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This conference builds on a series of annual workshops and conferences on statistical machine translation, going back to 2006:

IMPORTANT DATES

Release of training data for shared tasksJanuary/February, 2018
Evaluation periods for shared tasksMay/June, 2018
Paper submission deadlineJuly 27th, 2018
Paper notificationAugust 18th, 2018
Camera-ready version dueAugust 31st, 2018
Conference in BrusselsOctober 31 - November 1, 2018

OVERVIEW

This year's conference will feature the following shared tasks:

In addition to the shared tasks, the conference 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.

REGISTRATION AND VISA INFORMATION

These will both be handled by EMNLP 2018.

NEWS TRANSLATION TASK

This shared task will examine translation between the following language pairs:

NB: The Kazakh task is postponed (probably until WMT19)

The text for all the test sets will be drawn from news articles. Participants may submit translations for any or all of the language directions. In addition to the common test sets the conference organizers will provide optional training resources.

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. For each team, this will be about 8 hours per language pair submitted.

For 2018 we highlight the following innovations in the news task:

Language pairs
This year we introduce Estonian to/from English and Kazakh to/from English as additional language pairs.
NEW: Multilinguality
We encourage participants to exploit multilingual training resources. In other words, to use other languages and third languages to improve translation, for example, participants could exploit the similarity of Finnish and Estonian, or make use of the Russian-Kazakh data set that we will release.
NEW: Unsupervised learning
We also encourage the more adventurous participants to avoid the parallel corpora and use only monolingual corpora only to train the translation models. Use cross-lingual embeddings, or see the news translation task for more ideas.
NEW: Deep analysis through additional test sets
At no additional burden on the News Translation Task participants (aside from having to translate much larger input data), we will collectively provide a deeper analysis of various qualities of the translations.
For more information or if you would like to join this activity, see the WMT18 Addtitional Test Suites Google doc.

BIOMEDICAL TRANSLATION TASK

In this third edition of this task, we will evaluate systems for the translation of biomedical documents for the following languages pairs:

Parallel corpora will be available for all language pairs but also monoligual corpora for some languages. Evaluation will be carried out both automatically and manually.

AUTOMATIC POST-EDITING TASK

This shared task will examine automatic methods for correcting errors produced by machine translation (MT) systems. Automatic Post-editing (APE) aims at improving MT output in black box scenarios, in which the MT system is used "as is" and cannot be modified. From the application point of view APE components would make it possible to:

In this fourth edition of the task, the evaluation will focus on two subtasks:

METRICS TASK

See task page

QUALITY ESTIMATION TASK

See task page

MULTIMODAL TRANSLATION TASK

See task page

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submissions will consist of regular full papers of 6-10 pages, plus additional pages for references, formatted following the EMNLP 2018 guidelines. Supplementary material can be added to research papers. In addition, shared task participants will be invited to submit short papers (suggested length: 4-6 pages, plus references) describing their systems or their evaluation metrics. Both submission and review processes will be handled electronically. Note that regular papers must be anonymized, while system descriptions do not need to be.

Research papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted and published at WMT 2018. We will not accept for publication papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that have been or will be published elsewhere. It is acceptable to submit work that has been made available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) without citing it. This double submission policy only applies to research papers, so system papers can have significant overlap with other published work, if it is relevant to the system description.

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

POSTER FORMAT

The poster boards will be 1m wide and 2.50m tall (about 3.3 feet wide and 8.2 feet high). These boards will comfortably fit an A0 poster in portrait mode.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Subscribe to to the announcement list for WMT 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 WMT. These also include an archive of announcements from earlier workshops. Google Groups

