WAT 2025
The 12th Workshop on Asian Translation
December 24, 2025
(Hosted by the IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
[IMPORTANT DATES]
| [INVITED TALK]
| [TIMETABLE]
| [POLICY]
| [SHARED TASKS]
| [APPLICATION]
| [RESEARCH PAPER]
| [SYSTEM DESCRIPTION PAPER]
| [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
INVITED TALK
Prof. Diptesh Kanojia
Senior Lecturer, University of Surrey
[Bio.]
Title: Optimizing Large Language Models for Low-resource Quality Estimation
Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are positioned as generalist models often claiming superlative performance on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, they tend to fail at Quality Estimation (QE) of Machine Translation (MT), particularly for low-resource languages. The talk investigates root causes of this disparity, such as tokenization inconsistencies arising from morphological richness in natural languages. To bridge this gap, the talk introduces strategies to embed annotation guidelines-based reasoning constraints directly in-context. Furthermore, our investigation on optimal cross-lingual alignment shows that intermediate Transformer layers help produce performant adapters. By attaching Low-Rank Adapter (LoRA) based regression heads to intermediate layers, we bypass the generation-specific biases of the final layer, efficiently outperforming standard instruction fine-tuning and SoTA encoders like COMETKiwi. Finally, via results from the WMT Unified Shared subtask on QE-informed Correction, we demonstrate that these precise estimations can guide LLMs to produce reliable corrections. We discuss how these signals help address the "diminishing returns" challenge, enabling models to improve fluent outputs without diverging from human references.
Time zone: UTC+5:30 (IST)
| 9:25-9:30 | Welcome (Toshiaki Nakazawa) |
| 9:30-10:30 | Shared Task - Patent Claims Translation (chair: Toshiaki Nakazawa) 20 mins. * 3 |
| 9:30-9:50 | Findings of the First Patent Claims Translation Task at WAT2025
Toshiaki Nakazawa, Takashi Tsunakawa, Isao Goto, Kazuhiro Kasada, Katsuhito Sudoh, Shoichi Okuyama, Takashi Ieda and Masaaki Nagata |
| 9:50-10:10 | Ehime-U System with Judge and Refinement, Specialized Prompting, and Few-shot for the Patent Claim Translation Task at WAT 2025
Taishi Edamatsu, Isao Goto and Takashi Ninomiya |
| 10:10-10:30 | UTSK25 at WAT2025 Patent Claims Translation/Evaluation Task
Haruto Azami, Yin Zhang, Futo Kajita, Nobuyori Nishimura and Takehito Utsuro |
| 10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break |
| 11:00-11:40 | Research Paper I (Chair: Raj Dabre) 20 mins. * 2 |
| 11:00-11:20 | Segmentation Beyond Defaults: Asymmetrical Byte Pair Encoding for Optimal Machine Translation Performance
Saumitra Yadav and Manish Shrivastava |
| 11:20-11:40 | Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation for Dialectal Variations of Hindi
Sanmay Sood, Siddharth Rajput and Md Shad Akhtar |
| 11:40-12:30 | Invited Talk (Chair: Raj Dabre) 50 mins. |
| 11:40-12:30 | Optimizing Large Language Models for Low-resource Quality Estimation
Diptesh Kanojia |
| 12:30-14:10 | Lunch Break |
| 14:10-14:50 | Research Paper II (Chair: Toshiaki Nakazawa) 20 mins. * 2 |
| 14:10-14:30 | A Systematic Review on Machine Translation and Transliteration Techniques for Code-Mixed Indo-Aryan Languages
H. Rukshan Dias, Deshan Sumanathilaka |
| 14:30-14:50 | CycleDistill: Bootstrapping Machine Translation using LLMs with Cyclical Distillation
Deepon Halder, Thanmay Jayakumar, Raj Dabre |
| 14:50-15:30 | Shared Task - Japanese-English Article-level News Translation (chair: Naoto Shirai) 20 mins. * 2 |
| 14:50-15:10 | Findings of the WAT 2025 Shared Task on Japanese-English Article-level News Translation
Naoto Shirai, Kazutaka Kinugawa, Hitoshi Ito, Hideya Mino and Yoshihiko Kawai |
| 15:10-15:30 | NHK Submission to WAT 2025: Leveraging Preference Optimization for Article-level Japanese--English News Translation
Hideya Mino, Rei Endo and Yoshihiko Kawai |
| 15:30-16:00 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00-17:20 | Shared Task - English-to-Indic Multimodal Translation (chair: Shantipriya Parida) 20 mins. * 4 |
| 16:00-16:20 | Findings of WAT2025 English-to-Indic Multimodal Translation Task
Shantipriya Parida and Ondřej Bojar |
| 16:20-16:40 | OdiaGenAI participation at WAT 2025
Debasish Dhal, Sambit Sekhar, Revathy V R, Shantipriya Parida and Akash Kumar Dhaka |
