Growing Together: Modeling Human Language Learning With n-Best Multi-Checkpoint Machine Translation
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Sauder School of Business（尚德商学院）
El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Hasan Cavusoglu
备注：
Accepted to the 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education Mayhew et al., 2020) collocated with ACL 2020
We describe our submission to the 2020 Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE) (Mayhew et al., 2020). We view MT models at various training stages (i.e., checkpoints) as human learners at different levels. Hence, we employ an ensemble of multi-checkpoints from the same model to generate translation sequences with various levels of fluency. From each checkpoint, for our best model, we sample n-Best sequences (n=10) with a beam width =100. We achieve 37.57 macro F1 with a 6 checkpoint model ensemble on the official English to Portuguese shared task test data, outperforming a baseline Amazon translation system of 21.30 macro F1 and ultimately demonstrating the utility of our intuitive method.
Checkpoint averaging is a simple and effective method to boost the performance of converged neural machine translation models. The calculation is cheap to perform and the fact that the translation improvement almost comes for free, makes it widely adopted in neural machine translation research. Despite the popularity, the method itself simply takes the mean of the model parameters from several checkpoints, the selection of which is mostly based on empirical recipes without many justifications. In this work, we revisit the concept of checkpoint averaging and consider several extensions. Specifi…
Unsupervised pre-training of large neural models has recently revolutionized Natural Language Processing. By warm-starting from the publicly released checkpoints, NLP practitioners have pushed the state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks while saving significant amounts of compute time. So far the focus has been mainly on the Natural Language Understanding tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of pre-trained checkpoints for Sequence Generation. We developed a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model that is compatible with publicly available pre-trained BERT, GPT-2 and RoBERTa c…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
While very deep neural networks have shown effectiveness for computer vision and text classification applications, how to increase the network depth of neural machine translation (NMT) models for better translation quality remains a challenging problem. Directly stacking more blocks to the NMT model results in no improvement and even reduces performance. In this work, we propose an effective two-stage approach with three specially designed components to construct deeper NMT models, which result in significant improvements over the strong Transformer baselines on WMT$14$ English$\to$German and …
This paper describes FBK's submission to the end-to-end English-German speech translation task at IWSLT 2018. Our system relies on a state-of-the-art model based on LSTMs and CNNs, where the CNNs are used to reduce the temporal dimension of the audio input, which is in general much higher than machine translation input. Our model was trained only on the audio-to-text parallel data released for the task, and fine-tuned on cleaned subsets of the original training corpus. The addition of weight normalization and label smoothing improved the baseline system by 1.0 BLEU point on our validation set.…
Although all-in-one-model multilingual neural machine translation (multilingual NMT) has achieved remarkable progress, the convergence inconsistency in the joint training is ignored, i.e., different language pairs reaching convergence in different epochs. This leads to the trained MNMT model over-fitting low-resource language translations while under-fitting high-resource ones. In this paper, we propose a novel training strategy named LSSD (Language-Specific Self-Distillation), which can alleviate the convergence inconsistency and help MNMT models achieve the best performance on each language …
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…
Walmart Labs（沃尔玛实验室）；SAP Labs（思爱普实验室）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）
Neural Machine Translation systems built on top of Transformer-based architectures are routinely improving the state-of-the-art in translation quality according to word-overlap metrics. However, a growing number of studies also highlight the inherent gender bias that these models incorporate during training, which reflects poorly in their translations. In this work, we investigate whether these models can be instructed to fix their bias during inference using targeted, guided instructions as contexts. By translating relevant contextual sentences during inference along with the input, we observ…
New York University（纽约大学）；CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar（CIFAR Azrieli全球学者（注：CIFAR是加拿大高级研究所，非机构；此处按原文保留））
Interest in larger-context neural machine translation, including document-level and multi-modal translation, has been growing. Multiple works have proposed new network architectures or evaluation schemes, but potentially helpful context is still sometimes ignored by larger-context translation models. In this paper, we propose a novel learning algorithm that explicitly encourages a neural translation model to take into account additional context using a multilevel pair-wise ranking loss. We evaluate the proposed learning algorithm with a transformer-based larger-context translation system on do…
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University（查理大学数学与物理学院形式与应用语言学研究所）
This article describes our experiments in neural machine translation using the recent Tensor2Tensor framework and the Transformer sequence-to-sequence model (Vaswani et al., 2017). We examine some of the critical parameters that affect the final translation quality, memory usage, training stability and training time, concluding each experiment with a set of recommendations for fellow researchers. In addition to confirming the general mantra "more data and larger models", we address scaling to multiple GPUs and provide practical tips for improved training regarding batch size, learning rate, wa…
