This paper presents the results of the shared tasks from the 8th workshop on Asian translation (WAT2021). For the WAT2021, 28 teams participated in the shared tasks and 24 teams submitted their translation results for the human evaluation. We also accepted 5 research papers. About 2,100 translation results were submitted to the automatic evaluation server, and selected submissions were manually evaluated.

An image captioning system involves modules on computer vision as well as natural language processing. Computer vision module is for detecting salient objects or extracting features of images and Natural Language Processing (NLP) module is for generating correct syntactic and semantic image captions. Although many image caption datasets such as Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MSCOCO are publicly available, most of the datasets are captioned in English language. There is no image caption corpus for Myanmar language. Myanmar image caption corpus is manually built as part of the Flickr8k dataset in this current work. Furthermore, a generative merge model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) is applied especially for Myanmar image captioning. Next, two conventional feature extraction models Visual Geometry Group (VGG) OxfordNet 16-layer and 19-layer are compared. The performance of this system is evaluated on Myanmar image caption corpus using BLEU scores and 10-fold cross validation.

This paper presents the results of the shared tasks from the 7th workshop on Asian translation (WAT2020). For the WAT2020, 20 teams participated in the shared tasks and 14 teams submitted their translation results for the human evaluation. We also received 12 research paper submissions out of which 7 were accepted. About 500 translation results were submitted to the automatic evaluation server, and selected submissions were manually evaluated.

This paper presents the results of the shared tasks from the 6th workshop on Asian translation (WAT2019) including Ja↔En, Ja↔Zh scientific paper translation subtasks, Ja↔En, Ja↔Ko, Ja↔En patent translation subtasks, Hi↔En, My↔En, Km↔En, Ta↔En mixed domain subtasks and Ru↔Ja news commentary translation task. For the WAT2019, 25 teams participated in the shared tasks. We also received 10 research paper submissions out of which 61 were accepted. About 400 translation results were submitted to the automatic evaluation server, and selected submis- sions were manually evaluated.

This paper describes the UCSYNLP-Lab submission to WAT 2019 for Myanmar-English translation tasks in both direction. We have used the neural machine translation systems with attention model and utilized the UCSY-corpus and ALT corpus. In NMT with attention model, we use the word segmentation level as well as syllable segmentation level. Especially, we made the UCSY-corpus to be cleaned in WAT 2019. Therefore, the UCSY corpus for WAT 2019 is not identical to those used in WAT 2018. Experiments show that the translation systems can produce the substantial improvements.

Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) conversion is the task of predicting the pronunciation of a word given its graphemic or written form. It is a highly important part of both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In this paper, we evaluate seven G2P conversion approaches: Adaptive Regularization of Weight Vectors (AROW) based structured learning (S-AROW), Conditional Random Field (CRF), Joint-sequence models (JSM), phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) based point-wise classification, Weighted Finite-state Transducers (WFST) on a manually tagged Myanmar phoneme dictionary. The G2P bootstrapping experimental results were measured with both automatic phoneme error rate (PER) calculation and also manual checking in terms of voiced/unvoiced, tones, consonant and vowel errors. The result shows that CRF, PBSMT and WFST approaches are the best performing methods for G2P conversion on Myanmar language.

This paper introduces the ALT project initiated by the Advanced Speech Translation Research and Development Promotion Center (ASTREC), NICT, Kyoto, Japan. The aim of this project is to accelerate NLP research for Asian languages such as Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Laos, Malay, Myanmar, Philippine, Thai and Vietnamese. The original resource for this project was English articles that were randomly selected from Wikinews. The project has so far created a corpus for Myanmar and will extend in scope to include other languages in the near future. A 20000-sentence corpus of Myanmar that has been manually translated from an English corpus has been word segmented, word aligned, part-of-speech tagged and constituency parsed by human annotators. In this paper, we present the implementation steps for creating the treebank in detail, including a description of the ALT web-based treebanking tool. Moreover, we report statistics on the annotation quality of the Myanmar treebank created so far.