Many Nigerian languages have relinquished their previous prestige and purpose in modern society to English and Nigerian Pidgin. For the millions of L1 speakers of indigenous languages, there are inequalities that manifest themselves as unequal access to information, communications, health care, security as well as attenuated participation in political and civic life. To minimize exclusion and promote socio-linguistic and economic empowerment, this work explores the feasibility of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for the Edoid language family of Southern Nigeria. Using the new JW300 public dataset, we trained and evaluated baseline translation models for four widely spoken languages in this group: Èdó, Ésán, Urhobo and Isoko. Trained models, code and datasets have been open-sourced to advance future research efforts on Edoid language technology.
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…
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 …
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.
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.
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…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics(洞察数据分析中心);Data Science Institute(数据科学研究所);National University of Ireland Galway(爱尔兰国立高威大学)
Machine translation is one of the applications of natural language processing which has been explored in different languages. Recently researchers started paying attention towards machine translation for resource-poor languages and closely related languages. A widespread and underlying problem for these machine translation systems is the variation in orthographic conventions which causes many issues to traditional approaches. Two languages written in two different orthographies are not easily comparable, but orthographic information can also be used to improve the machine translation system. T…
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.
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 …
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…
Language Technology Lab(语言技术实验室);University of Amsterdam(阿姆斯特丹大学)
Machine translation for Sranantongo (Sranan, srn), a low-resource Creole language spoken predominantly in Surinam, is virgin territory. In this study we create a general purpose machine translation system for srn. In order to facilitate this research, we introduce the SRNcorpus, a collection of parallel Dutch (nl) to srn and monolingual srn data. We experiment with a wide range of proven machine translation methods. Our results demonstrate a strong baseline machine translation system for srn.
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…
Center for Speech and Language Processing(语音与语言处理中心);Department of Computer Science(计算机科学系);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学)
Draft of textbook chapter on neural machine translation. a comprehensive treatment of the topic, ranging from introduction to neural networks, computation graphs, description of the currently dominant attentional sequence-to-sequence model, recent refinements, alternative architectures and challenges. Written as chapter for the textbook Statistical Machine Translation. Used in the JHU Fall 2017 class on machine translation.
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a new approach to machine translation that has made great progress in recent years. However, recent studies show that NMT generally produces fluent but inadequate translations (Tu et al. 2016b; Tu et al. 2016a; He et al. 2016; Tu et al. 2017). This is in contrast to conventional Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which usually yields adequate but non-fluent translations. It is natural, therefore, to leverage the advantages of both models for better translations, and in this work we propose to incorporate SMT model into NMT framework. More specifically, a…
We explore six challenges for neural machine translation: domain mismatch, amount of training data, rare words, long sentences, word alignment, and beam search. We show both deficiencies and improvements over the quality of phrase-based statistical machine translation.
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan(波兹南亚当·密茨凯维奇大学数学与计算机科学学院);School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院);Moses Machine Translation CIC(Moses机器翻译社区利益公司)
In this paper we provide the largest published comparison of translation quality for phrase-based SMT and neural machine translation across 30 translation directions. For ten directions we also include hierarchical phrase-based MT. Experiments are performed for the recently published United Nations Parallel Corpus v1.0 and its large six-way sentence-aligned subcorpus. In the second part of the paper we investigate aspects of translation speed, introducing AmuNMT, our efficient neural machine translation decoder. We demonstrate that current neural machine translation could already be used for i…
We present an approach to Machine Translation that combines the ideas and methodologies of the Example-Based and Lexicalist theoretical frameworks. The approach has been implemented in a multilingual Machine Translation system.
