Translating literary works has perennially stood as an elusive dream in machine translation (MT), a journey steeped in intricate challenges. To foster progress in this domain, we hold a new shared task at WMT 2023, the first edition of the Discourse-Level Literary Translation. First, we (Tencent AI Lab and China Literature Ltd.) release a copyrighted and document-level Chinese-English web novel corpus. Furthermore, we put forth an industry-endorsed criteria to guide human evaluation process. This year, we totally received 14 submissions from 7 academia and industry teams. We employ both automatic and human evaluations to measure the performance of the submitted systems. The official ranking of the systems is based on the overall human judgments. In addition, our extensive analysis reveals a series of interesting findings on literary and discourse-aware MT. We release data, system outputs, and leaderboard at http://www2.statmt.org/wmt23/literary-translation-task.html.

We present the findings of the LoResMT 2021 shared task which focuses on machine translation (MT) of COVID-19 data for both low-resource spoken and sign languages. The organization of this task was conducted as part of the fourth workshop on technologies for machine translation of low resource languages (LoResMT). Parallel corpora is presented and publicly available which includes the following directions: English↔Irish, English↔Marathi, and Taiwanese Sign language↔Traditional Chinese. Training data consists of 8112, 20933 and 128608 segments, respectively. There are additional monolingual data sets for Marathi and English that consist of 21901 segments. The results presented here are based on entries from a total of eight teams. Three teams submitted systems for English↔Irish while five teams submitted systems for English↔Marathi. Unfortunately, there were no systems submissions for the Taiwanese Sign language↔Traditional Chinese task. Maximum system performance was computed using BLEU and follow as 36.0 for English–Irish, 34.6 for Irish–English, 24.2 for English–Marathi, and 31.3 for Marathi–English.

Thai is a low-resource language, so it is often the case that data is not available in sufficient quantities to train an Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model which perform to a high level of quality. In addition, the Thai script does not use white spaces to delimit the boundaries between words, which adds more complexity when building sequence to sequence models. In this work, we explore how to augment a set of English–Thai parallel data by replicating sentence-pairs with different word segmentation methods on Thai, as training data for NMT model training. Using different merge operations of Byte Pair Encoding, different segmentations of Thai sentences can be obtained. The experiments show that combining these datasets, performance is improved for NMT models trained with a dataset that has been split using a supervised splitting tool.

This paper presents the findings of the LoResMT 2020 Shared Task on zero-shot translation for low resource languages. This task was organised as part of the 3rd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT) at AACL-IJCNLP 2020. The focus was on the zero-shot approach as a notable development in Neural Machine Translation to build MT systems for language pairs where parallel corpora are small or even non-existent. The shared task experience suggests that back-translation and domain adaptation methods result in better accuracy for small-size datasets. We further noted that, although translation between similar languages is no cakewalk, linguistically distinct languages require more data to give better results.

Data selection is a process used in selecting a subset of parallel data for the training of machine translation (MT) systems, so that 1) resources for training might be reduced, 2) trained models could perform better than those trained with the whole corpus, and/or 3) trained models are more tailored to specific domains. It has been shown that for statistical MT (SMT), the use of data selection helps improve the MT performance significantly. In this study, we reviewed three data selection approaches for MT, namely Term Frequency– Inverse Document Frequency, Cross-Entropy Difference and Feature Decay Algorithm, and conducted experiments on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with the selected data using the three approaches. The results showed that for NMT systems, using data selection also improved the performance, though the gain is not as much as for SMT systems.

This document introduces the IJCNLP 2017 Shared Task on Customer Feedback Analysis. In this shared task we have prepared corpora of customer feedback in four languages, i.e. English, French, Spanish and Japanese. They were annotated in a common meanings categorization, which was improved from an ADAPT-Microsoft pivot study on customer feedback. Twenty teams participated in the shared task and twelve of them have submitted prediction results. The results show that performance of prediction meanings of customer feedback is reasonable well in four languages. Nine system description papers are archived in the shared tasks proceeding.

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.