In this paper we present our work on a case study on Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Rule based machine translation (RBMT) for translation from English to Malayalam and Malayalam to English. One of the motivations of our study is to make a three way performance comparison, such as, a) SMT and RBMT b) English to Malayalam SMT and Malayalam to English SMT c) English to Malayalam RBMT and Malayalam to English RBMT. We describe the development of English to Malayalam and Malayalam to English baseline phrase based SMT system and the evaluation of its performance compared against the RBMT system. Based on our study the observations are: a) SMT systems outperform RBMT systems, b) In the case of SMT, English - Malayalam systems perform better than that of Malayalam - English systems, c) In the case RBMT, Malayalam to English systems are performing better than English to Malayalam systems. Based on our evaluations and detailed error analysis, we describe the requirements of incorporating morphological processing into the SMT to improve the accuracy of translation.
University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
This paper describes the WLV-RIT entry to the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC) shared task 2020. The HASOC 2020 organizers provided participants with annotated datasets containing social media posts of code-mixed in Dravidian languages (Malayalam-English and Tamil-English). We participated in task 1: Offensive comment identification in Code-mixed Malayalam Youtube comments. In our methodology, we take advantage of available English data by applying cross-lingual contextual word embeddings and transfer learning to make predictions to Malayalam …
Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology（吉大港工程技术大学）
In recent years, several systems have been developed to regulate the spread of negativity and eliminate aggressive, offensive or abusive contents from the online platforms. Nevertheless, a limited number of researches carried out to identify positive, encouraging and supportive contents. In this work, our goal is to identify whether a social media post/comment contains hope speech or not. We propose three distinct models to identify hope speech in English, Tamil and Malayalam language to serve this purpose. To attain this goal, we employed various machine learning (support vector machine, logi…
Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology（吉大港工程技术大学）
The increasing accessibility of the internet facilitated social media usage and encouraged individuals to express their opinions liberally. Nevertheless, it also creates a place for content polluters to disseminate offensive posts or contents. Most of such offensive posts are written in a cross-lingual manner and can easily evade the online surveillance systems. This paper presents an automated system that can identify offensive text from multilingual code-mixed data. In the task, datasets provided in three languages including Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada code-mixed with English where particip…
Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics（Insight SFI数据分析研究中心）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）；Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala（喀拉拉邦信息技术与管理学院）
There is an increasing demand for sentiment analysis of text from social media which are mostly code-mixed. Systems trained on monolingual data fail for code-mixed data due to the complexity of mixing at different levels of the text. However, very few resources are available for code-mixed data to create models specific for this data. Although much research in multilingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has used semi-supervised or unsupervised methods, supervised methods still performs better. Only a few datasets for popular languages such as English-Spanish, English-Hindi, and English-C…
This paper describes the algorithm for translating English negative sentences into Korean in English-Korean Machine Translation (EKMT). The proposed algorithm is based on the comparative study of English and Korean negative sentences. The earlier translation software cannot translate English negative sentences into accurate Korean equivalents. We established a new algorithm for the negative sentence translation and evaluated it.
COMSAT University（COMSATS大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
In this study, we present an analysis regarding the performance of the state-of-art Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) on multiple Indian languages. We report baseline systems on several language pairs. The motivation of this study is to promote the development of SMT and linguistic resources for these language pairs, as the current state-of-the-art is quite bleak due to sparse data resources. The success of an SMT system is contingent on the availability of a large parallel corpus. Such data is necessary to reliably estimate translation probabilities. We report the performance…
We outline a bidirectional translation system that converts sentences from American Sign Language (ASL) to English, and vice versa. To perform machine translation between ASL and English, we utilize a generative approach. Specifically, we employ an adjustment to the IBM word-alignment model 1 (IBM WAM1), where we define language models for English and ASL, as well as a translation model, and attempt to generate a translation that maximizes the posterior distribution defined by these models. Then, using these models, we are able to quantify the concepts of fluency and faithfulness of a translat…
It is the most effective way for quick translation of tremendous amount of explosively increasing science and technique information material to develop a practicable machine translation system and introduce it into translation practice. This essay treats problems arising from translation of isolated units on the basis of the practical materials and experiments obtained in the development and introduction of English-Korean machine translation system. In other words, this essay considers establishment of information for isolated units and their Korean equivalents and word order.
