WAT 2021 Newswire Tasks Description

1. Subtasks

1.1 There are two language directions:

l Japanese to English

l English to Japanese

1.2 There are two types of test sets:

l Test set I: A pair of test and reference sentences. The references were automatically extracted from English newswire sentences and not manually checked. There are no context data.

l Test set II: A test set added from WAT 2020. A pair of test and reference sentences and context data that are articles including test sentences. The references were automatically extracted from English newswire sentences and manually selected. Therefore, the quality of the references of test set II is better than that of test set I.

Participants submit the translation results of one or more of the test data.

2. Official Data

2.1 Files

filename	Contents
train.txt	0.2 million sentence pairs
devtest.txt	2,000 sentence pairs
dev.txt	2,000 sentence pairs
test.txt	2,000 sentence pairs
devc.tsv	479 sentence pairs
testc.tsv	1851 sentence pairs
context-devc.ja.tsv	132 articles
context-devc.en.tsv	132 articles
context-testc.ja.tsv	546 articles
context-testc.en.tsv	546 articles

3. Definition of Data Use 

	Use		Contents
Japanese to English	Training		train.txt, devtest.txt, dev.txt, devc.tsv, context-devc.ja.tsv, and context-dev.en.tsv
	Test set I	To be translated	Japanese sentences in test.txt
		Reference	English sentences in test.txt
	Test set II	To be translated	Japanese sentences in testc.tsv
		Context	context-testc.ja.tsv
		Reference	English sentences in testc.tsv
English to Japanese	Training		train.txt, devtest.txt, dev.txt, devc.tsv, context-devc.ja.tsv, and context-dev.en.tsv
	Test set I	To be translated	English sentences in test.txt
		Reference	Japanese sentences in test.txt
	Test set II	To be translated	English sentences in testc.tsv
		Context	context-testc.en.tsv
		Reference	Japanese sentences in testc.tsv

4. Data Format

Files with the extension ".txt" are text files and their format is "<Japanese text> ||| <English text>".

Files with the extension ".tsv" are tab separated values and their columns are Sentence ID, Japanese text and corresponding English text for {devc,testc}.tsv and Article ID, Sentence ID, Japanese text and corresponding English text for context-{devc,testc}.{en,ja}.tsv.

One line may contain more than one sentence. Sentences are separated by a " || ".

Some of personal names were anonymized by replacing them with 〇〇〇〇.

5. Policy for External Resource Usage and Declaration

Participants will be allowed to use external data other than the official data for their MT systems, if they make a declaration of the resources they used for each submission.

When participants use external resources to train their MT systems, they may not use JIJI news articles published between January, 2018 to March, 2018 because test set II were selected from JIJI news articles published in this period.

Participants may also not use sentences that are included in test set I when they use JIJI news published before June, 2017 because the test set I were selected from JIJI news articles published before June, 2017 (the specific period is unknown).

CHANGE LOG

2021-1-24: the title was updated

2020-4-11: initial version