WMT General MT task is Open – Are You In?

[Kocmi T.]

Guess what! The jubilee 🎉 20th iteration of WMT General Machine Translation task is here, and we want you to participate - as for the first time in years, the entry barrier to make an impact is so low!

This isn’t just any repeat. We’ve kept what worked, removed what was outdated, and introduced many exciting new twists! Among key changes are:

* New human-evaluated language pairs: EN–Arabic, EN–Estonian, EN–Korean, EN–Serbian, Czech–German, Bhojpuri–EN, Maasai–EN
* New multilingual subtask – Can you build a system that translates 30 languages?
* New modalities – Additional context from video and image (text-to-text remains the core).
* Revamped constrained track – No restrictions on training data except licensing; all open models under 20B parameters are allowed.
* More challenging sources; long-context translation; prompt preambles; and much more.

📌 All details are available at https://www2.statmt.org/wmt25/translation-task.html

We are looking forward for your participation,

Tom Kocmi

(in Europe, [kotsmi], he/him)

[Ada Wan]

Dear Tom, dear all at WMT (workshop organizers as well as participants)

A general briefing:

Please be officially notified of my findings from 2019 on (see https://sites.google.com/view/adawan), esp. "Representation and Bias", "Fairness in Representation", and my posts on X (formerly Twitter, @adawan919). I'd appreciate it if you'd please read carefully and reflect more on my findings and results. There is neither CL (computational linguistics) or NLP ("Natural Language Processing") that is possible/ethical/legal. Statistics is the driver, not textual values/meaning (esp. in the context of computing). The name "NLP" was also much of a misnomer, esp. now that "language complexity" has been resolved, "language" decomposed and generalized, processing has been, or realized to have been, automated. "Language technology" can now be just "technology" (because there is no need for "language" in tech and things work in tech not because of "language" (but everything else that I named specifically)). 

If one has studied or worked in the "language space", including but not limited to linguistics, computational linguistics, and NLP, chances are that one has been miseducated. Please think about the students who were or any new practitioners who could be misinformed or become too attached to a certain "'specialisation'/'track' identity" that is redundant and incorrect, and the consequences thereof.

Ask not what there is left to do for a direction that ought to be discontinued, ask who, which students might fall victim to the teaching of such if it were to continue.
Academic disciplines or research topics/foci don't have to last forever. Things get solved and resolved in tech.

There are reasons scientific, academic, technical, ethical, and legal for the retirement of all "language" endeavours (esp. ones in the context of computing) (see also point #7 below).
I hereby ask you to please cancel this event and call immediately.
I hereby also ask you to please stop corroborating/(co-)developing a narrative in the name of "language" that is irrelevant in computing. Otherwise, you show yourself to be, inter alia, intentional in the manipulation of "language", political and/or inappropriate sentiments with your use of technology. There should also be no further hiring in the areas related to "language".

If you should have any questions regarding my requests, or if there is anything that you do not understand, including but not limited to my notification/message to you here or the conclusions/implications of my work, please do not hesitate to contact me in writing via email AND on X (x.com) at @adawan919 within 3 business days, i.e. by 2359 on Friday, 04Jul2025 (ZRH time) for this case. If you should require an extension, please contact me immediately and no later than said deadline. Your lack of reply will be understood as your having understood the conclusions and implications of my work and my requests to you. I will confirm receipt of your reply immediately (within at most 48 hours, Monday-Friday). If you do not see my reply, please try re-sending and/or re-posting until I do.

Especially applicable for this event/initiative:

