There have been very few attempts to benchmark performances of state-of-the-art algorithms for Neural Machine Translation task on Indian Languages. Google, Bing, Facebook and Yandex are some of the very few companies which have built translation systems for few of the Indian Languages. Among them, translation results from Google are supposed to be better, based on general inspection. Bing-Translator do not even support Marathi language which has around 95 million speakers and ranks 15th in the world in terms of combined primary and secondary speakers. In this exercise, we trained and compared variety of Neural Machine Marathi to English Translators trained with BERT-tokenizer by huggingface and various Transformer based architectures using Facebook's Fairseq platform with limited but almost correct parallel corpus to achieve better BLEU scores than Google on Tatoeba and Wikimedia open datasets.
Assessing and Improving Punctuation Robustness in English-Marathi Machine Translation
Computation for Indian Language Technology (CFILT) Department of Computer Science and Engineering（印度语言技术计算（CFILT）部门计算机科学与工程系）；Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度班加罗尔理工学院）
In this paper we describe some ways to utilize various lexical resources to improve the quality of statistical machine translation system. We have augmented the training corpus with various lexical resources such as IndoWordnet semantic relation set, function words, kridanta pairs and verb phrases etc. Our research on the usage of lexical resources mainly focused on two ways such as augmenting parallel corpus with more vocabulary and augmenting with various word forms. We have described case studies, evaluations and detailed error analysis for both Marathi to Hindi and Hindi to Marathi machine…
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…
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Lack of proper linguistic resources is the major challenges faced by the Machine Translation system developments when dealing with the resource poor languages. In this paper, we describe effective ways to utilize the lexical resources to improve the quality of statistical machine translation. Our research on the usage of lexical resources mainly focused on two ways, such as; augmenting the parallel corpus with more vocabulary and to provide various word forms. We have augmented the training corpus with various lexical resources such as lexical words, function words, kridanta pairs and verb phr…
Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；MAHE（马尼帕尔高等教育学院）；University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
As the use of natural language processing increases in our day-to-day life, the need to address gender bias inherent in these systems also amplifies. This is because the inherent bias interferes with the semantic structure of the output of these systems while performing tasks like machine translation. While research is being done in English to quantify and mitigate bias, debiasing methods in Indic Languages are either relatively nascent or absent for some Indic languages altogether. Most Indic languages are gendered, i.e., each noun is assigned a gender according to each language's grammar rul…
We present in this paper our work on comparison between Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Rule-based machine translation for translation from Marathi to Hindi. Rule Based systems although robust take lots of time to build. On the other hand statistical machine translation systems are easier to create, maintain and improve upon. We describe the development of a basic Marathi-Hindi SMT system and evaluate its performance. Through a detailed error analysis, we, point out the relative strengths and weaknesses of both systems. Effectively, we shall see that even with a small amount of train…
In this paper, we show that the combination of Phrase Pair Injection and Corpus Filtering boosts the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. We extract parallel phrases and sentences from the pseudo-parallel corpus and augment it with the parallel corpus to train the NMT models. With the proposed approach, we observe an improvement in the Machine Translation (MT) system for 3 low-resource language pairs, Hindi-Marathi, English-Marathi, and English-Pashto, and 6 translation directions by up to 2.7 BLEU points, on the FLORES test data. These BLEU score improvements are over the …
Transformer based language models have led to impressive results across all domains in Natural Language Processing. Pretraining these models on language modeling tasks and finetuning them on downstream tasks such as Text Classification, Question Answering and Neural Machine Translation has consistently shown exemplary results. In this work, we propose a Multitask Finetuning methodology which combines the Bilingual Machine Translation task with an auxiliary Causal Language Modeling task to improve performance on the former task on Indian Languages. We conduct an empirical study on three languag…
We present a new open-source parallel corpus consisting of news articles collected from the Bianet magazine, an online newspaper that publishes Turkish news, often along with their translations in English and Kurdish. In this paper, we describe the collection process of the corpus and its statistical properties. We validate the benefit of using the Bianet corpus by evaluating bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation models in English-Turkish and English-Kurdish directions.
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…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Intelligent Systems Program（智能系统项目）
One of the most major and essential tasks in natural language processing is machine translation that is now highly dependent upon multilingual parallel corpora. Through this paper, we introduce the biggest Persian-English parallel corpus with more than one million sentence pairs collected from masterpieces of literature. We also present acquisition process and statistics of the corpus, and experiment a base-line statistical machine translation system using the corpus.