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 effect of translationese has been studied in the field of machine translation (MT), mostly with respect to training data. We study in depth the effect of translationese on test data, using the test sets from the last three editions of WMT's news shared task, containing 17 translation directions. We show evidence that (i) the use of translationese in test sets results in inflated human evaluation scores for MT systems; (ii) in some cases system rankings do change and (iii) the impact translationese has on a translation direction is inversely correlated to the translation quality attainable …
This report presents an automatic evaluation of the general machine translation task of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT22). It evaluates a total of 185 systems for 21 translation directions including high-resource to low-resource language pairs and from closely related to distant languages. This large-scale automatic evaluation highlights some of the current limits of state-of-the-art machine translation systems. It also shows how automatic metrics, namely chrF, BLEU, and COMET, can complement themselves to mitigate their own limits in terms of interpretability and accuracy.
Middle East Technical University(中东技术大学);IBM T.J. Watson Research Center(IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心);New York University(纽约大学)
In this paper, we propose a novel finetuning algorithm for the recently introduced multi-way, mulitlingual neural machine translate that enables zero-resource machine translation. When used together with novel many-to-one translation strategies, we empirically show that this finetuning algorithm allows the multi-way, multilingual model to translate a zero-resource language pair (1) as well as a single-pair neural translation model trained with up to 1M direct parallel sentences of the same language pair and (2) better than pivot-based translation strategy, while keeping only one additional cop…
University of Zurich(苏黎世大学);University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学)
Recent research suggests that neural machine translation achieves parity with professional human translation on the WMT Chinese--English news translation task. We empirically test this claim with alternative evaluation protocols, contrasting the evaluation of single sentences and entire documents. In a pairwise ranking experiment, human raters assessing adequacy and fluency show a stronger preference for human over machine translation when evaluating documents as compared to isolated sentences. Our findings emphasise the need to shift towards document-level evaluation as machine translation im…
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.
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab(华为诺亚方舟实验室);Institute for Artificial Intelligence(人工智能研究院);Tsinghua University(清华大学);Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology(北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心)
The field of machine translation has progressed tremendously in recent years. Even though the translation quality has improved significantly, current systems are still unable to produce uniformly acceptable machine translations for the variety of possible use cases. In this work, we put machine translation in a cross-lingual pipeline and introduce downstream tasks to define task-specific acceptability of machine translations. This allows us to leverage parallel data to automatically generate acceptability annotations on a large scale, which in turn help to learn acceptability detectors for the…
We present a simple, yet effective, Neural Machine Translation system for Indian languages. We demonstrate the feasibility for multiple language pairs, and establish a strong baseline for further research.
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…
A probabilistic model for computer-based generation of a machine translation system on the basis of English-Russian parallel text corpora is suggested. The model is trained using parallel text corpora with pre-aligned source and target sentences. The training of the model results in a bilingual dictionary of words and "word blocks" with relevant translation probability.
Although neural machine translation has made significant progress recently, how to integrate multiple overlapping, arbitrary prior knowledge sources remains a challenge. In this work, we propose to use posterior regularization to provide a general framework for integrating prior knowledge into neural machine translation. We represent prior knowledge sources as features in a log-linear model, which guides the learning process of the neural translation model. Experiments on Chinese-English translation show that our approach leads to significant improvements.
We describe our recently developed neural machine translation (NMT) system and benchmark it against our own statistical machine translation (SMT) system as well as two other general purpose online engines (statistical and neural). We present automatic and human evaluation results of the translation output provided by each system. We also analyze the effect of sentence length on the quality of output for SMT and NMT systems.
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…
University of Southern California(南加州大学);University of Washington(华盛顿大学)
Most statistical machine translation systems cannot translate words that are unseen in the training data. However, humans can translate many classes of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words (e.g., novel morphological variants, misspellings, and compounds) without context by using orthographic clues. Following this observation, we describe and evaluate several general methods for OOV translation that use only subword information. We pose the OOV translation problem as a standalone task and intrinsically evaluate our approaches on fourteen typologically diverse languages across varying resource levels. …
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…
This paper introduces WeChat's participation in WMT 2022 shared biomedical translation task on Chinese to English. Our systems are based on the Transformer, and use several different Transformer structures to improve the quality of translation. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, data generation, several variants of Transformer, fine-tuning and model ensemble. Our Chinese$\to$English system, named Summer, achieves the highest BLEU score among all submissions.