Beyond Scalar Scores: Reinforcement Learning for Error-Aware Quality Estimation of Machine Translation
Institute for People-Centred AI（以人为本的人工智能研究所）；University of Surrey（塞弗尔大学）；NICE Research Group（NICE研究组）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Centre for Translation Studies（翻译研究中心）
In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2018 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Finnish to English. The system used a Character Based Neural Machine Translation model to accomplish the given task. The current paper documents the preprocessing steps, the description of the submitted system and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 12.9.
The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT19 Shared Task on News Translation in six language directions: English-to-Gujarati, Gujarati-to-English, English-to-Chinese, Chinese-to-English, German-to-English, and English-to-Czech. For all translation directions, we created or used back-translations of monolingual data in the target language as additional synthetic training data. For English-Gujarati, we also explored semi-supervised MT with cross-lingual language model pre-training, and translation pivoting through Hindi. For translation to and from Chinese, we investigated character-bas…
Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内理工大学）；FPT Technology Research Institute, FPT University（FPT大学FPT技术研究院）
Machine translation is shifting to an end-to-end approach based on deep neural networks. The state of the art achieves impressive results for popular language pairs such as English - French or English - Chinese. However for English - Vietnamese the shortage of parallel corpora and expensive hyper-parameter search present practical challenges to neural-based approaches. This paper highlights our efforts on improving English-Vietnamese translations in two directions: (1) Building the largest open Vietnamese - English corpus to date, and (2) Extensive experiments with the latest neural models to …
This paper presents a summary of the findings that we obtained based on the shared task on machine translation of Dravidian languages. We stood first in three of the five sub-tasks which were assigned to us for the main shared task. We carried out neural machine translation for the following five language pairs: Kannada to Tamil, Kannada to Telugu, Kannada to Malayalam, Kannada to Sanskrit, and Kannada to Tulu. The datasets for each of the five language pairs were used to train various translation models, including Seq2Seq models such as LSTM, bidirectional LSTM, Conv2Seq, and training state-o…
This paper describes LIUM submissions to WMT17 News Translation Task for English-German, English-Turkish, English-Czech and English-Latvian language pairs. We train BPE-based attentive Neural Machine Translation systems with and without factored outputs using the open source nmtpy framework. Competitive scores were obtained by ensembling various systems and exploiting the availability of target monolingual corpora for back-translation. The impact of back-translation quantity and quality is also analyzed for English-Turkish where our post-deadline submission surpassed the best entry by +1.6 BLE…
Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently become popular in the field of machine translation. However, NMT suffers from the problem of repeating or missing words in the translation. To address this problem, Tu et al. (2017) proposed an encoder-decoder-reconstructor framework for NMT using back-translation. In this method, they selected the best forward translation model in the same manner as Bahdanau et al. (2015), and then trained a bi-directional translation model as fine-tuning. Their experiments show that it offers significant improvement in BLEU scores in Chinese-English translation t…
Communication tools make the world like a small village and as a consequence people can contact with others who are from different societies or who speak different languages. This communication cannot happen effectively without Machine Translation because they can be found anytime and everywhere. There are a number of studies that have developed Machine Translation for the English language with so many other languages except the Arabic it has not been considered yet. Therefore we aim to highlight a roadmap for our proposed translation machine to provide an enhanced Arabic English translation b…
The parallel corpus for multilingual NLP tasks, deep learning applications like Statistical Machine Translation Systems is very important. The parallel corpus of Hindi-English language pair available for news translation task till date is of very limited size as per the requirement of the systems are concerned. In this work we have developed an automatic parallel corpus generation system prototype, which creates Hindi-English parallel corpus for news translation task. Further to verify the quality of generated parallel corpus we have experimented by taking various performance metrics and the r…
We introduce a high-quality and large-scale Vietnamese-English parallel dataset of 3.02M sentence pairs, which is 2.9M pairs larger than the benchmark Vietnamese-English machine translation corpus IWSLT15. We conduct experiments comparing strong neural baselines and well-known automatic translation engines on our dataset and find that in both automatic and human evaluations: the best performance is obtained by fine-tuning the pre-trained sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder mBART. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale Vietnamese-English machine translation study. We hope …
Wollo University（沃洛大学）；Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Bahir Dar University（巴赫达尔大学）；Assosa University（阿索萨大学）
Machine translation (MT) is one of the main tasks in natural language processing whose objective is to translate texts automatically from one natural language to another. Nowadays, using deep neural networks for MT tasks has received great attention. These networks require lots of data to learn abstract representations of the input and store it in continuous vectors. This paper presents the first relatively large-scale Amharic-English parallel sentence dataset. Using these compiled data, we build bi-directional Amharic-English translation models by fine-tuning the existing Facebook M2M100 pre-…
In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2019 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Lithuanian to English. To accomplish the given task, our system used a Word Embedding based Neural Machine Translation model to post edit the outputs generated by a Statistical Machine Translation model. The current paper documents the architecture of our model, descriptions of the various modules and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 17.6.