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation（日本电信电话株式会社通信科学实验室）
Most current machine translation models are mainly trained with parallel corpora, and their translation accuracy largely depends on the quality and quantity of the corpora. Although there are billions of parallel sentences for a few language pairs, effectively dealing with most language pairs is difficult due to a lack of publicly available parallel corpora. This paper creates a large parallel corpus for English-Japanese, a language pair for which only limited resources are available, compared to such resource-rich languages as English-German. It introduces a new web-based English-Japanese par…
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…
Sentence-level (SL) machine translation (MT) has reached acceptable quality for many high-resourced languages, but not document-level (DL) MT, which is difficult to 1) train with little amount of DL data; and 2) evaluate, as the main methods and data sets focus on SL evaluation. To address the first issue, we present a document-aligned Japanese-English conversation corpus, including balanced, high-quality business conversation data for tuning and testing. As for the second issue, we manually identify the main areas where SL MT fails to produce adequate translations in lack of context. We then …
Phrase-based Statistical models are more commonly used as they perform optimally in terms of both, translation quality and complexity of the system. Hindi and in general all Indian languages are morphologically richer than English. Hence, even though Phrase-based systems perform very well for the less divergent language pairs, for English to Indian language translation, we need more linguistic information (such as morphology, parse tree, parts of speech tags, etc.) on the source side. Factored models seem to be useful in this case, as Factored models consider word as a vector of factors. These…
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；L3Cube
We present L3Cube-MahaCorpus a Marathi monolingual data set scraped from different internet sources. We expand the existing Marathi monolingual corpus with 24.8M sentences and 289M tokens. We further present, MahaBERT, MahaAlBERT, and MahaRoBerta all BERT-based masked language models, and MahaFT, the fast text word embeddings both trained on full Marathi corpus with 752M tokens. We show the effectiveness of these resources on downstream Marathi sentiment analysis, text classification, and named entity recognition (NER) tasks. We also release MahaGPT, a generative Marathi GPT model trained on M…
This paper presents Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to NLP Tools Contest on Statistical Machine Translation in Indian Languages (ILSMT) 2015 (collocated with ICON 2015). The aim of the contest was to collectively explore the effectiveness of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) while translating within Indian languages and between English and Indian languages. In this paper, we report our work on all five language pairs, namely Bengali-Hindi (\bnhi), Marathi-Hindi (\mrhi), Tamil-Hindi (\tahi), Telugu-Hindi (\tehi), and English-Hindi (\enhi) for Health,…
Data Science Institute, NUIG, Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校数据科学研究所）；Panlingua Language Processing LLP, New Delhi（Panlingua语言处理有限责任公司（新德里））；Potamu Research Ltd（Potamu研究有限公司）；University of Colorado at Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；New York University（纽约大学）
We present the findings of the LoResMT 2021 shared task which focuses on machine translation (MT) of COVID-19 data for both low-resource spoken and sign languages. The organization of this task was conducted as part of the fourth workshop on technologies for machine translation of low resource languages (LoResMT). Parallel corpora is presented and publicly available which includes the following directions: English$\leftrightarrow$Irish, English$\leftrightarrow$Marathi, and Taiwanese Sign language$\leftrightarrow$Traditional Chinese. Training data consists of 8112, 20933 and 128608 segments, re…
In this paper, we present a corpus based study of politeness across two languages-English and Hindi. It studies the politeness in a translated parallel corpus of Hindi and English and sees how politeness in a Hindi text is translated into English. We provide a detailed theoretical background in which the comparison is carried out, followed by a brief description of the translated data within this theoretical model. Since politeness may become one of the major reasons of conflict and misunderstanding, it is a very important phenomenon to be studied and understood cross-culturally, particularly …
University of Salerno（萨勒诺大学）；ICAR-CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息与高性能计算研究所）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
The development of automated approaches to linguistic acceptability has been greatly fostered by the availability of the English CoLA corpus, which has also been included in the widely used GLUE benchmark. However, this kind of research for languages other than English, as well as the analysis of cross-lingual approaches, has been hindered by the lack of resources with a comparable size in other languages. We have therefore developed the ItaCoLA corpus, containing almost 10,000 sentences with acceptability judgments, which has been created following the same approach and the same steps as the …
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（甘地讷格尔印度理工学院）
Code-mixing is the phenomenon of using more than one language in a sentence. It is a very frequently observed pattern of communication on social media platforms. Flexibility to use multiple languages in one text message might help to communicate efficiently with the target audience. But, it adds to the challenge of processing and understanding natural language to a much larger extent. This paper presents a parallel corpus of the 13,738 code-mixed English-Hindi sentences and their corresponding translation in English. The translations of sentences are done manually by the annotators. We are rel…
