Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING and CoNLL, are affiliated to African institutions. In this work, we discuss our effort toward building a standard machine translation benchmark dataset for Igbo, one of the 3 major Nigerian languages. Igbo is spoken by more than 50 million people globally with over 50% of the speakers are in southeastern Nigeria. Igbo is low resourced although there have been some efforts toward developing IgboNLP such as part of speech tagging and diacritic restoration
The IgboAPI Dataset: Empowering Igbo Language Technologies through Multi-dialectal Enrichment
Lanfrica（兰非里亚）；Masakhane（马萨卡内）；UCREL（乌克雷尔）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；Nnamdi Azikiwe University（纳姆迪·阿齐基韦大学）；University of Nigeria（尼日利亚大学）；University of Ibadan（伊巴丹大学）
Department of Automation and Applied Informatics（自动化与应用信息学系）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Eötvös Loránd Research Network（厄特沃什·罗兰研究网络）；Institute for Computer Science and Control（计算机科学与控制研究所）
We train Transformer-based neural machine translation models for Hungarian-English and English-Hungarian using the Hunglish2 corpus. Our best models achieve a BLEU score of 40.0 on HungarianEnglish and 33.4 on English-Hungarian. Furthermore, we present results on an ongoing work about syntax-based augmentation for neural machine translation. Both our code and models are publicly available.
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…
The performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) depends significantly on the size of the available parallel corpus. Due to this fact, low resource language pairs demonstrate low translation performance compared to high resource language pairs. The translation quality further degrades when NMT is performed for morphologically rich languages. Even though the web contains a large amount of information, most people in Sri Lanka are unable to read and understand English properly. Therefore, there is a huge requirement of translating English content to local languages to share information among …
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 …
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for low-resource languages suffers from low performance because of the lack of large amounts of parallel data and language diversity. To contribute to ameliorating this problem, we built a baseline model for English-Hausa machine translation, which is considered a task for low-resource language. The Hausa language is the second largest Afro-Asiatic language in the world after Arabic and it is the third largest language for trading across a larger swath of West Africa countries, after English and French. In this paper, we curated different datasets containing Ha…
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）
Recent advancements in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have proved to produce a state of the art results on machine translation for low resource Indian languages. This paper describes the neural machine translation systems for the English-Hindi language presented in AdapMT Shared Task ICON 2020. The shared task aims to build a translation system for Indian languages in specific domains like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chemistry using a small in-domain parallel corpus. We evaluated the effectiveness of two popular NMT models i.e, LSTM, and Transformer architectures for the English-…
Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of …
Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousand…
The applications of recurrent neural networks in machine translation are increasing in natural language processing. Besides other languages, Bangla language contains a large amount of vocabulary. Improvement of English to Bangla machine translation would be a significant contribution to Bangla Language processing. This paper describes an architecture of English to Bangla machine translation system. The system has been implemented with the encoder-decoder recurrent neural network. The model uses a knowledge-based context vector for the mapping of English and Bangla words. Performances of the mo…
This paper provides an overview of NVIDIA NeMo's neural machine translation systems for the constrained data track of the WMT21 News and Biomedical Shared Translation Tasks. Our news task submissions for English-German (En-De) and English-Russian (En-Ru) are built on top of a baseline transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model. Specifically, we use a combination of 1) checkpoint averaging 2) model scaling 3) data augmentation with backtranslation and knowledge distillation from right-to-left factorized models 4) finetuning on test sets from previous years 5) model ensembling 6) shallow fusio…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research（Salesforce研究中心）；Institute for Infocomm Research (IR), A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
We introduce Data Diversification: a simple but effective strategy to boost neural machine translation (NMT) performance. It diversifies the training data by using the predictions of multiple forward and backward models and then merging them with the original dataset on which the final NMT model is trained. Our method is applicable to all NMT models. It does not require extra monolingual data like back-translation, nor does it add more computations and parameters like ensembles of models. Our method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 30.7 and 43.7 in the WMT'14 English-German and English…
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.
In this research paper, I will elaborate on a method to evaluate machine translation models based on their performance on underlying syntactical phenomena between English and Arabic languages. This method is especially important as such "neural" and "machine learning" are hard to fine-tune and change. Thus, finding a way to evaluate them easily and diversely would greatly help the task of bettering them.
This article overviews the current state of the English-Lithuanian-English machine translation system. The first part of the article describes the problems that system poses today and what actions will be taken to solve them in the future. The second part of the article tackles the main issue of the translation process. Article briefly overviews the word sense disambiguation for MT technique using Google.
