EASIER was present at EMNLP 2022 and WMT 2022, held on December 7 to 11 2022 in Abu Dhabi. EMNLP and WMT are among the most prestigious venues for machine translation research.
In particular, EASIER members organized a novel competition (called a “shared task” in this field) for sign language machine translation.
The 1st Shared Task on SL Translation is organized as part of WMT 2022. Its organization is coordinated by the University of Zurich, Switzerland with collaborators from the EASIER EU project (grant agreement no. 101016982), the Innosuisse Flagship IICT (grant agreement no. PFFS-21-47), the SignON EU project (grant agreement no. 101017255), and other partners.
The task was concerned with automatic translation between signed and spoken languages. The task was novel in the sense that it required processing visual information (such as video frames or human pose estimation) beyond the well-known paradigm of text-to-text machine translation.
The main goals of this effort were to create a standard benchmark specifically for sign languages, improve state-of-the-art technologies and simply bring sign languages to the attention of researchers.
Seven teams competed in the shared task, which we consider a high turnout. The shared task was also well received and sparked considerable interest in the machine translation community.
Relevant links:
- Shared task website: www.wmt-slt.com
- Findings paper: statmt.org/wmt22/pdf/2022.wmt-1.71.pdf
- EMNLP 2022: 2022.emnlp.org
- WMT 2022: www.statmt.org/wmt22
