What is NIST Open MT?

The objective of the NIST Open Machine Translation (MT) evaluation series is to support research in, and help advance the state of the art of, technologies that translate text between human languages. Input may include all forms of text. The goal is for the output to be an adequate and fluent translation of the original.

The MT evaluation series started in 2001 as part of the DARPA TIDES program. In their current form, the evaluations are driven and coordinated by NIST as NIST Open MT. They provide an important contribution to the direction of research efforts and the calibration of technical capabilities in MT. The Open MT evaluations are intended to be of interest to all researchers working on the general problem of automatic translation between human languages. To this end, they are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported, and to be accessible to all those wishing to participate.

Current and Recent NIST Open MT Activities

The current NIST Open MT evaluation is MT09.

The most recently completed NIST Open MT evaluation was MT08 and took place in January/February 2008. MT08 featured more language pairs and a new Progress test option. Results of past NIST Open MT and DARPA TIDES MT evaluations as well as resources specific to each evaluation can be accessed via the year-specific links at the bottom.

Joining the NIST Open MT Community

You can subscribe to the general MT mailing list hosted by NIST, mt_list@nist.gov, by sending e-mail to listproc@nist.gov; put "subscribe mt_list" in the body.

Find more information by selecting a specific year below.