There are publicly available general purpose sentiment lexicons in some high resource languages but very few exist in the low resource languages. This makes it difficult to directly perform sentiment analysis tasks in such languages. The objective of this work is to create a general purpose sentiment lexicon for the Igbo language that can determine the sentiment of documents written in the Igbo language without having to translate it to the English language. The material used was an automatically translated lexicon by Liu and the manual addition of Igbo native words. The result of this work is…
We outline a bidirectional translation system that converts sentences from American Sign Language (ASL) to English, and vice versa. To perform machine translation between ASL and English, we utilize a generative approach. Specifically, we employ an adjustment to the IBM word-alignment model 1 (IBM WAM1), where we define language models for English and ASL, as well as a translation model, and attempt to generate a translation that maximizes the posterior distribution defined by these models. Then, using these models, we are able to quantify the concepts of fluency and faithfulness of a translat…
The sense analysis is still critical problem in machine translation system, especially such as English-Korean translation which the syntactical different between source and target languages is very great. We suggest a method for selecting the noun sense using contextual feature in English-Korean Translation.
In this paper we present our work on a case study on Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Rule based machine translation (RBMT) for translation from English to Malayalam and Malayalam to English. One of the motivations of our study is to make a three way performance comparison, such as, a) SMT and RBMT b) English to Malayalam SMT and Malayalam to English SMT c) English to Malayalam RBMT and Malayalam to English RBMT. We describe the development of English to Malayalam and Malayalam to English baseline phrase based SMT system and the evaluation of its performance compared against the RBMT …
AI Saturdays Lagos（拉各斯AI星期六）；Niger-Volta Language Technologies Institute（尼日尔-沃尔特语言技术研究所）
This paper describes foundational efforts with SautiDB-Naija, a novel corpus of non-native (L2) Nigerian English speech. We describe how the corpus was created and curated as well as preliminary experiments with accent classification and learning Nigerian accent embeddings. The initial version of the corpus includes over 900 recordings from L2 English speakers of Nigerian languages, such as Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Efik-Ibibio, and Igala. We further demonstrate how fine-tuning on a pre-trained model like wav2vec can yield representations suitable for related speech tasks such as accent classificatio…
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.
In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2018 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Finnish to English. The system used a Character Based Neural Machine Translation model to accomplish the given task. The current paper documents the preprocessing steps, the description of the submitted system and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 12.9.
The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT19 Shared Task on News Translation in six language directions: English-to-Gujarati, Gujarati-to-English, English-to-Chinese, Chinese-to-English, German-to-English, and English-to-Czech. For all translation directions, we created or used back-translations of monolingual data in the target language as additional synthetic training data. For English-Gujarati, we also explored semi-supervised MT with cross-lingual language model pre-training, and translation pivoting through Hindi. For translation to and from Chinese, we investigated character-bas…
Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内理工大学）；FPT Technology Research Institute, FPT University（FPT大学FPT技术研究院）
Machine translation is shifting to an end-to-end approach based on deep neural networks. The state of the art achieves impressive results for popular language pairs such as English - French or English - Chinese. However for English - Vietnamese the shortage of parallel corpora and expensive hyper-parameter search present practical challenges to neural-based approaches. This paper highlights our efforts on improving English-Vietnamese translations in two directions: (1) Building the largest open Vietnamese - English corpus to date, and (2) Extensive experiments with the latest neural models to …
This paper describes LIUM submissions to WMT17 News Translation Task for English-German, English-Turkish, English-Czech and English-Latvian language pairs. We train BPE-based attentive Neural Machine Translation systems with and without factored outputs using the open source nmtpy framework. Competitive scores were obtained by ensembling various systems and exploiting the availability of target monolingual corpora for back-translation. The impact of back-translation quantity and quality is also analyzed for English-Turkish where our post-deadline submission surpassed the best entry by +1.6 BLE…
Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently become popular in the field of machine translation. However, NMT suffers from the problem of repeating or missing words in the translation. To address this problem, Tu et al. (2017) proposed an encoder-decoder-reconstructor framework for NMT using back-translation. In this method, they selected the best forward translation model in the same manner as Bahdanau et al. (2015), and then trained a bi-directional translation model as fine-tuning. Their experiments show that it offers significant improvement in BLEU scores in Chinese-English translation t…
