Four PhD theses defended in 2020 were received as candidates for the 2020 edition of the Anthony C Clarke Award – EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all four were eligible. Eight 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.
The scores of the best theses were extremely close, which made it very hard to select a single winner. A panel of seven EAMT Executive Committee members (Khalil Sima’an, Barry Haddow, Celia Rico, Lieve Macken, Carolina Scarton, Helena Moniz and Mikel L. Forcada) was assembled to process and discuss the reviews.
After a lot of consideration, the panel has decided to have two ex aequo winners for the 2020 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award:
Maha Elbayad: Rethinking the Design of Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Efficient Machine Translation (University Grenoble Alpes, France) — supervised by Laurent Besacier and Jakob Verbeek
Mattia Antonino Di Gangi: Neural Speech Translation: From Neural Machine Translation to Direct Speech Translation (University of Trento, Italy) — supervised by Marcello Federico, Marco Turchi and Matteo Negri
The awardees will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Elbayad and Dr. Di Gangi have been invited to present a summary of their theses at the 23nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2022: https://eamt2022.com) which will take place in June, 1-3 2021 .
Helena Moniz, EAMT President Carolina Scarton, EAMT Secretary
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT, http://www.eamt.org) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including translators, users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.
The EAMT invites entries for its ninth EAMT Best Thesis Award for a PhD or equivalent thesis on a topic related to machine translation.
have completed a PhD (or equivalent) thesis on a relevant topic in a European, Northern African or Middle Eastern institution within calendar year 2020,
have not previously won another international award for that thesis, and,
are members of the EAMT at the time of submission,
are invited to submit their theses to the EAMT for consideration.
Panel
The submissions will be judged by a panel of experts who will be specifically appointed, based on the EAMT 2020 program committee, and which will be ratified by the Executive Board of the EAMT.
Selection criteria
Each thesis will be judged according to how challenging the problem was, to how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and to the strength of their impact in terms of scientific publications.
Scope
The scope of the thesis does not need to be confined to a technical area, and applications are also invited from students who carried out their research into commercial and management aspects of machine translation.
Possible areas of research include:
development of machine translation or advanced computer-assisted translation: methods, software or resources
machine translation for less-resourced languages
the use of these systems in professional environments (freelance translators, translation agencies, localisation, etc.)
the increasing impact of machine translation on non-professional Internet users and its impact in communications, social networking, etc.
spoken language translation
the integration of machine translation and translation memory systems
the integration of machine translation software in larger IT applications
the evaluation of machine translation systems in real tasks such as those above
the cross-fertilisation between machine translation and other language technologies
Prize
The winner will be announced on the 5th of September 2021 and will receive a prize of €500, together with an inscribed certificate. The recipient of the award will be required to briefly present their research at EAMT 2022. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200 to enable the recipient of the award to attend the said conference. The prize includes complimentary membership in the EAMT for 2021 and 2022.
a 2-page summary of your thesis in English, containing:
your full contact details,
the name and contact details of your supervisor(s),
a copy of your CV in English (at most one page, plus a complete list of publications directly related to the thesis)
an electronic copy of your thesis
optionally, an appendix with any other relevant information on the thesis
By submitting their work, authors
agree that, in case they are granted the award, any subsequently published version of the thesis should carry the citation “The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2020 EAMT Best Thesis” and
acknowledge the right of the EAMT to publicize the granting of the award.
For this year Best Thesis Award we are requiring candidates to be an individual EAMT member at the time of submission. For EAMT memberships, please visit: http://www.eamt.org/membership.php.
The closing date for submissions will be the same as the deadline for EAMT 2021 research papers (to be announced).
Closing date
Submission deadline: June 30, 2021, 23:59 CEST.
Award notification: September 5, 2021.
[1] Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. [2] Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
Ten PhD theses defended in 2019 were received as candidates for the 2019 edition of the Anthony C Clarke Award – EAMT Best Thesis Award, and all ten were eligible. 36 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.
The panel has then decided to grant the 2019 edition of the EAMT Best Thesis Award to Felix Stahlberg’s thesis “The Roles of Language Models and Hierarchical Models in Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Prediction” (University of Cambridge — now at Google), supervised by Bill Byrne and with Phil Woodland as advisor.
The awardee will receive a prize of €500, together with a suitably-inscribed certificate. In addition, Dr. Stahlberg has been invited to present a summary of his thesis at the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2020: https://eamt2020.inesc-id.pt) which will take place in November (dates to be confirmed).
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT, http://www.eamt.org) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.
The EAMT invites entries for eighth EAMT Best Thesis Award for a PhD or equivalent thesis on a topic related to machine translation.
