Pre-training and fine-tuning have achieved great success in the natural language process field. The standard paradigm of exploiting them includes two steps: first, pre-training a model, e.g. BERT, with a large scale unlabeled monolingual data. Then, fine-tuning the pre-trained model with labeled data from downstream tasks. However, in neural machine translation (NMT), we address the problem that the training objective of the bilingual task is far different from the monolingual pre-trained model. This gap leads that only using fine-tuning in NMT can not fully utilize prior language knowledge. In this paper, we propose an APT framework for acquiring knowledge from the pre-trained model to NMT. The proposed approach includes two modules: 1). a dynamic fusion mechanism to fuse task-specific features adapted from general knowledge into NMT network, 2). a knowledge distillation paradigm to learn language knowledge continuously during the NMT training process. The proposed approach could integrate suitable knowledge from pre-trained models to improve the NMT. Experimental results on WMT English to German, German to English and Chinese to English machine translation tasks show that our model outperforms strong baselines and the fine-tuning counterparts.
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging and important tasks in discourse parsing, due to the lack of connective as strong linguistic cues. A principle bottleneck to further improvement is the shortage of training data (ca.~16k instances in the PDTB). Shi et al. (2017) proposed to acquire additional data by exploiting connectives in translation: human translators mark discourse relations which are implicit in the source language explicitly in the translation. Using back-translations of such explicitated connectives improves discourse relation parsing performanc…
The recent advances introduced by neural machine translation (NMT) are rapidly expanding the application fields of machine translation, as well as reshaping the quality level to be targeted. In particular, if translations have to fit some given layout, quality should not only be measured in terms of adequacy and fluency, but also length. Exemplary cases are the translation of document files, subtitles, and scripts for dubbing, where the output length should ideally be as close as possible to the length of the input text. This paper addresses for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, th…
Knowledge-based machine translation (KBMT) techniques yield high quality in domains with detailed semantic models, limited vocabulary, and controlled input grammar. Scaling up along these dimensions means acquiring large knowledge resources. It also means behaving reasonably when definitive knowledge is not yet available. This paper describes how we can fill various KBMT knowledge gaps, often using robust statistical techniques. We describe quantitative and qualitative results from JAPANGLOSS, a broad-coverage Japanese-English MT system.
When translating "The secretary asked for details." to a language with grammatical gender, it might be necessary to determine the gender of the subject "secretary". If the sentence does not contain the necessary information, it is not always possible to disambiguate. In such cases, machine translation systems select the most common translation option, which often corresponds to the stereotypical translations, thus potentially exacerbating prejudice and marginalisation of certain groups and people. We argue that the information necessary for an adequate translation can not always be deduced fro…
We present TURJUMAN, a neural toolkit for translating from 20 languages into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). TURJUMAN exploits the recently-introduced text-to-text Transformer AraT5 model, endowing it with a powerful ability to decode into Arabic. The toolkit offers the possibility of employing a number of diverse decoding methods, making it suited for acquiring paraphrases for the MSA translations as an added value. To train TURJUMAN, we sample from publicly available parallel data employing a simple semantic similarity method to ensure data quality. This allows us to prepare and release AraOPU…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）
The success of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) largely depends on the availability of large bitext training corpora. Due to the lack of such large corpora in low-resource language pairs, NMT systems often exhibit poor performance. Extra relevant monolingual data often helps, but acquiring it could be quite expensive, especially for low-resource languages. Moreover, domain mismatch between bitext (train/test) and monolingual data might degrade the performance. To alleviate such issues, we propose AUGVIC, a novel data augmentation framework for low-resource NMT which exploits the vicinal sample…
The competitive performance of neural machine translation (NMT) critically relies on large amounts of training data. However, acquiring high-quality translation pairs requires expert knowledge and is costly. Therefore, how to best utilize a given dataset of samples with diverse quality and characteristics becomes an important yet understudied question in NMT. Curriculum learning methods have been introduced to NMT to optimize a model's performance by prescribing the data input order, based on heuristics such as the assessment of noise and difficulty levels. However, existing methods require tr…
Self-Distillation for Model Stacking Unlocks Cross-Lingual NLU in 200+ Languages
Center For Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学人工智能与数据科学中心）；IESEG School of Management（IESEG管理学院）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学语言技术实验室）
Task-oriented Dialogue (ToD) agents are mostly limited to a few widely-spoken languages, mainly due to the high cost of acquiring training data for each language. Existing low-cost approaches that rely on cross-lingual embeddings or naive machine translation sacrifice a lot of accuracy for data efficiency, and largely fail in creating a usable dialogue agent. We propose automatic methods that use ToD training data in a source language to build a high-quality functioning dialogue agent in another target language that has no training data (i.e. zero-shot) or a small training set (i.e. few-shot).…
We summarize recent machine translation (MT) research at the Information Sciences Institute of USC, and we describe its application to the development of a Japanese-English newspaper MT system. Our work aims at scaling up grammar-based, knowledge-based MT techniques. This scale-up involves the use of statistical methods, both in acquiring effective knowledge resources and in making reasonable linguistic choices in the face of knowledge gaps.