Domain adaptation is a key feature in Machine Translation. It generally encompasses terminology, domain and style adaptation, especially for human post-editing workflows in Computer Assisted Translation (CAT). With Neural Machine Translation (NMT), we introduce a new notion of domain adaptation that we call "specialization" and which is showing promising results both in the learning speed and in adaptation accuracy. In this paper, we propose to explore this approach under several perspectives.
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.
A recent study has shown that, compared to human translations, neural machine translations contain more strongly-associated formulaic sequences made of relatively high-frequency words, but far less strongly-associated formulaic sequences made of relatively rare words. These results were obtained on the basis of translations of quality newspaper articles in which human translations can be thought to be not very literal. The present study attempts to replicate this research using a parliamentary corpus. The text were translated from French to English by three well-known neural machine translatio…
Machine Translation is one of the major oldest and the most active research area in Natural Language Processing. Currently, Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) dominates the Machine Translation research. Statistical Machine Translation is an approach to Machine Translation which uses models to learn translation patterns directly from data, and generalize them to translate a new unseen text. The SMT approach is largely language independent, i.e. the models can be applied to any language pair. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) attempts to generate translations using statistical methods bas…
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…
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…
An effective method to improve extremely low-resource neural machine translation is multilingual training, which can be improved by leveraging monolingual data to create synthetic bilingual corpora using the back-translation method. This work focuses on closely related languages from the Uralic language family: from Estonian and Finnish geographical regions. We find that multilingual learning and synthetic corpora increase the translation quality in every language pair for which we have data. We show that transfer learning and fine-tuning are very effective for doing low-resource machine trans…
Fondazione Bruno Kessler(布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会);University of Trento(特伦托大学)
We propose a neural machine translation (NMT) approach that, instead of pursuing adequacy and fluency ("human-oriented" quality criteria), aims to generate translations that are best suited as input to a natural language processing component designed for a specific downstream task (a "machine-oriented" criterion). Towards this objective, we present a reinforcement learning technique based on a new candidate sampling strategy, which exploits the results obtained on the downstream task as weak feedback. Experiments in sentiment classification of Twitter data in German and Italian show that feedi…
We performed corpus correction on a modality corpus for machine translation by using such machine-learning methods as the maximum-entropy method. We thus constructed a high-quality modality corpus based on corpus correction. We compared several kinds of methods for corpus correction in our experiments and developed a good method for corpus correction.
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…
We propose a straightforward vocabulary adaptation scheme to extend the language capacity of multilingual machine translation models, paving the way towards efficient continual learning for multilingual machine translation. Our approach is suitable for large-scale datasets, applies to distant languages with unseen scripts, incurs only minor degradation on the translation performance for the original language pairs and provides competitive performance even in the case where we only possess monolingual data for the new languages.