This paper discusses Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to the NLP Tools Contest on Statistical Machine Translation in Indian Languages (ILSMT) 2014 (collocated with ICON 2014). The objective of the contest was to explore the effectiveness of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) for Indian language to Indian language and English-Hindi machine translation. In this paper, we have proposed that suffix separation and word splitting for SMT from agglutinative languages to Hindi significantly improves over the baseline (BL). We have also shown that the factored…
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…
National Center for AI and Big Data Technology（国家人工智能与大数据技术中心）；King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王科技城（KACST））
In this paper, we present a recipe for building a good Arabic-English neural machine translation. We compare neural systems with traditional phrase-based systems using various parallel corpora including UN, ISI and Ummah. We also investigate the importance of special preprocessing of the Arabic script. The presented results are based on test sets from NIST MT 2005 and 2012. The best neural system produces a gain of +13 BLEU points compared to an equivalent simple phrase-based system in NIST MT12 test set. Unexpectedly, we find that tuning a model trained on the whole data using a small high qu…
Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS)（基础科学高级研究所）
Parallel data are an important part of a reliable Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system. The more of these data are available, the better the quality of the SMT system. However, for some language pairs such as Persian-English, parallel sources of this kind are scarce. In this paper, a bidirectional method is proposed to extract parallel sentences from English and Persian document aligned Wikipedia. Two machine translation systems are employed to translate from Persian to English and the reverse after which an IR system is used to measure the similarity of the translated sentences. Addin…
University of Tyumen（秋明大学）；Thales Canada（泰雷兹加拿大公司）
This paper describes neural models developed for the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in English and Indo-Aryan Languages Shared Task 2021. Our team called neuro-utmn-thales participated in two tasks on binary and fine-grained classification of English tweets that contain hate, offensive, and profane content (English Subtasks A & B) and one task on identification of problematic content in Marathi (Marathi Subtask A). For English subtasks, we investigate the impact of additional corpora for hate speech detection to fine-tune transformer models. We also apply a one-vs-rest approa…
Grammatical tense and mood are important linguistic phenomena to consider in natural language processing (NLP) research. We consider the correspondence between English and German tense and mood in translation. Human translators do not find this correspondence easy, and as we will show through careful analysis, there are no simplistic ways to map tense and mood from one language to another. Our observations about the challenges of human translation of tense and mood have important implications for multilingual NLP. Of particular importance is the challenge of modeling tense and mood in rule-bas…
BhashaSetu: A Data-Centric Approach to Low-Resource Machine Translation
Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai（孟买韦尔马塔·吉贾拜技术学院计算机工程与信息技术系）；Tübingen AI Center, University of Tübingen, Germany（图宾根大学图宾根人工智能中心，德国）
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）
Multimodal neural machine translation (NMT) has become an increasingly important area of research over the years because additional modalities, such as image data, can provide more context to textual data. Furthermore, the viability of training multimodal NMT models without a large parallel corpus continues to be investigated due to low availability of parallel sentences with images, particularly for English-Japanese data. However, this void can be filled with comparable sentences that contain bilingual terms and parallel phrases, which are naturally created through media such as social networ…
West Greenlandic, known by native speakers as Kalaallisut, is an extremely low-resource polysynthetic language spoken by around 56,000 people in Greenland. Here, we attempt to finetune a pretrained Kalaallisut-to-English neural machine translation (NMT) system using web-crawled pseudoparallel sentences from around 30 multilingual websites. We compile a corpus of over 93,000 Kalaallisut sentences and over 140,000 Danish sentences, then use cross-lingual sentence embeddings and approximate nearest-neighbors search in an attempt to mine near-translations from these corpora. Finally, we translate …
MahaParaphrase: A Marathi Paraphrase Detection Corpus and BERT-based Models
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（普那计算机技术研究所）；MKSSS’ Cummins College of Engineering for Women（MKSSS女子工程学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；L3Cube Labs（L3Cube实验室）
NLP Ghana（NLP加纳）；Algorine；Leuphana University Luneburg（吕讷堡洛伊法纳大学）；University of Cape Coast（开普海岸大学）；Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡龙比亚大学）；Accra Institute of Technology（阿克拉理工学院）；Tulane University（杜兰大学）；University of Tromso（特罗姆瑟大学）；AiMlCamp；University of Strathclyde（斯特拉斯克莱德大学）；Azubi Africa；Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学）；Centre for Research, Data Science and IT Solutions（研究、数据科学与IT解决方案中心）；University of Energy and Natural Resources（能源与自然资源大学）；Integrated Geospatial Intelligence Application Centre（综合地理空间情报应用中心）；SRH Berlin University of Applied Science（SRH柏林应用科学大学）
We present a parallel machine translation training corpus for English and Akuapem Twi of 25,421 sentence pairs. We used a transformer-based translator to generate initial translations in Akuapem Twi, which were later verified and corrected where necessary by native speakers to eliminate any occurrence of translationese. In addition, 697 higher quality crowd-sourced sentences are provided for use as an evaluation set for downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The typical use case for the larger human-verified dataset is for further training of machine translation models in Akuapem …