University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）
By using a trigram model and fine-tuning a pretrained BERT model for sequence classification, we show that machine translation and human translation can be classified with an accuracy above chance level, which suggests that machine translation and human translation are different in a systematic way. The classification accuracy of machine translation is much higher than of human translation. We show that this may be explained by the difference in lexical diversity between machine translation and human translation. If machine translation has independent patterns from human translation, automatic…
We investigate the potential of attention-based neural machine translation in simultaneous translation. We introduce a novel decoding algorithm, called simultaneous greedy decoding, that allows an existing neural machine translation model to begin translating before a full source sentence is received. This approach is unique from previous works on simultaneous translation in that segmentation and translation are done jointly to maximize the translation quality and that translating each segment is strongly conditioned on all the previous segments. This paper presents a first step toward buildin…
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based heavily on concepts borrowed from machine learning and statistical estimation. In particular, learning takes place by fitting a stochastic, generative model of language to the evidence. Much of the thesis is devoted to explaining conditions that must hold for this general learning strategy to arrive at linguistically desirable grammars. The thesis introduces a v…
Back-translation is a widely used data augmentation technique which leverages target monolingual data. However, its effectiveness has been challenged since automatic metrics such as BLEU only show significant improvements for test examples where the source itself is a translation, or translationese. This is believed to be due to translationese inputs better matching the back-translated training data. In this work, we show that this conjecture is not empirically supported and that back-translation improves translation quality of both naturally occurring text as well as translationese according …
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Despite the success of neural machine translation (NMT), simultaneous neural machine translation (SNMT), the task of translating in real time before a full sentence has been observed, remains challenging due to the syntactic structure difference and simultaneity requirements. In this paper, we propose a general framework for adapting neural machine translation to translate simultaneously. Our framework contains two parts: prefix translation that utilizes a consecutive NMT model to translate source prefixes and a stopping criterion that determines when to stop the prefix translation. Experiment…
Institute for Anthropomatics（拟人学研究所）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Recently, the development of neural machine translation (NMT) has significantly improved the translation quality of automatic machine translation. While most sentences are more accurate and fluent than translations by statistical machine translation (SMT)-based systems, in some cases, the NMT system produces translations that have a completely different meaning. This is especially the case when rare words occur. When using statistical machine translation, it has already been shown that significant gains can be achieved by simplifying the input in a preprocessing step. A commonly used example i…
Developing parallel corpora is an important and a difficult activity for Machine Translation. This requires manual annotation by Human Translators. Translating same text again is a useless activity. There are tools available to implement this for European Languages, but no such tool is available for Indian Languages. In this paper we present a tool for Indian Languages which not only provides automatic translations of the previously available translation but also provides multiple translations, in cases where a sentence has multiple translations, in ranked list of suggestive translations for a…
Text simplification aims at reducing the lexical, grammatical and structural complexity of a text while keeping the same meaning. In the context of machine translation, we introduce the idea of simplified translations in order to boost the learning ability of deep neural translation models. We conduct preliminary experiments showing that translation complexity is actually reduced in a translation of a source bi-text compared to the target reference of the bi-text while using a neural machine translation (NMT) system learned on the exact same bi-text. Based on knowledge distillation idea, we th…
