The 1st Workshop on Asian Translation

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Participation
Abbreviated Title: 
WAT2014
Location: 
Hongo Campus, The University of Tokyo
Saturday, 4 October 2014
Country: 
Japan
City: 
Tokyo
Contact: 
Toshiaki Nakazawa
Hideya Mino
Isao Goto
Eiichiro Sumita
Sadao Kurohashi
Submission Deadline: 
Sunday, 31 August 2014

WAT 2014
(The 1st Workshop on Asian Translation)
http://lotus.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/WAT/
October 4, 2014, Tokyo, Japan

WAT is a new open evaluation campaign focusing on Asian languages. We
would like to invite a broad range of participants and conduct various
forms of machine translation experiments and evaluation. Collecting
and sharing our knowledge will allow us to understand the essence of
machine translation and the problems to be solved. We are working
toward the practical use of machine translation among all Asian
countries.

For the 1st WAT, we chose "scientific papers" as the targeted domain,
and selected the languages Japanese, Chinese and English.

TASK
----

The task is to improve the text translation quality for scientific
papers. Participants choose any of the subtasks in which they would
like to participate and translate the test data using their machine
translation systems. The WAT organizers will evaluate the results
submitted using automatic evaluation and human evaluation. We will
also provide a baseline machine translation.

Subtasks:
Japanese --> English
English --> Japanese
Japanese --> Chinese
Chinese --> Japanese

Dataset:
WAT uses ASPEC (Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus) for the dataset
including training, development, development test and test
data. Participants must get a copy of ASPEC by themselves from
http://lotus.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ASPEC/

Automatic evaluation:
We prepare an automatic evaluation server. It is for free for
everyone, but you need to create an account for evaluation. Just
showing the list of evaluation results does not require an account.

Registration: http://lotus.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/WAT/registration/index.html
Eval. result: http://lotus.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/WAT/evaluation/index.html

Human evaluation:
Human evaluation will be carried out using crowdsourcing. Participants
can submit translation results a maximum of
twice. Sentence-by-sentence pair-wise evaluation compared to the
baseline system will be carried out. The crowdsourcing workers will be
asked to judge which translation is better than the other in view of
adequacy and fluency. All systems will be ranked by the percentage of
translations judged to improve upon the baseline system.

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

Crowdsourcing evaluation due August 31, 2014
System description draft paper due September 14, 2014
Review feedback September 21, 2014
Camera-ready paper due September 28, 2014
WAT 2014 October 4, 2014

PAPER
-----

Participants who submit results for human evaluation should submit
description papers of their translation systems and evaluation
results.

We strongly prefer that papers include a section entitled "Issues for
Context-aware Machine Translation" which discusses the importance and
usefulness of context.

INVITED TALK
------------

We are planning to have an invited talk as follows:

Speaker: Dr. Ir. Hammam Riza, Director,
Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT)
Title: Leveraging ASEAN economic communities 2015 through Language Translation

Please visit the homepage of WAT for the biography of the speaker.

ORGANIZERS
----------

Toshiaki Nakazawa (Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST))
Hideya Mino (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT))
Isao Goto (Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK))
Eiichiro Sumita (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT))
Sadao Kurohashi (Kyoto University)

CONTACT
-------

wat [at] nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp