In this work, we present the work that has been carried on in the MT4All CEF project and the resources that it has generated by leveraging recent research carried out in the field of unsupervised learning. In the course of the project 18 monolingual corpora for specific domains and languages have been collected, and 12 bilingual dictionaries and translation models have been generated. As part of the research, the unsupervised MT methodology based only on monolingual corpora (Artetxe et al., 2017) has been tested on a variety of languages and domains. Results show that in specialised domains, when there is enough monolingual in-domain data, unsupervised results are comparable to those of general domain supervised translation, and that, at any rate, unsupervised techniques can be used to boost results whenever very little data is available.

This paper describes the PARSEME Shared Task 1.1 on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions. We present the annotation methodology, focusing on changes from last year’s shared task. Novel aspects include enhanced annotation guidelines, additional annotated data for most languages, corpora for some new languages, and new evaluation settings. Corpora were created for 20 languages, which are also briefly discussed. We report organizational principles behind the shared task and the evaluation metrics employed for ranking. The 17 participating systems, their methods and obtained results are also presented and analysed.

Meaningful conclusions about the relative performance of NLP systems are only possible if the gold standard employed in a given evaluation is both valid and reliable. In this paper, we explore the validity of human annotations currently employed in the evaluation of document-level quality estimation for machine translation (MT). We demonstrate the degree to which MT system rankings are dependent on weights employed in the construction of the gold standard, before proposing direct human assessment as a valid alternative. Experiments show direct assessment (DA) scores for documents to be highly reliable, achieving a correlation of above 0.9 in a self-replication experiment, in addition to a substantial estimated cost reduction through quality controlled crowd-sourcing. The original gold standard based on post-edits incurs a 10–20 times greater cost than DA.

Shared tasks are increasingly common in our field, and new challenges are suggested at almost every conference and workshop. However, as this has become an established way of pushing research forward, it is important to discuss how we researchers organise and participate in shared tasks, and make that information available to the community to allow further research improvements. In this paper, we present a number of ethical issues along with other areas of concern that are related to the competitive nature of shared tasks. As such issues could potentially impact on research ethics in the Natural Language Processing community, we also propose the development of a framework for the organisation of and participation in shared tasks that can help mitigate against these issues arising.

This paper summarizes the preliminary results of an ongoing survey on multiword resources carried out within the IC1207 Cost Action PARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions). Despite the availability of language resource catalogs and the inventory of multiword datasets on the SIGLEX-MWE website, multiword resources are scattered and difficult to find. In many cases, language resources such as corpora, treebanks, or lexical databases include multiwords as part of their data or take them into account in their annotations. However, these resources need to be centralized to make them accessible. The aim of this survey is to create a portal where researchers can easily find multiword(-aware) language resources for their research. We report on the design of the survey and analyze the data gathered so far. We also discuss the problems we have detected upon examination of the data as well as possible ways of enhancing the survey.

This paper reports on the evaluation of two compound splitters for German. Compounding is a very frequent phenomenon in German and thus efficient ways of detecting and correctly splitting compound words are needed for natural language processing applications. This paper presents different strategies for compound splitting, focusing on German. Four compound splitters for German are presented. Two of them were used in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) experiments, obtaining very similar qualitative scores in terms of BLEU and TER and therefore a thorough evaluation of both has been carried out.

This paper discusses the design and compilation of the TRIS corpus, a specialized parallel corpus of Spanish and German texts. It will be used for phraseological research aimed at improving statistical machine translation. The corpus is based on the European database of Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS), containing 995 original documents written in German and Spanish and their translations into Spanish and German respectively. This parallel corpus is under development and the first version with 97 aligned file pairs was released in the first META-NORD upload of metadata and resources in November 2011. The second version of the corpus, described in the current paper, contains 205 file pairs which have been completely aligned at sentence level, which account for approximately 1,563,000 words and 70,648 aligned sentence pairs.