Nine PhD theses defended in 2022 were received as candidates for the 2022 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all nine were eligible. 28 reviewers and six 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 also analysed all theses. It became very clear that 2022 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 (Carolina Scarton 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 awardee of the 2022 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis is Biao Zhang’s thesis “Towards Efficient Universal Neural Machine Translation” (University of Edinburgh, UK), supervised by Dr Rico Sennrich and Dr Ivan Titov.

The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Zhang will present a summary of their thesis at the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2023: https://events.tuni.fi/eamt23/) which will take place from June 12th to 15th in Tampere, Finland. 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 

Rachel Bawden, Inria

Daniel Beck, The University of Melbourne

William Byrne, University of Cambridge

José G. C. de Souza, Unbabel

Vera Cabarrão, Unbabel / INESC-ID

Sheila Castilho, Dublin City University

Anna Currey, Amazon Web Services

Mattia Antonino Di Gangi, AppTek

Maha Elbayad, LIG/ Inria

Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Universitat d’Alacant

Marcello Federico, Amazon AI

Mikel Forcada, DLSI – Universitat d’Alacant

Barry Haddow, The University of Edinburgh

Diptesh Kanojia, IIT Bombay

Philipp Koehn, Johns Hopkins University

Helena Moniz, INESC/FLUL

Mary Nurminen, Tampere University

Constantin Orasan, University of Surrey

John E. Ortega, Northeastern University

Santanu Pal, Wipro Limited

Pavel Pecina, Charles University

Maja Popovic, ADAPT Centre @ DCU

Celia Rico, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Universitat d’Alacant

Marina Sánchez-Torrón, Unbabel

Danielle Saunders, University of Cambridge

Dimitar Shterionov, Tilburg University

Felix Stahlberg, Google Research

Arda Tezcan, Ghent University

Antonio Toral, University of Groningen

Ualsher Tukeyev, al-Farabi Kazakh National University

Bram Vanroy, KU Leuven; Ghent University

Longyue Wang, Tencent AI Lab