAT2024.
- 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 mandatory 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 and system description paper submission policy:
- All the submissions to WAT2024 must follow the policy of EMNLP 2024 Paper Submission Details, excluding the following exceptions.
- Single-blind review (not need to blind the author information) for the system description papers.
- Author information can't be changed after the initial submission.
- Multiple Submission Policy: submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the EMNLP 2024 review period. This policy covers all refereed and archival conferences and workshops (e.g., IJCAI, SIGIR, NAACL). We make an exception to the above: papers can be dual-submitted to both EMNLP 2024 and an EMNLP 2024 workshop which has its submission deadline falling before our notification date of September 27, 2024.
In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to EMNLP 2024 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.
- System description paper submission is only for the participants of shared tasks.
RESEARCH PAPER
WAT2024 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:
- 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
The format of research paper is identital to the format of system description,
please refer to the section of PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION.
SHARED TASK
This year's shared tasks are run under the WMT24 conference. We run the following tasks.
Tasks:
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.
Submission:
Submission site is now open.
(User Name and Password is necessary to access.)
Evaluation results:
Evaluation results site is now open.
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 2024 papers and follow the same instructions
in terms of the format. We do not distinguish between long and short papers.
We ask you to use the EMNLP 2024 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word template
that are available
HERE.
- Submission site:
https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2024/WAT2024/
APPLICATION for Shared Tasks
The application site
for task participants of WAT2024 is now open.
ORGANIZERS
- Toshiaki Nakazawa, The University of Tokyo, Japan
- Isao Goto, Ehime University, Japan
- Hidaya Mino, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Japan
- Kazutaka Kinugawa, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Japan
- Chenhui Chu, Kyoto University, Japan
- Raj Dabre, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
- Shohei Higashiyama, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
- Hiroshi Manabe, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
- Anoop Kunchookuttan, Microsoft AI and Research, India
- Shantipriya Parida, Silo AI, Finland
- Ondřej Bojar, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
- Sadao Kurohashi, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
- Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IITP), India
PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS
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
- Chen Zhang, National University of Singapore, Singapore
For questions, comments, etc. please email to "wat-organizer -at- googlegroups -dot- com".
Japan Patent Office
The Association for Natural Language Processing
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)
Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT)
PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS
- WAT 2023
The 10th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2023) was held in September 4 2023 in Macau SAR, China.
- WAT 2022
The 9th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2022) was held in October 17 2022 in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.
- WAT 2021
The 8th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2021) was held in August 6 2021 in Bangkok, Thailand.
- WAT 2020
The 7th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2020) was held in December 2020 in Suzhou, China (Online).
- WAT 2019
The 6th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2019) was held in December 2019 in Hong Kong, China.
- 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
2024-06-03: site opened
NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Kyoto University
Last Modified: 2024-06-03