1. Machine Translation (MT) is solved. "Hardness"/Difficulty in modeling correlates with sequence length and not anything "intrinsic" to any particular style/brand of "language" (and should researchers not be convinced, their own unresolved subjective issues with "language", or their "image"/"impression" of a particular style, might play a role --- but that should not be a research project for students). 
2. MT is solved. It comes down to data statistics wrt algorithm, in certain suboptimal settings, length (and vocab) is/are found to correlate with hardness. The task is as simple as data in and data out --- it does not have to do with "(particular) languages". One can pass data in different styles in and get "style transfer". The possibility/success of the task of "style transfer" should already be a sign that our algorithms have generalization capability (and MT solved). My work, in resolving "language complexity", in showing that there are no significant differences between "(particular) languages", is an explicit proof of the generalization capability of our algorithms nowadays and of MT being solved and resolved (that there are no "langauges" and that MT has been reduced to a matter of statistics).
3. Regarding segmentation and evaluation: please refer to my work, in particular Section 2 under "Fair information-theoretic evaluation metric" in 'Fairness in Representation', e.g. ICLR2022 version at https://openreview.net/pdf?id=-llS6TiOew:
   "we find that it is not necessary to assign a perspective that is centered on any one particular language, when we can evaluate simply by the total number of bits for a larger portion of texts/sequences. This can be a fairer, more general and flexible way of evaluating data that has not been or cannot be perfectly segmented or aligned line by line. We hence used instead unnormalized PP, i.e. the total number of bits needed to encode the dev set..."
   If/When computation memory and setup allow, one can pass in data in larger segments, hence obviating the need to align too precisely. (That having been expressed, evaluating alignment accuracy can be a philological/academic exercise (but not a job!).) Please reread my findings again with care. There are many details that have been solved/explained (including some in the rebuttal for the ICLR2022 version), the importance of which might have been overlooked.
4. Again, MT is solved, and the proper thing to do would be to officially recognize my results, not to hide from them or ignore them. Please do not "fight" me, I am not your enemy. Many people in other sciences (those which do not exploit emotions) are able to just move on from potential collective oversight and/or technological progress, self-correct, start practicing the right way, keep advancing --- e.g. one would now train models with data with diverse statistical profiles instead (not "different" from a "linguistic"/philological point of view), stop interpreting models in manners that are not centered in computation and/or statistics....
   I'd be grateful and honored if, in addition to canceling this event, the WMT community would formally recognize and celebrate my results and achievement. That would also be the right and respectful thing to do.
5. There is no more NLP, any "text-centric" computational modeling in connection with "words", "sentences", "meaning"/semantics/linguistics etc. that should be treated as real applications. (This, in part, follows from my results from 2019 on.) The closest to it could be (generalized) data science (as in, for explanation, clarification, evaluation, and interpretation) and statistical modeling (but such may be irrelevant to applications). But note that these are not the same as NLP. Claims that do not hold in another representation (e.g. standardized byte) should not be taken seriously, or as valid/true/universal/scientific. *Everything has been solved/resolved, clarified in my work (including the rebuttal for 'Fairness in Representation' (ICLR 2022) and 'Representation and Bias').
   
6. Please clarify if "quality" would/might involve "grammar" (which is irrelevant, unnecessary, and unethical) in your call/work.
7. "Reasons scientific, academic, technical, ethical, and legal for the retirement of all 'language' endeavours" apply also to "research" with "LLMs" that cannot be carried out in an honest and transparent manner, e.g. with available input data and data profile/statistics, and evaluation and interpretation with respect to such.
8. It would be apt to ask about the nature of WMT:
   a. Please state explicitly whether this is an academic/scientific or commercial/industry event, to what extent it is being funded publicly and privately (as in, via commercial sponsorship), as well as any conflict of interest. The concern here is that you are / might be doing commercial research under the hood of academic research, with academic titles and affiliation, and/or promoting some research/education initiatives/directions which are in violation of principles of research integrity --- e.g. lack of honesty/transparency, respect (please do cite my work should you find it insightful, and if you should find it not insightful, please explain why).
   b. If this event were a private assembly in the name of "language" or "technology", or some philological entertainment (i.e. not on public funding and not for science/technology/engineering/education), please ensure that this does not lead to any sentiment manipulation/provocation. Please also note the unethical nature of "language". Please make sure that you state explicitly the nature/orientation of your event and refrain from using your official titles or professional/professorial affiliations when hosting/participating in such event.
   c. Please state any commercial and non-commercial "LLMs" that would be used as objects of investigation. Please clarify if these are completely based on open-sourced data with data specifications and statistics readily available.
   d. Please report everything honestly and transparently, and have non-misleading calls for participation.
9. Even though there might be ways to reformulate your tasks such that they would adhere to research guidelines (e.g. by evaluating all models with transparent data and statistics), it would be best to cancel this event lest more students or public audience be miseducated/misled, as you (as well as I myself at one point) were.
10. Many in linguistics, CL, NLP and/or ML/CS may not have thought through the irrelevance/redundancy of "language" enough because "language" has been an implicit assumption of their field/foci/specialty. But "language" has been generalized. Things in what used to be referred to as "language" have been solved and/or deemed indeterminate. Aspects that are more general do not require the mentioning of "language". By doing "language", one is / can be implicitly promoting "grammar", which is often an excuse for philologists/grammarians/linguists to infringe on or corrupt the tech space, and/or abuse its funding. So please don't. For those who work(ed) and publish(ed) honestly: before my findings, MT wasn't or might not have been fraud. But after my findings, it is; likewise with LLMs without clear data/statistics (esp. when one is doing science, working in education and/or public research, or using public funding).
    
    

To Administrators/Authorities:

Please note that there is currently rampant fraud (and possibly corruption) going on with "language", including but not limited to waste, fraud, and abuse in university disciplines/foci of linguistics, computational linguistics, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and some areas of ML (machine learning) and CS (computer science). Please report such to higher authorities should activities in these areas continue to be hosted. Disciplines/foci relating to "language" ought to be discontinued.


This post will also be posted on my X account (@adawan919). One should also post one's reply to me over X (x.com).
Please reply to all via email with comment/notification/post on X.

Thank you.

Best regards
Ada Wan
https://sites.google.com/view/adawan

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WMT: Workshop on Machine Translation" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wmt-tasks+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/wmt-tasks/CACW3Gxb1yufoZoZ4bmDO%2BSped_aHjv9gungtYG6q6gjR7no_bA%40mail.gmail.com.