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…
Triangular machine translation is a special case of low-resource machine translation where the language pair of interest has limited parallel data, but both languages have abundant parallel data with a pivot language. Naturally, the key to triangular machine translation is the successful exploitation of such auxiliary data. In this work, we propose a transfer-learning-based approach that utilizes all types of auxiliary data. As we train auxiliary source-pivot and pivot-target translation models, we initialize some parameters of the pivot side with a pre-trained language model and freeze them t…
Korea University of Science and Technology (UST)(韩国科学技术大学(UST));Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI)(电子通信研究院(ETRI))
In machine translation, we often try to collect resources to improve performance. However, most of the language pairs, such as Korean-Arabic and Korean-Vietnamese, do not have enough resources to train machine translation systems. In this paper, we propose the use of synthetic methods for extending a low-resource corpus and apply it to a multi-source neural machine translation model. We showed the improvement of machine translation performance through corpus extension using the synthetic method. We specifically focused on how to create source sentences that can make better target sentences, in…
Dublin City University(都柏林城市大学);University of Groningen(格罗宁根大学);Prompsit Language Engineering(Prompsit语言工程公司)
We aim to shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the newly introduced neural machine translation paradigm. To that end, we conduct a multifaceted evaluation in which we compare outputs produced by state-of-the-art neural machine translation and phrase-based machine translation systems for 9 language directions across a number of dimensions. Specifically, we measure the similarity of the outputs, their fluency and amount of reordering, the effect of sentence length and performance across different error categories. We find out that translations produced by neural machine translation syst…
Fondazione Bruno Kessler(布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会);Interactions, LLC(Interactions有限责任公司)
Machine translation systems are conventionally trained on textual resources that do not model phenomena that occur in spoken language. While the evaluation of neural machine translation systems on textual inputs is actively researched in the literature , little has been discovered about the complexities of translating spoken language data with neural models. We introduce and motivate interesting problems one faces when considering the translation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) outputs on neural machine translation (NMT) systems. We test the robustness of sentence encoding approaches for…
The interest in statistical machine translation systems increases currently due to political and social events in the world. A proposed Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) based model that can be used to translate a sentence from the source Language (English) to the target language (Arabic) automatically through efficiently incorporating different statistical and Natural Language Processing (NLP) models such as language model, alignment model, phrase based model, reordering model, and translation model. These models are combined to enhance the performance of statistical machine translation (…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway(爱尔兰国立高威大学数据科学研究所(Insight数据分析中心));United Language Group(联合语言集团)
Rule-based machine translation is a machine translation paradigm where linguistic knowledge is encoded by an expert in the form of rules that translate text from source to target language. While this approach grants extensive control over the output of the system, the cost of formalising the needed linguistic knowledge is much higher than training a corpus-based system, where a machine learning approach is used to automatically learn to translate from examples. In this paper, we describe different approaches to leverage the information contained in rule-based machine translation systems to imp…
Machine Translation is one of the research fields of Computational Linguistics. The objective of many MT Researchers is to develop an MT System that produce good quality and high accuracy output translations and which also covers maximum language pairs. As internet and Globalization is increasing day by day, we need a way that improves the quality of translation. For this reason, we have developed a Classifier based Text Simplification Model for English-Hindi Machine Translation Systems. We have used support vector machines and Naïve Bayes Classifier to develop this model. We have also evaluat…
Neural machine translation (NMT) approaches have improved the state of the art in many machine translation settings over the last couple of years, but they require large amounts of training data to produce sensible output. We demonstrate that NMT can be used for low-resource languages as well, by introducing more local dependencies and using word alignments to learn sentence reordering during translation. In addition to our novel model, we also present an empirical evaluation of low-resource phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) and NMT to investigate the lower limits of the respe…
A large number of machine translation approaches have recently been developed to facilitate the fluid migration of content across languages. However, the literature suggests that many obstacles must still be dealt with to achieve better automatic translations. One of these obstacles is lexical and syntactic ambiguity. A promising way of overcoming this problem is using Semantic Web technologies. This article is an extended abstract of our systematic review on machine translation approaches that rely on Semantic Web technologies for improving the translation of texts. Overall, we present the ch…
Neural machine translation, a recently proposed approach to machine translation based purely on neural networks, has shown promising results compared to the existing approaches such as phrase-based statistical machine translation. Despite its recent success, neural machine translation has its limitation in handling a larger vocabulary, as training complexity as well as decoding complexity increase proportionally to the number of target words. In this paper, we propose a method that allows us to use a very large target vocabulary without increasing training complexity, based on importance sampl…
Nara Institute of Science and Technology(奈良先端科学技术大学院大学)
Simultaneous machine translation is a variant of machine translation that starts the translation process before the end of an input. This task faces a trade-off between translation accuracy and latency. We have to determine when we start the translation for observed inputs so far, to achieve good practical performance. In this work, we propose a neural machine translation method to determine this timing in an adaptive manner. The proposed method introduces a special token '<wait>', which is generated when the translation model chooses to read the next input token instead of generating an outpu…