Communication tools make the world like a small village and as a consequence people can contact with others who are from different societies or who speak different languages. This communication cannot happen effectively without Machine Translation because they can be found anytime and everywhere. There are a number of studies that have developed Machine Translation for the English language with so many other languages except the Arabic it has not been considered yet. Therefore we aim to highlight a roadmap for our proposed translation machine to provide an enhanced Arabic English translation b…
The parallel corpus for multilingual NLP tasks, deep learning applications like Statistical Machine Translation Systems is very important. The parallel corpus of Hindi-English language pair available for news translation task till date is of very limited size as per the requirement of the systems are concerned. In this work we have developed an automatic parallel corpus generation system prototype, which creates Hindi-English parallel corpus for news translation task. Further to verify the quality of generated parallel corpus we have experimented by taking various performance metrics and the r…
We introduce a high-quality and large-scale Vietnamese-English parallel dataset of 3.02M sentence pairs, which is 2.9M pairs larger than the benchmark Vietnamese-English machine translation corpus IWSLT15. We conduct experiments comparing strong neural baselines and well-known automatic translation engines on our dataset and find that in both automatic and human evaluations: the best performance is obtained by fine-tuning the pre-trained sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder mBART. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale Vietnamese-English machine translation study. We hope …
Wollo University（沃洛大学）；Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Bahir Dar University（巴赫达尔大学）；Assosa University（阿索萨大学）
Machine translation (MT) is one of the main tasks in natural language processing whose objective is to translate texts automatically from one natural language to another. Nowadays, using deep neural networks for MT tasks has received great attention. These networks require lots of data to learn abstract representations of the input and store it in continuous vectors. This paper presents the first relatively large-scale Amharic-English parallel sentence dataset. Using these compiled data, we build bi-directional Amharic-English translation models by fine-tuning the existing Facebook M2M100 pre-…
In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2019 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Lithuanian to English. To accomplish the given task, our system used a Word Embedding based Neural Machine Translation model to post edit the outputs generated by a Statistical Machine Translation model. The current paper documents the architecture of our model, descriptions of the various modules and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 17.6.
The acceleration in telecommunication needs leads to many groups of research, especially in communication facilitating and Machine Translation fields. While people contact with others having different languages and cultures, they need to have instant translations. However, the available instant translators are still providing somewhat bad Arabic-English Translations, for instance when translating books or articles, the meaning is not totally accurate. Therefore, using the semantic web techniques to deal with the homographs and homonyms semantically, the aim of this research is to extend a mode…
This paper presents the NICT's participation to the WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in the eight translation directions of four language pairs: Estonian-English, Finnish-English, Turkish-English and Chinese-English. For each translation direction, we prepared state-of-the-art statistical (SMT) and neural (NMT) machine translation systems. Our NMT systems were trained with the transformer architecture using the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data that we generated with a new incremental training framework. Our primary sub…
Many-to-English Machine Translation Tools, Data, and Pretrained Models
Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Texas Advanced Computing Center（德克萨斯高级计算中心）；University of Texas（德克萨斯大学）；NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory（美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Visual Genome is a dataset connecting structured image information with English language. We present ``Hindi Visual Genome'', a multimodal dataset consisting of text and images suitable for English-Hindi multimodal machine translation task and multimodal research. We have selected short English segments (captions) from Visual Genome along with associated images and automatically translated them to Hindi with manual post-editing which took the associated images into account. We prepared a set of 31525 segments, accompanied by a challenge test set of 1400 segments. This challenge test set was cr…
Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）
We introduce the Helsinki Neural Machine Translation system (HNMT) and how it is applied in the news translation task at WMT 2017, where it ranked first in both the human and automatic evaluations for English--Finnish. We discuss the success of English--Finnish translations and the overall advantage of NMT over a strong SMT baseline. We also discuss our submissions for English--Latvian, English--Chinese and Chinese--English.