The acceleration in telecommunication needs leads to many groups of research, especially in communication facilitating and Machine Translation fields. While people contact with others having different languages and cultures, they need to have instant translations. However, the available instant translators are still providing somewhat bad Arabic-English Translations, for instance when translating books or articles, the meaning is not totally accurate. Therefore, using the semantic web techniques to deal with the homographs and homonyms semantically, the aim of this research is to extend a mode…
This paper presents the NICT's participation to the WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in the eight translation directions of four language pairs: Estonian-English, Finnish-English, Turkish-English and Chinese-English. For each translation direction, we prepared state-of-the-art statistical (SMT) and neural (NMT) machine translation systems. Our NMT systems were trained with the transformer architecture using the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data that we generated with a new incremental training framework. Our primary sub…
Visual Genome is a dataset connecting structured image information with English language. We present ``Hindi Visual Genome'', a multimodal dataset consisting of text and images suitable for English-Hindi multimodal machine translation task and multimodal research. We have selected short English segments (captions) from Visual Genome along with associated images and automatically translated them to Hindi with manual post-editing which took the associated images into account. We prepared a set of 31525 segments, accompanied by a challenge test set of 1400 segments. This challenge test set was cr…
Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）
We introduce the Helsinki Neural Machine Translation system (HNMT) and how it is applied in the news translation task at WMT 2017, where it ranked first in both the human and automatic evaluations for English--Finnish. We discuss the success of English--Finnish translations and the overall advantage of NMT over a strong SMT baseline. We also discuss our submissions for English--Latvian, English--Chinese and Chinese--English.
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Basement AI（Basement人工智能公司）
In this paper, we present the University of Helsinki submissions to the WMT 2019 shared task on news translation in three language pairs: English-German, English-Finnish and Finnish-English. This year, we focused first on cleaning and filtering the training data using multiple data-filtering approaches, resulting in much smaller and cleaner training sets. For English-German, we trained both sentence-level transformer models and compared different document-level translation approaches. For Finnish-English and English-Finnish we focused on different segmentation approaches, and we also included …
For Japanese-to-English translation, zero pronouns in Japanese pose a challenge, since the model needs to infer and produce the corresponding pronoun in the target side of the English sentence. However, although fully resolving zero pronouns often needs discourse context, in some cases, the local context within a sentence gives clues to the inference of the zero pronoun. In this study, we propose a data augmentation method that provides additional training signals for the translation model to learn correlations between local context and zero pronouns. We show that the proposed method significa…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；The German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic - English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resour…
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
In this paper, we present our work on the creation of lexical resources for the Machine Translation between English and Hindi. We describes the development of phrase pair mappings for our experiments and the comparative performance evaluation between different trained models on top of the baseline Statistical Machine Translation system. We focused on augmenting the parallel corpus with more vocabulary as well as with various inflected forms by exploring different ways. We have augmented the training corpus with various lexical resources such as lexical words, synset words, function words and v…
In machine translation it is common phenomenon that machine-readable dictionaries and standard parsing rules are not enough to ensure accuracy in parsing and translating English phrases into Korean language, which is revealed in misleading translation results due to consequent structural and semantic ambiguities. This paper aims to suggest a solution to structural and semantic ambiguities due to the idiomaticity and non-grammaticalness of phrases commonly used in English language by applying bilingual phrase database in English-Korean Machine Translation (EKMT). This paper firstly clarifies wh…
This paper presents our contribution to the PolEval 2021 Task 2: Evaluation of translation quality assessment metrics. We describe experiments with pre-trained language models and state-of-the-art frameworks for translation quality assessment in both nonblind and blind versions of the task. Our solutions ranked second in the nonblind version and third in the blind version.
Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；Global Tone Communication Technology Co., Ltd.（环球语音通信技术有限公司）
Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the best methods for understanding the differences in semantic rules between two languages. Especially for Indo-European languages, subword-level models have achieved impressive results. However, when the translation task involves Chinese, semantic granularity remains at the word and character level, so there is still need more fine-grained translation model of Chinese. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective method for Chinese translation at the sub-character level. Our approach uses the Wubi method to translate Chinese into English; byte-…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Neural machine translation (NMT), a new approach to machine translation, has been proved to outperform conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) across a variety of language pairs. Translation is an open-vocabulary problem, but most existing NMT systems operate with a fixed vocabulary, which causes the incapability of translating rare words. This problem can be alleviated by using different translation granularities, such as character, subword and hybrid word-character. Translation involving Chinese is one of the most difficult tasks in machine translation, however, to the best of our…
Spoken Language Translation (SLT) is becoming more widely used and becoming a communication tool that helps in crossing language barriers. One of the challenges of SLT is the translation from a language without gender agreement to a language with gender agreement such as English to Arabic. In this paper, we introduce an approach to tackle such limitation by enabling a Neural Machine Translation system to produce gender-aware translation. We show that NMT system can model the speaker/listener gender information to produce gender-aware translation. We propose a method to generate data used in ad…
English to Indian language machine translation poses the challenge of structural and morphological divergence. This paper describes English to Indian language statistical machine translation using pre-ordering and suffix separation. The pre-ordering uses rules to transfer the structure of the source sentences prior to training and translation. This syntactic restructuring helps statistical machine translation to tackle the structural divergence and hence better translation quality. The suffix separation is used to tackle the morphological divergence between English and highly agglutinative Ind…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Code-mixed machine translation has become an important task in multilingual communities and extending the task of machine translation to code mixed data has become a common task for these languages. In the shared tasks of WMT 2022, we try to tackle the same for both English + Hindi to Hinglish and Hinglish to English. The first task dealt with both Roman and Devanagari script as we had monolingual data in both English and Hindi whereas the second task only had data in Roman script. To our knowledge, we achieved one of the top ROUGE-L and WER scores for the first task of Monolingual to Code-Mix…
Language is an essential factor of emancipation. Unfortunately, most of the more than 2,000 African languages are low-resourced. The community has recently used machine translation to revive and strengthen several African languages. However, the trained models are often bilingual, resulting in a potentially exponential number of models to train and maintain to cover all possible translation directions. Additionally, bilingual models do not leverage the similarity between some of the languages. Consequently, multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) is gaining considerable interest, especia…
Machine translation has made rapid advances in recent years. Millions of people are using it today in online translation systems and mobile applications in order to communicate across language barriers. The question naturally arises whether such systems can approach or achieve parity with human translations. In this paper, we first address the problem of how to define and accurately measure human parity in translation. We then describe Microsoft's machine translation system and measure the quality of its translations on the widely used WMT 2017 news translation task from Chinese to English. We…
This work was conducted to find out how tokenization methods affect the training results of machine translation models. In this work, alphabet tokenization, morpheme tokenization, and BPE tokenization were applied to Korean as the source language and English as the target language respectively, and the comparison experiment was conducted by repeating 50,000 epochs of each 9 models using the Transformer neural network. As a result of measuring the BLEU scores of the experimental models, the model that applied BPE tokenization to Korean and morpheme tokenization to English recorded 35.73, showin…
Facebook Applied Machine Learning（Facebook应用机器学习）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；Sorbonne Universités（索邦大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