INVITED TALK

Alexandra Birch (University of Edinburgh)
Translation and the Media

ORGANIZERS

Ondřej Bojar (Charles University in Prague)
Rajen Chatterjee (FBK)
Christian Federmann (MSR)
Yvette Graham (DCU)
Barry Haddow (University of Edinburgh)
Matthias Huck (LMU Munich)
Antonio Jimeno Yepes (IBM Research Australia)
Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh / Johns Hopkins University)
Christof Monz (University of Amsterdam)
Matteo Negri (FBK)
Aurélie Névéol (LIMSI, CNRS)
Mariana Neves (German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment)
Matt Post (Johns Hopkins University)
Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield)
Marco Turchi (FBK)
Karin Verspoor (University of Melbourne)
Mark Fishel (University of Tartu)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Antonios Anastasopoulos (University of Notre Dame)
Tim Anderson (Air Force Research Laboratory)
Yuki Arase (Osaka University)
Mihael Arcan (INSIGHT, NUI Galway)
Duygu Ataman (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, University of Trento)
Eleftherios Avramidis (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI))
Amittai Axelrod (Amazon)
Parnia Bahar (RWTH Aachen University)
Ankur Bapna (Google)
Petra Barancikova (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics)
Joost Bastings (University of Amsterdam)
Meriem Beloucif (University of Copenhagen)
Graeme Blackwood (IBM Research AI)
Frédéric Blain (University of Sheffield)
Chris Brockett (Microsoft Research)
Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge)
Ozan Caglayan (LIUM, Le Mans University)
Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland)
Francisco Casacuberta (Universitat Politècnica de València)
Sheila Castilho (Dublin City University)
Daniel Cer (Google Research)
Rajen Chatterjee (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Boxing Chen (Alibaba)
Colin Cherry (Google)
Mara Chinea-Rios (Universitat Politècnica de València)
Vishal Chowdhary (MSR)
Chenhui Chu (Osaka University)
Ann Clifton (Amazon)
Marta R. Costa-jussà (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
Josep Crego (SYSTRAN)
James Cross (Facebook)
Raj Dabre (NICT)
Praveen Dakwale (University of Amsterdam)
Steve DeNeefe (SDL Research)
Michael Denkowski (Amazon.com, Inc.)
Mattia Antonino Di Gangi (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Miguel Domingo (PRHLT Center)
Kevin Duh (Johns Hopkins University)
Marc Dymetman (Naver Labs Europe)
Hiroshi Echizen’ya (Hokkai-Gakuen University)
Sergey Edunov (Faceook AI Research)
Micha Elsner (The Ohio State University)
Marcello Federico (FBK)
Yang Feng (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Andrew Finch (Apple Inc.)
Orhan Firat (Google AI)
Mark Fishel (University of Tartu)
Mikel L. Forcada (Universitat d’Alacant)
George Foster (Google)
Atsushi Fujita (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Juri Ganitkevitch (Johns Hopkins University)
Mercedes García-Martínez (Pangeanic)
Ekaterina Garmash (KLM Royal Dutch Airlines)
Niyu Ge (IBM Research)
Ulrich Germann (University of Edinburgh)
Jesús González-Rubio (WebInterpret)
Isao Goto (NHK)
Cyril Goutte (National Research Council Canada)
Roman Grundkiewicz (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh)
Mandy Guo (Google)
Thanh-Le Ha (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Nizar Habash (New York University Abu Dhabi)
Gholamreza Haffari (Monash University)
Viktor Hangya (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Greg Hanneman (Amazon)
Christian Hardmeier (Uppsala universitet)
Eva Hasler (SDL Research)
Yifan He (Alibaba Inc.)
John Henderson (MITRE)
Felix Hieber (Amazon Research)
Hieu Hoang (University of Edinburgh)
Vu Cong Duy Hoang (The University of Melbourne)
Ke Hu (ADAPT Research Centre, SALIS, Dublin City University)
Gonzalo Iglesias (SDL)
Kenji Imamura (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Aizhan Imankulova (Tokyo Metropolitan University)
Julia Ive (University of Sheffield)
Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt (Microsoft)
Shahram Khadivi (eBay)
Huda Khayrallah (The Johns Hopkins University)
Yunsu Kim (RWTH Aachen University)
Rebecca Knowles (Johns Hopkins University)
Julia Kreutzer (Department of Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University)