| 16:40-17:00 | Does Vision Still Help? Multimodal Translation with CLIP-Based Image Selection
Deepak Kumar, Baban Gain, Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh and Asif Ekbal |
| 17:00-17:20 | A Picture is Worth a Thousand (Correct) Captions: A Vision-Guided Judge-Corrector System for Multimodal Machine Translation
Siddharth Betala, Kushan Raj, Vipul Betala and Rohan Saswade |
| 17:20-17:25 | Closing (Toshiaki Nakazawa) |
IMPORTANT DATES
| Shared Task Submission Deadline | See each task description page. |
|
| System Description Paper for Shared Tasks Submission Deadline | See each task description page. |
|
| Research Paper Submission Deadline | September 29, 2025 |
|
| ARR Commitment Deadline | October 27, 2025 |
|
| Notification of Acceptance for Research Papers | November 3, 2025 |
|
| Review Feedback of System Description Papers | See each task description page. |
|
| Camera-ready Deadline (both Research and System Description Papers) | November 11, 2025November 17, 2025 |
|
| Workshop Dates | December 24, 2025 |
|
* All deadlines are calculated at 11:59PM UTC-12
POLICY
Shared task participation policy:
- There is no limitation on the number of teams from one laboratory to apply for WAT2025.
- 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 WAT2025 must follow the policy of AACL-IJCNLP 2025 Paper Submission Details, excluding the following exceptions.
- Multiple Submission Policy: submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the AACL-IJCNLP 2025 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 AACL-IJCNLP 2025 and an AACL-IJCNLP 2025 workshop which has its submission deadline falling before our notification date of November 3, 2025.
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 AACL-IJCNLP 2025 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.
SHARED TASKS
We run the following tasks. More tasks will come soon.
Tasks:
Patent Translation Tasks:
Document Translation Tasks:
Multimodal Translation Tasks:
APPLICATION for Shared Tasks
The application site
for task participants of WAT2025 is now open.
RESEARCH PAPER
WAT2025 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
Format and Template:
Participants must use the same format as AACL-IJCNLP 2025 papers and follow the same instructions
in terms of the format. We do not distinguish between long and short papers.
Submission site:
All the papers must be submitted to our OpenReview Site.
For the ARR commitment submissions, please use this link.
SYSTEM DESCRIPTION PAPER
Participants who submit results for human evaluation are required to submit description
papers of their translation systems and evaluation results.
The format of system description paper is identical to that of research paper, but there is one difference: the system description paper is single-blind.
We do NOT review the paper, but just give feedback to improve the submitted system description papers.
Submission site:
All the papers must be submitted to our OpenReview Site for system description papers.
SHARED TASK SUBMISSION SITE
Translation Submission:
Submission site is now open.
(User Name and Password is necessary to access.)
Evaluation results:
Evaluation results site is now open.
ORGANIZERS
- Toshiaki Nakazawa, The University of Tokyo, Japan
- Isao Goto, Ehime University, Japan
- Hidaya Mino, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Japan
- Naoto Shirai, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Japan
- Chenhui Chu, Kyoto University, Japan
- Haiyue Song, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
- Raj Dabre, Google Research Australia, Australia
- Shohei Higashiyama, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
- Anoop Kunchookuttan, Microsoft AI and Research, India
- Shantipriya Parida, AMD Silo AI, Finland
- Ondřej Bojar, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
- Katsuhito Sudoh, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan [GENERAL]
- Masaaki Nagata, NTT Corporation, Japan
- Sadao Kurohashi, National Institute of Informatics, 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
- 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 2024
The 11th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2024) was held in November 16 2024 in Miami, Florida, USA.
- 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
2025-06-18: site opened
NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Kyoto University
Last Modified: 2025-06-18
