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.
We are pleased to announce the first call for papers for MT Summit XVII: the 17th Machine Translation Summit, which will take place in the Helix Theatre at Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland, from 19-23 August 2019.
The conference is organised by the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT: http://eamt.org), and overall chair of the conference is Andy Way (ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland), supported by the following track chairs:
Research track co-chairs: Barry Haddow & Rico Sennrich (University of Edinburgh, UK)
User track: John Tinsley (Iconic Translation Machines, Ireland)
Translator track: Celia Rico (Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain)
We are keen to solicit novel, original contributions in each of these three areas that will advance the field of MT. In addition to regular contributions, we are also seeking extended abstracts for the User and Translator tracks, which can report work-in-progress, or novel applications of technology to real application scenarios. Submissions must be unpublished, and written in English.
We seek submissions across the entire spectrum of MT-related research activity. Traditionally, the MT Summit is the place where researchers, developers, users and vendors all get together under one roof to discuss the issues of the day. Accordingly, we are especially interested in papers which demonstrate a clear interaction between researchers and practitioners who are applying MT technology to their specific use-cases. Thus, we particularly encourage submissions that are oriented towards building robust and practical systems, including systems where there is a user-in-the-loop, adaptation to particular domains or usage scenarios, and utilization of available resources in real production scenarios. There is little doubt that the quality of MT systems has improved significantly in recent years. In line with general overhyping of AI, we have seen some extraordinary claims about the capability of MT, so much so that translators have had cause to worry about the impact of this improved technology on their profession. In response, and as a clear attempt to bring translators and system developers closer together, the 2019 MT Summit will also feature a Translators track, where we get to hear what the issues of the day are for perhaps the largest set of users of the technology.
As well as the three main tracks, the conference will also feature invited talks, panel discussions, a technology showcase, tutorials and workshops, presentation of the 2019 EAMT Best Thesis Award, and presentation of the IAMT 2019 Award of Honour. More information about each of these will follow in due course.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: Friday, 12th April 2019
Notification of acceptance: Friday, 17th May 2019
Final camera-ready versions: Friday, 21st June 2019
Notification comes a full three months before the conference takes place, which should be plenty of time for conference attendees who need visas.
Research Track
Full papers must not exceed 10 (ten) pages plus unlimited pages for references, and must be formatted according to the MT Summit 2019 style guide (PDF version / LaTeX version / MS Word version). These papers will be rigorously reviewed for novelty and impact, and published in the conference proceedings. They will be presented at the conference as either oral presentations or as posters.
Translator Track
For the translator track, we will be accepting submissions of short papers of no more than 6 (six) pages, plus unlimited pages for references, reporting professional translators’ experiences with MT on issues such as the following:
Productivity measurements and their impact on MT adoption
Impact of MT on translators& work (pricing issues, post-editing tasks assignment and their acceptance among translators)
Ethical and confidentiality issues when using MT
Psycho-social aspects of MT adoption (translator attitudes and (pre-)conceptions)
Types of MT errors which influence quality acceptance/rejection
Discussions on the role of professional translators in MT development
The business side of MT
Integration of MT in large-scale production processes
The importance of translator feedback in MT
The role of the freelance translator in MT
The eruption of neural MT and its effect on the translation profession
User Track
For the user and translator tracks, we will be accepting submissions of short papers of no more than 6 (six) pages, plus unlimited pages for references, which report analyses of the effects of applying research technology to practical application scenarios, or descriptions of demonstrations appearing at the technology showcase.
Submissions to the user track are particularly encouraged from industry. Submissions from academic institutions should endeavour to include a user partner or collaborator as co-author where possible.
All Tracks
Submitted papers must be in PDF. To allow for blind reviewing, please do not include author names and affiliations within the paper, and avoid obvious self-references. Papers must be submitted to the Easy Chair/START system (to be determined shortly).
Topics of interest, across all tracks, include but are not limited to:
Advances in various MT paradigms: data-driven, rule-based, and hybrid MT
MT applications and embedding: translation/localization aids, speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, OCR, MT for communication (chats, blogs, social networks), multilingual applications, etc.
Technologies for MT deployment: quality estimation and domain adaptation
MT in special settings: low resources, massive resources, high volume, low computing resources, crisis scenarios, etc.
Human factors in MT and user interfaces for MT
Ethical issues in translation
Linguistic resources for MT: dictionaries, terminology banks, corpora
MT evaluation techniques and evaluation results
Empirical studies on translation data
Multiple Submissions
Full and short papers that will appear in the MT Summit proceedings must represent new work that has not been previously published. Pre-prints posted online on servers such as arXiv do not count as published papers, and thus are allowed to be submitted. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time in the EasyChair/START submission form. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at MT Summit must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings.
Authors submitting more than one paper to MT Summit must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results. Track chairs have the right to redirect papers to other tracks if deemed appropriate.
EAMT best thesis award