We present a new approach to perform zero-shot cross-modal transfer between speech and text for translation tasks. Multilingual speech and text are encoded in a joint fixed-size representation space. Then, we compare different approaches to decode these multimodal and multilingual fixed-size representations, enabling zero-shot translation between languages and modalities. All our models are trained without the need of cross-modal labeled translation data. Despite a fixed-size representation, we achieve very competitive results on several text and speech translation tasks. In particular, we sig…
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（国立信息通信技术研究所）
Recent work achieved remarkable results in training neural machine translation (NMT) systems in a fully unsupervised way, with new and dedicated architectures that rely on monolingual corpora only. In this work, we propose to define unsupervised NMT (UNMT) as NMT trained with the supervision of synthetic bilingual data. Our approach straightforwardly enables the use of state-of-the-art architectures proposed for supervised NMT by replacing human-made bilingual data with synthetic bilingual data for training. We propose to initialize the training of UNMT with synthetic bilingual data generated …
An effective method to generate a large number of parallel sentences for training improved neural machine translation (NMT) systems is the use of back-translations of the target-side monolingual data. Recently, iterative back-translation has been shown to outperform standard back-translation albeit on some language pairs. This work proposes the iterative batch back-translation that is aimed at enhancing the standard iterative back-translation and enabling the efficient utilization of more monolingual data. After each iteration, improved back-translations of new sentences are added to the paral…
Analysing translation quality in regards to specific linguistic phenomena has historically been difficult and time-consuming. Neural machine translation has the attractive property that it can produce scores for arbitrary translations, and we propose a novel method to assess how well NMT systems model specific linguistic phenomena such as agreement over long distances, the production of novel words, and the faithful translation of polarity. The core idea is that we measure whether a reference translation is more probable under a NMT model than a contrastive translation which introduces a speci…
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…
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.
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Spoken language translation applications for speech suffer due to conversational speech phenomena, particularly the presence of disfluencies. With the rise of end-to-end speech translation models, processing steps such as disfluency removal that were previously an intermediate step between speech recognition and machine translation need to be incorporated into model architectures. We use a sequence-to-sequence model to translate from noisy, disfluent speech to fluent text with disfluencies removed using the recently collected `copy-edited' references for the Fisher Spanish-English dataset. We …
Amazon（亚马逊）；USC Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；DiDi Labs（滴滴实验室）
Given a rough, word-by-word gloss of a source language sentence, target language natives can uncover the latent, fully-fluent rendering of the translation. In this work we explore this intuition by breaking translation into a two step process: generating a rough gloss by means of a dictionary and then `translating' the resulting pseudo-translation, or `Translationese' into a fully fluent translation. We build our Translationese decoder once from a mish-mash of parallel data that has the target language in common and then can build dictionaries on demand using unsupervised techniques, resulting…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
The overreliance on large parallel corpora significantly limits the applicability of machine translation systems to the majority of language pairs. Back-translation has been dominantly used in previous approaches for unsupervised neural machine translation, where pseudo sentence pairs are generated to train the models with a reconstruction loss. However, the pseudo sentences are usually of low quality as translation errors accumulate during training. To avoid this fundamental issue, we propose an alternative but more effective approach, extract-edit, to extract and then edit real sentences fro…
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学信息学研究所）
Neural Machine Translation has achieved state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs using a combination of parallel and synthetic data. Synthetic data is often generated by back-translating sentences randomly sampled from monolingual data using a reverse translation model. While back-translation has been shown to be very effective in many cases, it is not entirely clear why. In this work, we explore different aspects of back-translation, and show that words with high prediction loss during training benefit most from the addition of synthetic data. We introduce several variations of…
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.
