The Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation has released translation challenges each year from 2004 on, which feature a dataset of sentence pairs in a variety of languages.
Even though the conference has been taking place each year, with ever growing dataset sizes, the dataset from 2016 is still being used frequently as an evaluation dataset in scientific papers when evaluating machine translation models and it has by far the most downloads on the huggingface hub.
I would be grateful if someone could shed light on the reason for which the WMT16 dataset is so strongly favoured by the machine translation community.