For machine translation, a vast majority of language pairs in the world are considered low-resource because they have little parallel data available. Besides the technical challenges of learning with limited supervision, it is difficult to evaluate methods trained on low-resource language pairs because of the lack of freely and publicly available benchmarks. In this work, we introduce the FLoRes evaluation datasets for Nepali-English and Sinhala-English, based on sentences translated from Wikipedia. Compared to English, these are languages with very different morphology and syntax, for which l…
There are many machine translation (MT) papers that propose novel approaches and show improvements over their self-defined baselines. The experimental setting in each paper often differs from one another. As such, it is hard to determine if a proposed approach is really useful and advances the state of the art. Chinese-to-English translation is a common translation direction in MT papers, although there is not one widely accepted experimental setting in Chinese-to-English MT. Our goal in this paper is to propose a benchmark in evaluation setup for Chinese-to-English machine translation, such t…
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University（大阪大学信息科学与技术研究生院）；Institute for Datability Science, Osaka University（大阪大学数据可用性科学研究所）
The word order between source and target languages significantly influences the translation quality in machine translation. Preordering can effectively address this problem. Previous preordering methods require a manual feature design, making language dependent design costly. In this paper, we propose a preordering method with a recursive neural network that learns features from raw inputs. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable gain in translation quality to the state-of-the-art method but without a manual feature design.
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions, often requiring large amounts of auxiliary data to achieve competitive results. An effective method of generating auxiliary data is back-translation of target language sentences. In this work, we present a case study of Tigrinya where we investigate several back-translation methods to generate synthetic source sentences. We find that in low-resource conditions, back-translation by pivoting through a higher-resource language related to the target language proves most effective re…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Tiruchirappalli（印度特里奇拉帕利信息技术学院）；ULTRA Arts and Science College（ULTRA文理学院）；Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering（斯里·西瓦苏布拉马尼亚·纳达尔工程学院）；Kongu Engineering College（孔古工程学院）；Sultan Idris Education University（苏丹依德里斯教育大学）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
This paper reports the Machine Translation (MT) systems submitted by the IIITT team for the English->Marathi and English->Irish language pairs LoResMT 2021 shared task. The task focuses on getting exceptional translations for rather low-resourced languages like Irish and Marathi. We fine-tune IndicTrans, a pretrained multilingual NMT model for English->Marathi, using external parallel corpus as input for additional training. We have used a pretrained Helsinki-NLP Opus MT English->Irish model for the latter language pair. Our approaches yield relatively promising results on the BLEU metrics. Un…
Soochow University（苏州大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Neural machine translation (NMT) suffers a performance deficiency when a limited vocabulary fails to cover the source or target side adequately, which happens frequently when dealing with morphologically rich languages. To address this problem, previous work focused on adjusting translation granularity or expanding the vocabulary size. However, morphological information is relatively under-considered in NMT architectures, which may further improve translation quality. We propose a novel method, which can not only reduce data sparsity but also model morphology through a simple but effective mec…
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a new approach for Machine Translation (MT), and due to its success, it has absorbed the attention of many researchers in the field. In this paper, we study NMT model on Persian-English language pairs, to analyze the model and investigate the appropriateness of the model for scarce-resourced scenarios, the situation that exists for Persian-centered translation systems. We adjust the model for the Persian language and find the best parameters and hyper parameters for two tasks: translation and transliteration. We also apply some preprocessing task on the Pers…
We participated in the WMT 2016 shared news translation task by building neural translation systems for four language pairs, each trained in both directions: English<->Czech, English<->German, English<->Romanian and English<->Russian. Our systems are based on an attentional encoder-decoder, using BPE subword segmentation for open-vocabulary translation with a fixed vocabulary. We experimented with using automatic back-translations of the monolingual News corpus as additional training data, pervasive dropout, and target-bidirectional models. All reported methods give substantial improvements, a…