There has been great progress in improving streaming machine translation, a simultaneous paradigm where the system appends to a growing hypothesis as more source content becomes available. We study a related problem in which revisions to the hypothesis beyond strictly appending words are permitted. This is suitable for applications such as live captioning an audio feed. In this setting, we compare custom streaming approaches to re-translation, a straightforward strategy where each new source token triggers a distinct translation from scratch. We find re-translation to be as good or better than…
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机学院）
Back translation (BT) has been widely used and become one of standard techniques for data augmentation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), BT has proven to be helpful for improving the performance of translation effectively, especially for low-resource scenarios. While most works related to BT mainly focus on European languages, few of them study languages in other areas around the world. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of BT on Asia language translations between the extremely low-resource Chinese and Vietnamese language pair. We evaluate and compare the effects of different sizes o…
We present IntelliCAT, an interactive translation interface with neural models that streamline the post-editing process on machine translation output. We leverage two quality estimation (QE) models at different granularities: sentence-level QE, to predict the quality of each machine-translated sentence, and word-level QE, to locate the parts of the machine-translated sentence that need correction. Additionally, we introduce a novel translation suggestion model conditioned on both the left and right contexts, providing alternatives for specific words or phrases for correction. Finally, with wor…
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（国立信息通信技术研究所）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
One of the difficulties of neural machine translation (NMT) is the recall and appropriate translation of low-frequency words or phrases. In this paper, we propose a simple, fast, and effective method for recalling previously seen translation examples and incorporating them into the NMT decoding process. Specifically, for an input sentence, we use a search engine to retrieve sentence pairs whose source sides are similar with the input sentence, and then collect $n$-grams that are both in the retrieved target sentences and aligned with words that match in the source sentences, which we call "tra…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU)（上海交通大学）；National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)（日本信息通信研究机构(NICT)）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU)（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系）
In this paper, we introduced our joint team SJTU-NICT 's participation in the WMT 2020 machine translation shared task. In this shared task, we participated in four translation directions of three language pairs: English-Chinese, English-Polish on supervised machine translation track, German-Upper Sorbian on low-resource and unsupervised machine translation tracks. Based on different conditions of language pairs, we have experimented with diverse neural machine translation (NMT) techniques: document-enhanced NMT, XLM pre-trained language model enhanced NMT, bidirectional translation as a pre-t…
Neural machine translation has become a major alternative to widely used phrase-based statistical machine translation. We notice however that much of research on neural machine translation has focused on European languages despite its language agnostic nature. In this paper, we apply neural machine translation to the task of Arabic translation (Ar<->En) and compare it against a standard phrase-based translation system. We run extensive comparison using various configurations in preprocessing Arabic script and show that the phrase-based and neural translation systems perform comparably to each …
Video-guided machine translation as one of multimodal neural machine translation tasks targeting on generating high-quality text translation by tangibly engaging both video and text. In this work, we presented our video-guided machine translation system in approaching the Video-guided Machine Translation Challenge 2020. This system employs keyframe-based video feature extractions along with the video feature positional encoding. In the evaluation phase, our system scored 36.60 corpus-level BLEU-4 and achieved the 1st place on the Video-guided Machine Translation Challenge 2020.
Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Existing machine translation decoding algorithms generate translations in a strictly monotonic fashion and never revisit previous decisions. As a result, earlier mistakes cannot be corrected at a later stage. In this paper, we present a translation scheme that starts from an initial guess and then makes iterative improvements that may revisit previous decisions. We parameterize our model as a convolutional neural network that predicts discrete substitutions to an existing translation based on an attention mechanism over both the source sentence as well as the current translation output. By mak…
We investigate why neural machine translation (NMT) systems assign high probability to empty translations. We find two explanations. First, label smoothing makes correct-length translations less confident, making it easier for the empty translation to finally outscore them. Second, NMT systems use the same, high-frequency EoS word to end all target sentences, regardless of length. This creates an implicit smoothing that increases zero-length translations. Using different EoS types in target sentences of different lengths exposes and eliminates this implicit smoothing.
Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach
Boston University（波士顿大学）；University of Uyo（乌约大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；University of Pretoria（比勒陀利亚大学）；Bayero University, Kano（卡诺贝罗大学）；Institute For Experiential AI, Northeastern University（东北大学体验式人工智能研究所）；Howard University（霍华德大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Monash University Indonesia（印度尼西亚莫纳什大学）；Masakhane（马萨卡内组织）
Idioms are an important language phenomenon in Chinese, but idiom translation is notoriously hard. Current machine translation models perform poorly on idiom translation, while idioms are sparse in many translation datasets. We present PETCI, a parallel English translation dataset of Chinese idioms, aiming to improve idiom translation by both human and machine. The dataset is built by leveraging human and machine effort. Baseline generation models show unsatisfactory abilities to improve translation, but structure-aware classification models show good performance on distinguishing good transla…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a short story by Kurt Vonnegut from English to Catalan and Dutch using three modalities: machine-translation (MT), post-editing (PE) and translation without aid (HT). Our aim is to explore creativity, understood to involve novelty and acceptability, from a quantitative perspective. The results show that HT has the highest creativity score, followed by PE, and lastly, MT, and this is unanimous from all reviewers. A neural MT system trained on literary data does not currently have the necessary capabilities for a creative …