Roland Kuhn (National Research Council of Canada)
Shankar Kumar (Google)
Anoop Kunchukuttan (IIT Bombay)
Surafel Melaku Lakew (University of Trento and Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski (Universität des Saarlandes)
Alon Lavie (Carnegie Mellon University)
Gregor Leusch (eBay)
William Lewis (Microsoft Research)
Qun Liu (Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab)
Samuel Läubli (University of Zurich)
Gideon Maillette de Buy Wenniger (ADAPT Centre - Dublin City University)
Andreas Maletti (Universität Leipzig)
Saab Mansour (Apple)
Krzysztof Marasek (Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology)
André F. T. Martins (Unbabel, Instituto de Telecomunicacoes)
Sameen Maruf (Monash University)
Rebecca Marvin (Johns Hopkins University)
Arne Mauser (Google, Inc)
Arya D. McCarthy (Johns Hopkins University)
Nikita Mediankin (Charles University in Prague)
Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone (The University of Edinburgh)
Paul Michel (Carnegie Mellon University)
Kenton Murray (University of Notre Dame)
Tomáš Musil (Charles University in Prague)
Mathias Müller (University of Zurich)
Masaaki Nagata (+81-774-93-5235)
Toshiaki Nakazawa (Japan Science and Technology Agency)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU)
Graham Neubig (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jan Niehues (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Xing Niu (University of Maryland)
Tsuyoshi Okita (Kyushuu institute of technology university)
Daniel Ortiz-Martínez (Technical University of Valencia)
Myle Ott (Facebook AI Research)
Carla Parra Escartín (ADAPT Centre / Dublin City University)
Pavel Pecina (Charles University)
Stephan Peitz (Apple)
Sergio Penkale (Lingo24)
Mārcis Pinnis (Tilde)
Martin Popel (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, UFAL)
Maja Popović (ADAPT Centre @ DCU)
Chris Quirk (Microsoft Research)
Preethi Raghavan (IBM Research TJ Watson)
Matīss Rikters (Tilde)
Annette Rios (Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich)
Devendra Sachan (CMU / Petuum Inc.)
Elizabeth Salesky (Carnegie Mellon University)
Hassan Sawaf (Amazon AWS)
Carolina Scarton (University of Sheffield)
Julian Schamper (RWTH Aachen University)
Helmut Schmid (CIS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität)
Jean Senellart (SYSTRAN)
Rico Sennrich (University of Edinburgh)
Patrick Simianer (Lilt Inc.)
Linfeng Song (University of Rochester)
Felix Stahlberg (University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering)
Dario Stojanovski (LMU Munich)
Brian Strope (Google)
Sara Stymne (Uppsala University)
Katsuhito Sudoh (Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST))
Felipe Sánchez-Martínez (Universitat d’Alacant)
Aleš Tamchyna (Charles University in Prague, UFAL MFF)
Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki)
Ke Tran (University of Amsterdam)
Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University)
Marco Turchi (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Ferhan Ture (Comcast Applied AI Research)
Nicola Ueffing (eBay)
Masao Utiyama (NICT)
Eva Vanmassenhove (DCU)
Dušan Variš (Charles University, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics)
David Vilar (Amazon Research)
Martin Volk (University of Zurich)
Ekaterina Vylomova (PhD Student, University of Melbourne)
Wei Wang (Google Research)
Weiyue Wang (RWTH Aachen University)
Taro Watanabe (Google)
Marion Weller-Di Marco (University of Amsterdam)
Philip Williams (University of Edinburgh)
Hua Wu (Baidu)
Joern Wuebker (Lilt, Inc.)
Hainan Xu (Johns Hopkins University)
Yinfei Yang (Google)
François Yvon (LIMSI/CNRS)
Dakun Zhang (SYSTRAN)

ANTI-HARASSMENT POLICY

WMT follows the ACL's anti-harassment policy

CONTACT

For general questions, comments, etc. please send email to bhaddow@inf.ed.ac.uk.
For task-specific questions, please contact the relevant organisers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This conference has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements 645452 (QT21) and 645357 (Cracker).
We thank Yandex for their donation of data for the Russian-English and Turkish-English news tasks, as well as University of Helsinki and University of Tartu for Finnish-English and Estonian-English news tasks.