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）
I train models for the task of neural machine translation for English-Hungarian and Hungarian-English, using the Hunglish2 corpus. The main contribution of this work is evaluating different data augmentation methods during the training of NMT models. I propose 5 different augmentation methods that are structure-aware, meaning that instead of randomly selecting words for blanking or replacement, the dependency tree of sentences is used as a basis for augmentation. I start my thesis with a detailed literature review on neural networks, sequential modeling, neural machine translation, dependency …
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Automated offensive language detection is essential in combating the spread of hate speech, particularly in social media. This paper describes our work on Offensive Language Identification in low resource Indic language Marathi. The problem is formulated as a text classification task to identify a tweet as offensive or non-offensive. We evaluate different mono-lingual and multi-lingual BERT models on this classification task, focusing on BERT models pre-trained with social media datasets. We compare the performance of MuRIL, MahaTweetBERT, MahaTweetBERT-Hateful, and MahaBERT on the HASOC 2022 …
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；L3Cube Pune（L3Cube浦那）
Despite being the third most popular language in India, the Marathi language lacks useful NLP resources. Moreover, popular NLP libraries do not have support for the Marathi language. With L3Cube-MahaNLP, we aim to build resources and a library for Marathi natural language processing. We present datasets and transformer models for supervised tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and hate speech detection. We have also published a monolingual Marathi corpus for unsupervised language modeling tasks. Overall we present MahaCorpus, MahaSent, MahaNER, and MahaHate datasets and the…
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）
The widespread presence of offensive language on social media motivated the development of systems capable of recognizing such content automatically. Apart from a few notable exceptions, most research on automatic offensive language identification has dealt with English. To address this shortcoming, we introduce MOLD, the Marathi Offensive Language Dataset. MOLD is the first dataset of its kind compiled for Marathi, thus opening a new domain for research in low-resource Indo-Aryan languages. We present results from several machine learning experiments on this dataset, including zero-short and …
Central Calcutta Polytechnic（中央加尔各答理工学院）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
This paper reports about our work in the ICON 2013 NLP TOOLS CONTEST on Named Entity Recognition. We submitted runs for Bengali, English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. A statistical HMM (Hidden Markov Models) based model has been used to implement our system. The system has been trained and tested on the NLP TOOLS CONTEST: ICON 2013 datasets. Our system obtains F-measures of 0.8599, 0.7704, 0.7520, 0.4289, 0.5455, 0.4466, and 0.4003 for Bengali, English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu respectively.
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；L3Cube Pune（L3Cube浦那）
The monolingual Hindi BERT models currently available on the model hub do not perform better than the multi-lingual models on downstream tasks. We present L3Cube-HindBERT, a Hindi BERT model pre-trained on Hindi monolingual corpus. Further, since Indic languages, Hindi and Marathi share the Devanagari script, we train a single model for both languages. We release DevBERT, a Devanagari BERT model trained on both Marathi and Hindi monolingual datasets. We evaluate these models on downstream Hindi and Marathi text classification and named entity recognition tasks. The HindBERT and DevBERT-based m…
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；L3Cube；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Sentiment analysis is one of the most fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing. Popular languages like English, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and also Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil have seen a significant amount of work in this area. However, the Marathi language which is the third most popular language in India still lags behind due to the absence of proper datasets. In this paper, we present the first major publicly available Marathi Sentiment Analysis Dataset - L3CubeMahaSent. It is curated using tweets extracted from various Maharashtrian personalities' Twitter accoun…
We present the IIT Bombay English-Hindi Parallel Corpus. The corpus is a compilation of parallel corpora previously available in the public domain as well as new parallel corpora we collected. The corpus contains 1.49 million parallel segments, of which 694k segments were not previously available in the public domain. The corpus has been pre-processed for machine translation, and we report baseline phrase-based SMT and NMT translation results on this corpus. This corpus has been used in two editions of shared tasks at the Workshop on Asian Language Translation (2016 and 2017). The corpus is fr…
We present the Prepositions Annotated with Supersense Tags in Reddit International English ("PASTRIE") corpus, a new dataset containing manually annotated preposition supersenses of English data from presumed speakers of four L1s: English, French, German, and Spanish. The annotations are comprehensive, covering all preposition types and tokens in the sample. Along with the corpus, we provide analysis of distributional patterns across the included L1s and a discussion of the influence of L1s on L2 preposition choice.
