Seven PhD theses defended in 2018 were received as candidates for the 2018 edition of the Anthony C Clarke Award – EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all seven were eligible. A panel of 29 reviewers was recruited to examine and score the theses, considering how challenging the problem tackled in each thesis was, how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and what the strength of its impact in terms of scientific publications was. Two EAMT Executive Committee members (Mikel L. Forcada and Lucia Specia) have also reviewed the theses and provided an additional review.

The year of 2018 was again a very good year for PhD theses in machine translation. The scores of all theses were very high, although one thesis was scored considerably higher than the others. A panel of two EAMT Executive Committee members (Mikel L. Forcada and Carolina Scarton) verified that all reviews were consistent and that we had a clear winner.

The panel has then decided to grant the 2018 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award to Longyue Wang’s thesis “Discourse-Aware Neural Machine Translation” (Dublin City University – now at Tencent AI Lab), supervised by Andy Way and Qun Liu (now at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab).

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Wang has been invited to present a summary of his thesis at the 17th Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit 2019: https://www.mtsummit2019.com) which will take place in Dublin (Ireland), August 19-23, 2019. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200.

Mikel L. Forcada

EAMT President

Carolina Scarton

EAMT Secretary