Six PhD theses defended in 2021 were received as candidates for the 2021 edition of the Anthony C Clarke Award for the EAMT Best Thesis, and all six were eligible. 12 reviewers and five EAMT Executive Committee members were recruited to examine and score the theses, considering how challenging the problem tackled in each thesis was, how relevant the results were for machine translation as a field, and what the strength of its impact in terms of scientific publications was. Two EAMT Executive Committee members (Helena Moniz – EAMT President – and Carolina Scarton – EAMT Secretary) formed a panel to analyse all theses and discuss all reviews.

The year of 2021 was again a very good year for PhD theses in machine translation. The scores of the best theses were very close, which made it very hard to select a winner. After discussing all the theses and their reviews, the panel proposed a winner that was approved by the EAMT executive committee. 

We are pleased to announce that the awardee of the 2021 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis is Danielle Saunders’ thesis “Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation” (University of Cambridge, UK – now at RWS Language Weaver), supervised by Professor Bill Byrne.

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Saunders will present a summary of their thesis at the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2022: https://eamt2022.com) which will take place from June 1st to 3rd in Ghent, Belgium. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200.

Helena Moniz, EAMT President
Carolina Scarton, EAMT Secretary

Program committee

José G. C. de Souza, Unbabel
Vera Cabarrão, Unbabel / INESC-ID
Sheila Castilho, DCU
Mattia Antonino Di Gangi, AppTek
Mirella De Sisto, Tilburg University
Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Universitat d’Alacant
Federico Gaspari, DCU
Barry Haddow, University of Edinburgh
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University
Maja Popovic, DCU
Lieve Macken, Ghent University
André Martins, Unbabel
Celia Rico, Spain
Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Universitat d’Alacant
Marina Sánchez-Torrón, Unbabel
Arda Tezcan, Ghent University
Marco Turchi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler