Four PhD theses defended in 2025 were received as candidates for this year’s edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award, all of which were eligible. Four external reviewers were recruited to examine and score the theses alongside seven EAMT executive committee members. Each thesis was evaluated according to predefined criteria: how challenging the topic was, how relevant the results were to the MT field and the strength of its impact in terms of scientific publications. As in previous years, 2025 was another strong year for PhD theses in machine translation, and the decision was incredibly tricky this year, with very little between the submissions.

All PhD theses were of very good quality, focused on interesting topics and were all highly appreciated by reviewers. A panel of two EAMT Executive Committee members (Barry Haddow and Rachel Bawden) 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 2025 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award is Gabriele Sarti (PhD carried out at the University of Groningen, currently at Northeastern University), “From Insight to Impact: Actionable Interpretability for Neural Machine Translation”, supervised by Arianna Bisazza, Malvina Nissim and Grzegorz Chrupała.

In addition, the committee judged that the thesis of David Stap (PhD carried out at the University of Amsterdam, currently at NXAI) entitled “Analyzing and Improving Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer for Machine Translation”, supervised by Christof Monz and Vlad Niculae was “highly commended”.

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with an inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Sarti will present a summary of their thesis at the EAMT 2026 in Tilburg, the Netherlands, receive complimentary membership to the EAMT in 2027 and will receive a travel bursary of €200.

Chairs of the Best Thesis Award 2025

Rachel Bawden, Inria, Paris, France

Barry Haddow, Aveni 

Programme committee

Lexi Birch, University of Edinburgh

Patrick Cadwell, Dublin City University

Miquel Esplà Gomis, Universidad de Alicante 

Mikel Forcada, Prompsit

Lieve Macken, Ghent University  

André Martins, TransPerfect and Instituto Superior Técnico

Mary Nurminen, Tampere University

Carolina Scarton, University of Sheffield

Rico Sennrich, University of Zurich

Dimitar Shterionov, Tilburg University

Marcely Zanon Boito, Naver Labs