University of Primorska（普里莫尔斯卡大学）；Andrej Marusic Institute（安德烈·马鲁西奇研究所）；Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts（斯洛文尼亚科学与艺术研究院研究中心）；The Fran Ramovš Institute（弗兰·拉莫夫什研究所）；University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学）
The manuscript presents an experiment at implementation of a Machine Translation system in a MapReduce model. The empirical evaluation was done using fully implemented translation systems embedded into the MapReduce programming model. Two machine translation paradigms were studied: shallow transfer Rule Based Machine Translation and Statistical Machine Translation. The results show that the MapReduce model can be successfully used to increase the throughput of a machine translation system. Furthermore this method enhances the throughput of a machine translation system without decreasing the qu…
Lexically cohesive translations preserve consistency in word choices in document-level translation. We employ a copy mechanism into a context-aware neural machine translation model to allow copying words from previous translation outputs. Different from previous context-aware neural machine translation models that handle all the discourse phenomena implicitly, our model explicitly addresses the lexical cohesion problem by boosting the probabilities to output words consistently. We conduct experiments on Japanese to English translation using an evaluation dataset for discourse translation. The …
This paper describes the acquisition, preprocessing, segmentation, and alignment of an Amharic-English parallel corpus. It will be helpful for machine translation of a low-resource language, Amharic. We freely released the corpus for research purposes. Furthermore, we developed baseline statistical and neural machine translation systems; we trained statistical and neural machine translation models using the corpus. In the experiments, we also used a large monolingual corpus for the language model of statistical machine translation and back-translation of neural machine translation. In the auto…
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
Simultaneous translation is a task in which translation begins before the speaker has finished speaking. In its evaluation, we have to consider the latency of the translation in addition to the quality. The latency is preferably as small as possible for users to comprehend what the speaker says with a small delay. Existing latency metrics focus on when the translation starts but do not consider adequately when the translation ends. This means such metrics do not penalize the latency caused by a long translation output, which actually delays users' comprehension. In this work, we propose a nove…
Neural machine translation (NMT) is often criticized for failures that happen without awareness. The lack of competency awareness makes NMT untrustworthy. This is in sharp contrast to human translators who give feedback or conduct further investigations whenever they are in doubt about predictions. To fill this gap, we propose a novel competency-aware NMT by extending conventional NMT with a self-estimator, offering abilities to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency. The self-estimator encodes the information of the decoding procedure and then examines whether it can reconstr…
Machine translation software has seen rapid progress in recent years due to the advancement of deep neural networks. People routinely use machine translation software in their daily lives, such as ordering food in a foreign restaurant, receiving medical diagnosis and treatment from foreign doctors, and reading international political news online. However, due to the complexity and intractability of the underlying neural networks, modern machine translation software is still far from robust and can produce poor or incorrect translations; this can lead to misunderstanding, financial loss, threat…
Walmart Labs（沃尔玛实验室）；SAP Labs（思爱普实验室）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）
Neural Machine Translation systems built on top of Transformer-based architectures are routinely improving the state-of-the-art in translation quality according to word-overlap metrics. However, a growing number of studies also highlight the inherent gender bias that these models incorporate during training, which reflects poorly in their translations. In this work, we investigate whether these models can be instructed to fix their bias during inference using targeted, guided instructions as contexts. By translating relevant contextual sentences during inference along with the input, we observ…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
The quality of neural machine translation can be improved by leveraging additional monolingual resources to create synthetic training data. Source-side monolingual data can be (forward-)translated into the target language for self-training; target-side monolingual data can be back-translated. It has been widely reported that back-translation delivers superior results, but could this be due to artefacts in the test sets? We perform a case study using French-English news translation task and separate test sets based on their original languages. We show that forward translation delivers superior …
Ahmadu Bello University（艾哈迈杜·贝罗大学）；Bayero University（巴耶罗大学）
An effective method to generate a large number of parallel sentences for training improved neural machine translation (NMT) systems is the use of the back-translations of the target-side monolingual data. The standard back-translation method has been shown to be unable to efficiently utilize the available huge amount of existing monolingual data because of the inability of translation models to differentiate between the authentic and synthetic parallel data during training. Tagging, or using gates, has been used to enable translation models to distinguish between synthetic and authentic data, …
We investigate different approaches to translate between similar languages under low resource conditions, as part of our contribution to the WMT 2020 Similar Languages Translation Shared Task. We submitted Transformer-based bilingual and multilingual systems for all language pairs, in the two directions. We also leverage back-translation for one of the language pairs, acquiring an improvement of more than 3 BLEU points. We interpret our results in light of the degree of mutual intelligibility (based on Jaccard similarity) between each pair, finding a positive correlation between mutual intelli…
