Machine Translation Weekly 86: The Wisdom of the WMT Crowd
Most of the papers that I comment on and review here present novel and cool
ideas on how to improve something in machine translation or multilingual NLP.
On the other hand, the WMT submissions are different. People want to get the
best translation quality and value efficiency, and simplicity. Novelty and
prettiness of the ideas are secondary. WMT
organizes annual competitions in machine translation quality (and other tasks
related to machine translation) where dozens of companies and universities
participate. Each submission is accompanied by a system description paper that
summarizes what the teams did for the competition.
For a project I am working on, I annotated the system description paper from
WMT18-20 and here I bring some statistics on what people do in their
submissions. Here are some basic