Nine PhD theses defended in 2023 were received as candidates for the 2022 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all nine were eligible. 20 reviewers 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 also analysed all theses. It became very clear that 2023 was another very good year for PhD theses in machine translation. 

All theses had merit, all candidates had strong CVs and, therefore, it was very difficult to select a winner.

A panel of two EAMT Executive Committee members (Barry Haddow and Helena Moniz) was assembled to process the reviews and select a winner that was later ratified by the EAMT executive committee.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2023 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award is Marco Gaido’s’ thesis “Direct Speech Translation Toward High-Quality, Inclusive, and Augmented Systems” (FBK, Italy), supervised by Dr Marco Turchi and Dr.  Matteo Negri.

In addition, the committee judged  that the following theses, were “highly commended”:

• Jannis Vamvas: “Model-based Evaluation of Multilinguality” (University of Zurich, Switzerland), supervised by Rico Sennrich and Lena A. Jäger

• Javier Iranzo-Sánchez: “Streaming Neural Speech Translation” ( UPV, Spain), supervised by Jorge Civera and Alfons Juan 

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Gaido will present a summary of their thesis at the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2024: https://eamt2024.sheffield.ac.uk/) which will take place from June 24th to 27th in Sheffield, UK.  In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200.

Barry Haddow, chair, EAMT BTA award 2023

Helena Moniz, EAMT president

Program committee 

Daniel Beck,   Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Bram Vanroy,   KU Leuven

Philipp Koehn,  Johns Hopkins University

Danielle Saunders,  DeepL

Alexandra Birch,  University of Edinburgh

Felix Stahlberg,  Google

Bill Byrne,   Amazon

Sheila Castilho,  Dublin City University

John E. Ortega,     Northeastern University

Anna Currey,  Amazon

Rachel Bawden,  Inria

Xingyi Song,  University of Sheffield

Miquel Esplà-Gomis,  Universidad de Alicante

Marcello Federico,    Amazon

Antonio Toral, University of Groningen

Diptesh Kanojia,     University of Surrey

José G. C. de Souza,  Unbabel

Mikel L. Forcada,     Universidad de Alicante

Liane Guillou,     University of Edinburgh

Vera Cabarrão,  Unbabel