EMNLP 2011
SIXTH WORKSHOP ON
STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION

July 30-31, 2011
Edinburgh, UK

[HOME] | [TRANSLATION TASK] | [FEATURED TRANSLATION TASK] | [SYSTEM COMBINATION TASK] | [EVALUATION TASK] | [RESULTS]
[BASELINE SYSTEM] | [BASELINE SYSTEM 2]
[SCHEDULE] | [PAPERS] | [AUTHORS]

This workshop builds on five previous workshops on statistical machine translation:

The workshop is sponsored by the ACL's special interest group in machine translation (SIGMT).

This year's workshop will feature three shared tasks: a shared translation task, a system combination shared task, and a shared evaluation task to test automatic evaluation metrics. The shared translation task will include a featured task this year: translating disaster response SMS messages from Haitian Creole to English. The goal is to delve into the scientific challenges of producing machine translation systems useful enough to help first responders translate messages sent in the aftermath of disasters like the earthquake that struck Haiti in January of 2010. Low-resource languages and nosiy/informal input texts are major challenges for statistical machine translation.

In addition to the shared tasks, the workshop will also feature scientific papers on topics related to MT. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

We encourage authors to evaluate their approaches to the above topics using the common data sets created for the shared tasks.

TRANSLATION TASK

The first shared task which will examine translation between the following language pairs:

Participants may submit translations for any or all of the language directions. In addition to the common test sets the workshop organizers will provide optional training resources, including a newly expanded release of the Europarl corpora and out-of-domain corpora.

All participants who submit entries will have their translations evaluated. We will evaluate translation performance by human judgment. To facilitate the human evaluation we will require participants in the shared tasks to manually judge some of the submitted translations.

We also provide baseline machine translation systems, with performance comparable to the best systems from last year's shared task.

SYSTEM COMBINATION TASK

Participants in the system combination task will be provided with the 1-best translations from each of the systems entered in the shared translation task. We will endeavor to provide a held-out development set for system combination, which will include translations from each of the systems and a reference translation. Any system combination strategy is acceptable, whether it selects the best translation on a per sentence basis or create novel translations by combining the systems' translations. The quality of the system combinations will be judged alongside the individual systems during the manual evaluation, as well as scored with automatic evaluation metrics.

EVALUATION TASK

The evaluation task will assess automatic evaluation metrics' ability to:

Participants in the shared evaluation task will use their automatic evaluation metrics to score the output from the translation task and the system combination task. They will be provided with the output from the other two shared tasks along with reference translations. We will measure the correlation of automatic evaluation metrics with the human judgments.

This year we are also featuring a new, invitation-only tunable metrics task.

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submissions will consist of regular full papers of 6-10 pages, plus additional pages for references, formatted following the EMNLP 2011 guidelines. In addition, shared task participants will be invited to submit short papers (4-6 pages) describing their systems or their evaluation metrics. Both submission and review processes will be handled electronically.

We encourage individuals who are submitting research papers to evaluate their approaches using the training resources provided by this workshop and past workshops, so that their experiments can be repeated by others using these publicly available corpora.

IMPORTANT DATES

Release of training dataJanuary 24, 2011
Test set distributed for translation taskMarch 14, 2011
Submission deadline for translation taskMarch 20, 2011
Translations released for system combination    March 25, 2011
System combination deadlineApril 1, 2011
Start of manual evaluation periodApril 1, 2011
End of manual evaluationMay 31, 2011
Paper submission deadlineMay 19, 2011
Notification of acceptanceJune 17, 2011
Camera-ready deadlineJuly 1, 2011
Papers available onlineJuly 23, 2011
Workshop in Edinburgh following EMNLPJuly 30-31, 2011

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Subscribe to to the announcement list for WMT11 by entering your e-mail address below. This list will be used to announce when the test sets are released, to indicate any corrections to the training sets, and to amend the deadlines as needed.
Email:

You can read past announcements on the Google Groups page for WMT11. These also include an archive of annoucements from WMT10. Google Groups

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

CONTACT

For questions, comments, etc. please send email to pkoehn@inf.ed.ac.uk.

supported by the EuroMatrixPlus project
P7-IST-231720-STP
funded by the European Commission
under Framework Programme 7