Eligibility
Researchers who
have completed a PhD (or equivalent) thesis on a relevant topic in a European, Northern African[1] or Middle Eastern[2] institution within calendar year 2019 and
have not previously won another international award for that thesis,
Panel
The submissions will be judged by a panel of experts who will be specifically appointed as part of the EAMT 2020 programme committee and which will be ratified by the Executive Board of the EAMT.
Selection criteria
Each thesis will be judged according to how challenging the problem was, to how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and to the strength of their impact in terms of scientific publications.
Scope
The scope of the thesis need not be confined to a technical area, and applications are also invited from students who carried out their research into commercial and management aspects of machine translation.
Possible areas of research include:
development of machine translation or advanced computer-assisted translation: methods, software or resources
machine translation for less-resourced languages
the use of these systems in professional environments (freelance translators, translation agencies, localisation, etc.)
the increasing impact of machine translation on non-professional Internet users and its impact in communications, social networking, etc.
spoken language translation
the integration of machine translation and translation memory systems
the integration of machine translation software in larger IT applications
the evaluation of machine translation systems in real tasks such as those above
the cross-fertilisation between machine translation and other language technologies
Prize
The winner will be announced at the same time as accepted papers for the EAMT 2020: the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Lisbon, Portugal, dates to be confirmed), and will receive a prize of €500, together with an inscribed certificate. The recipient of the award will be required to briefly present their research at EAMT 2020. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200 to enable the recipient of the award to attend the said conference. The prize includes complimentary membership in the EAMT for 2020 and 2021.
a 2-page summary of your thesis in English, containing:
your full contact details,
the name and contact details of your supervisor(s),
a copy of your CV in English (at most one page, plus a complete list of publications directly related to the thesis)
an electronic copy of your thesis
optionally, an appendix with any other relevant information on the thesis
By submitting their work, authors
agree that, in case they are granted the award, any subsequently published version of the thesis should carry the citation “The Anthony C. Clarke Award for the 2019 EAMT Best Thesis” and
acknowledge the right of the EAMT to publicize the granting of the award.
Closing date
The closing date for submissions will be the same as the deadline for EAMT 2020 research papers: TBA.
[1] Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. [2] Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
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.
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT, http://www.eamt.org) is an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.
The EAMT invites entries for the Anthony C Clarke award: the fifth EAMT Best Thesis Award, for a PhD or equivalent thesis on a topic related to machine translation.
Eligibility
Researchers who
have completed a PhD (or equivalent) thesis on a relevant topic in a European, Northern African[1] or Middle Eastern[2] institution within calendar year 2018 and
have not previously won another international award for that thesis,
Panel
The submissions will be judged by a panel of experts who will be specifically appointed as part of the EAMT 2018 programme committee and which will be ratified by the Executive Board of the EAMT.
Selection criteria
Each thesis will be judged according to how challenging the problem was, to how relevant the results are for machine translation as a field, and to the strength of their impact in terms of scientific publications.
Scope
The scope of the thesis need not be confined to a technical area, and applications are also invited from students who carried out their research into commercial and management aspects of machine translation.
Possible areas of research include:
development of machine translation or advanced computer-assisted translation: methods, software or resources
machine translation for less-resourced languages
the use of these systems in professional environments (freelance translators, translation agencies, localisation, etc.)
the increasing impact of machine translation on non-professional Internet users and its impact in communications, social networking, etc.
spoken language translation
the integration of machine translation and translation memory systems
the integration of machine translation software in larger IT applications
the evaluation of machine translation systems in real tasks such as those above
the cross-fertilisation between machine translation and other language technologies
Prize
The winner will be announced at the same time as accepted papers for the MT Summit XVII: the 17th Machine Translation Summit (Dublin, Ireland, Aug 19–23, 2019), and will receive a prize of €500, together with an inscribed certificate. The recipient of the award will be required to briefly present their research at MT Summit XVII. In order to facilitate this, the EAMT will waive the winner’s registration costs, and will make available a travel bursary of €200 to enable the recipient of the award to attend the said conference. The prize includes complimentary membership in the EAMT for 2019 and 2020.
a 2-page summary of your thesis in English, containing:
your full contact details,
the name and contact details of your supervisor(s),
a copy of your CV in English (at most one page, plus a complete list of publications directly related to the thesis)
submission form explaining how your thesis fulfills the selection criteria
an electronic copy of your thesis
optionally, an appendix with any other relevant information on the thesis
By submitting their work, authors
agree that, in case they are granted the award, any subsequently published version of the thesis should carry the citation “Winner of the 2018 European Association for Machine Translation Best Thesis Award” and
acknowledge the right of the EAMT to publicize the granting of the award.
Closing date
The closing date for submissions will be the same as the deadline for research papers at MT Summit XVII: April 12th, 2019.
[1] Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. [2] Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
EAMT best thesis award