Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the meaning similarity of sentences. Applications include machine translation (MT), summarization, generation, question answering (QA), short answer grading, semantic search, dialog and conversational systems. The STS shared task is a venue for assessing the current state-of-the-art. The 2017 task focuses on multilingual and cross-lingual pairs with one sub-track exploring MT quality estimation (MTQE) data. The task obtained strong participation from 31 teams, with 17 participating in all language tracks. We summarize performance and review a selection of well performing methods. Analysis highlights common errors, providing insight into the limitations of existing models. To support ongoing work on semantic representations, the STS Benchmark is introduced as a new shared training and evaluation set carefully selected from the corpus of English STS shared task data (2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017).

This paper presents the results of the WMT14 shared tasks, which included a standard news translation task, a separate medical translation task, a task for run-time estimation of machine translation quality, and a metrics task. This year, 143 machine translation systems from 23 institutions were submitted to the ten translation directions in the standard translation task. An additional 6 anonymized systems were included, and were then evaluated both automatically and manually. The quality estimation task had four subtasks, with a total of 10 teams, submitting 57 entries.

Findings of the 2016 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT16) Bojar, O.; Chatterjee, R.; Federmann, C.; Graham, Y.; Haddow, B.; Huck, M.; Jimeno Yepes, A.; Koehn, P.; Logacheva, V.; Monz, C.; Negri, M.; Névéol, A.; Neves, M.; Popel, M.; Post, M.; Rubino, R.; Scarton, C.; Specia, L.; Turchi, M.; Verspoor, K.; Zampieri, M.Abstract This paper presents the results of the WMT16 shared tasks, which included five machine translation (MT) tasks (standard news, IT-domain, biomedical, multimodal, pronoun), three evaluation tasks (metrics, tuning, run-time estimation of MT quality), and an automatic post-editing task and bilingual document alignment task. This year, 102 MT systems from 24 institutions (plus 36 anonymized online systems) were submitted to the 12 translation directions in the news translation task. The IT-domain task received 31 submissions from 12 institutions in 7 directions and the Biomedical task received 15 submissions systems from 5 institutions. Evaluation was both automatic and manual (relative ranking and 100-point scale assessments).The quality estimation task had three subtasks, with a total of 14 teams, submitting 39 entries. The automatic post-editing task had a total of 6 teams, submitting 11 entries.1 http://statmt.org/wmt16/results.html 2

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We introduce the Multi30K dataset to stimulate multilingual multimodal research. Recent advances in image description have been demonstrated on Englishlanguage datasets almost exclusively, but image description should not be limited to English. This dataset extends the Flickr30K dataset with i) German translations created by professional translators over a subset of the English descriptions, and ii) German descriptions crowdsourced independently of the original English descriptions. We describe the data and outline how it can be used for multilingual image description and multimodal machine translation, but we anticipate the data will be useful for a broader range of tasks.

This paper presents the results of the WMT14 shared tasks, which included a standard news translation task, a separate medical translation task, a task for run-time estimation of machine translation quality, and a metrics task. This year, 143 machine translation systems from 23 institutions were submitted to the ten translation directions in the standard translation task. An additional 6 anonymized systems were included, and were then evaluated both automatically and manually. The quality estimation task had four subtasks, with a total of 10 teams, submitting 57 entries.

We report the findings of the Complex Word Identification task of SemEval 2016. To create a dataset, we conduct a user study with 400 non-native English speakers, and find that complex words tend to be rarer, less ambiguous and shorter. A total of 42 systems were submitted from 21 distinct teams, and nine baselines were provided. The results highlight the effectiveness of Decision Trees and Ensemble methods for the task, but ultimately reveal that word frequencies remain the most reliable predictor of word complexity.

Abstract. While tags in collaborative tagging systems serve primarily an indexing purpose, facilitating search and navigation of resources, the use of the same tags by more than one individual can yield a collective classification schema. We present an approach for making explicit the semantics behind the tag space in social tagging systems, so that this collaborative organization can emerge in the form of groups of concepts and partial ontologies. This is achieved by using a combination of shallow pre-processing strategies and statistical techniques together with knowledge provided by ontologies available on the semantic web. Preliminary results on the del.icio.us and Flickr tag sets show that the approach is very promising: it generates clusters with highly related tags corresponding to concepts in ontologies and meaningful relationships among subsets of these tags can be identified.