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Basement AI（Basement人工智能公司）
In this paper, we present the University of Helsinki submissions to the WMT 2019 shared task on news translation in three language pairs: English-German, English-Finnish and Finnish-English. This year, we focused first on cleaning and filtering the training data using multiple data-filtering approaches, resulting in much smaller and cleaner training sets. For English-German, we trained both sentence-level transformer models and compared different document-level translation approaches. For Finnish-English and English-Finnish we focused on different segmentation approaches, and we also included …
For Japanese-to-English translation, zero pronouns in Japanese pose a challenge, since the model needs to infer and produce the corresponding pronoun in the target side of the English sentence. However, although fully resolving zero pronouns often needs discourse context, in some cases, the local context within a sentence gives clues to the inference of the zero pronoun. In this study, we propose a data augmentation method that provides additional training signals for the translation model to learn correlations between local context and zero pronouns. We show that the proposed method significa…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；The German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic - English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resour…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Mila Quebec AI Institute（米拉魁北克人工智能研究所）；Masakhane；Jacobs University Bremen（不来梅雅各布大学）
In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first many-to-many multilingual translation system for six African languages: Fon (fon), Igbo (ibo), Kinyarwanda (kin), Swahili/Kiswahili (swa), Xhosa (xho), and Yoruba (yor) and two non-African languages: English (eng) and French (fra). For multilingual translation concerning African languages, we introduce a novel backtranslation and reconstruction objective, BT\&REC, …
Machine translation is the process of translating text from one language to another. In this paper, Statistical Machine Translation is done on Assamese and English language by taking their respective parallel corpus. A statistical phrase based translation toolkit Moses is used here. To develop the language model and to align the words we used two another tools IRSTLM, GIZA respectively. BLEU score is used to check our translation system performance, how good it is. A difference in BLEU scores is obtained while translating sentences from Assamese to English and vice-versa. Since Indian language…
On Creating an English-Thai Code-switched Machine Translation in Medical Domain
Bangkok Christian International School（曼谷基督教国际学校）；Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology（维迪亚西密提科技学院）；Chulalongkorn University（朱拉隆功大学）；Mahidol University（玛希隆大学）
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
In this paper, we present our work on the creation of lexical resources for the Machine Translation between English and Hindi. We describes the development of phrase pair mappings for our experiments and the comparative performance evaluation between different trained models on top of the baseline Statistical Machine Translation system. We focused on augmenting the parallel corpus with more vocabulary as well as with various inflected forms by exploring different ways. We have augmented the training corpus with various lexical resources such as lexical words, synset words, function words and v…
In machine translation it is common phenomenon that machine-readable dictionaries and standard parsing rules are not enough to ensure accuracy in parsing and translating English phrases into Korean language, which is revealed in misleading translation results due to consequent structural and semantic ambiguities. This paper aims to suggest a solution to structural and semantic ambiguities due to the idiomaticity and non-grammaticalness of phrases commonly used in English language by applying bilingual phrase database in English-Korean Machine Translation (EKMT). This paper firstly clarifies wh…
This paper presents our contribution to the PolEval 2021 Task 2: Evaluation of translation quality assessment metrics. We describe experiments with pre-trained language models and state-of-the-art frameworks for translation quality assessment in both nonblind and blind versions of the task. Our solutions ranked second in the nonblind version and third in the blind version.
Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；Global Tone Communication Technology Co., Ltd.（环球语音通信技术有限公司）
Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the best methods for understanding the differences in semantic rules between two languages. Especially for Indo-European languages, subword-level models have achieved impressive results. However, when the translation task involves Chinese, semantic granularity remains at the word and character level, so there is still need more fine-grained translation model of Chinese. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective method for Chinese translation at the sub-character level. Our approach uses the Wubi method to translate Chinese into English; byte-…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Neural machine translation (NMT), a new approach to machine translation, has been proved to outperform conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) across a variety of language pairs. Translation is an open-vocabulary problem, but most existing NMT systems operate with a fixed vocabulary, which causes the incapability of translating rare words. This problem can be alleviated by using different translation granularities, such as character, subword and hybrid word-character. Translation involving Chinese is one of the most difficult tasks in machine translation, however, to the best of our…
Spoken Language Translation (SLT) is becoming more widely used and becoming a communication tool that helps in crossing language barriers. One of the challenges of SLT is the translation from a language without gender agreement to a language with gender agreement such as English to Arabic. In this paper, we introduce an approach to tackle such limitation by enabling a Neural Machine Translation system to produce gender-aware translation. We show that NMT system can model the speaker/listener gender information to produce gender-aware translation. We propose a method to generate data used in ad…
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…
Research Lab. UTIC, University of Tunis（突尼斯大学UTIC研究实验室）
This works aims to design a statistical machine translation from English text to American Sign Language (ASL). The system is based on Moses tool with some modifications and the results are synthesized through a 3D avatar for interpretation. First, we translate the input text to gloss, a written form of ASL. Second, we pass the output to the WebSign Plug-in to play the sign. Contributions of this work are the use of a new couple of language English/ASL and an improvement of statistical machine translation based on string matching thanks to Jaro-distance.
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…
Machine translation is research based area where evaluation is very important phenomenon for checking the quality of MT output. The work is based on the evaluation of English to Urdu Machine translation. In this research work we have evaluated the translation quality of Urdu language which has been translated by using different Machine Translation systems like Google, Babylon and Ijunoon. The evaluation process is done by using two approaches - Human evaluation and Automatic evaluation. We have worked for both the approaches where in human evaluation emphasis is given to scales and parameters …
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Code-mixed machine translation has become an important task in multilingual communities and extending the task of machine translation to code mixed data has become a common task for these languages. In the shared tasks of WMT 2022, we try to tackle the same for both English + Hindi to Hinglish and Hinglish to English. The first task dealt with both Roman and Devanagari script as we had monolingual data in both English and Hindi whereas the second task only had data in Roman script. To our knowledge, we achieved one of the top ROUGE-L and WER scores for the first task of Monolingual to Code-Mix…