There has been great progress in improving streaming machine translation, a simultaneous paradigm where the system appends to a growing hypothesis as more source content becomes available. We study a related problem in which revisions to the hypothesis beyond strictly appending words are permitted. This is suitable for applications such as live captioning an audio feed. In this setting, we compare custom streaming approaches to re-translation, a straightforward strategy where each new source token triggers a distinct translation from scratch. We find re-translation to be as good or better than…
In machine translation field, in both academia and industry, there is a growing interest in increasingly powerful systems, using corpora of several hundred million to several billion examples. These systems represent the state-of-the-art. Here we defend the idea of developing in parallel <<frugal>> bilingual translation systems, trained with relatively small corpora. Based on the observation of a standard human professional translator, we estimate that the corpora should be composed at maximum of a monolingual sub-corpus of 75 million examples for the source language, a second monolingual sub-…
Continuously-growing data volumes lead to larger generic models. Specific use-cases are usually left out, since generic models tend to perform poorly in domain-specific cases. Our work addresses this gap with a method for selecting in-domain data from generic-domain (parallel text) corpora, for the task of machine translation. The proposed method ranks sentences in parallel general-domain data according to their cosine similarity with a monolingual domain-specific data set. We then select the top K sentences with the highest similarity score to train a new machine translation system tuned to t…
Africa has the highest linguistic diversity in the world. On account of the importance of language to communication, and the importance of reliable, powerful and accurate machine translation models in modern inter-cultural communication, there have been (and still are) efforts to create state-of-the-art translation models for the many African languages. However, the low-resources, diacritical and tonal complexities of African languages are major issues facing African NLP today. The FFR is a major step towards creating a robust translation model from Fon, a very low-resource and tonal language,…
Given the growing number of patents filed in multiple countries, users are interested in retrieving patents across languages. We propose a multi-lingual patent retrieval system, which translates a user query into the target language, searches a multilingual database for patents relevant to the query, and improves the browsing efficiency by way of machine translation and clustering. Our system also extracts new translations from patent families consisting of comparable patents, to enhance the translation dictionary.
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；NAVER Labs（NAVER实验室）；Facebook（脸书）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
As neural machine translation (NMT) systems become an important part of professional translator pipelines, a growing body of work focuses on combining NMT with terminologies. In many scenarios and particularly in cases of domain adaptation, one expects the MT output to adhere to the constraints provided by a terminology. In this work, we propose metrics to measure the consistency of MT output with regards to a domain terminology. We perform studies on the COVID-19 domain over 5 languages, also performing terminology-targeted human evaluation. We open-source the code for computing all proposed …
From Rule-Based Models to Deep Learning Transformers Architectures for Natural Language Processing and Sign Language Translation Systems: Survey, Taxonomy and Performance Evaluation
United Arab Emirates University（阿联酋大学）；Emirates Center for Mobility Research（阿联酋移动性研究中心）
Simultaneous translation on both text and speech focuses on a real-time and low-latency scenario where the model starts translating before reading the complete source input. Evaluating simultaneous translation models is more complex than offline models because the latency is another factor to consider in addition to translation quality. The research community, despite its growing focus on novel modeling approaches to simultaneous translation, currently lacks a universal evaluation procedure. Therefore, we present SimulEval, an easy-to-use and general evaluation toolkit for both simultaneous te…
This paper describes the development of a new benchmark for machine translation that provides training and test data for thousands of language pairs covering over 500 languages and tools for creating state-of-the-art translation models from that collection. The main goal is to trigger the development of open translation tools and models with a much broader coverage of the World's languages. Using the package it is possible to work on realistic low-resource scenarios avoiding artificially reduced setups that are common when demonstrating zero-shot or few-shot learning. For the first time, this …
Even with the growing interest in problems at the intersection of Computer Vision and Natural Language, grounding (i.e. identifying) the components of a structured description in an image still remains a challenging task. This contribution aims to propose a model which learns grounding by reconstructing the visual features for the Multi-modal translation task. Previous works have partially investigated standard approaches such as regression methods to approximate the reconstruction of a visual input. In this paper, we propose a different and novel approach which learns grounding by adversarial…
Noisy or non-standard input text can cause disastrous mistranslations in most modern Machine Translation (MT) systems, and there has been growing research interest in creating noise-robust MT systems. However, as of yet there are no publicly available parallel corpora of with naturally occurring noisy inputs and translations, and thus previous work has resorted to evaluating on synthetically created datasets. In this paper, we propose a benchmark dataset for Machine Translation of Noisy Text (MTNT), consisting of noisy comments on Reddit (www.reddit.com) and professionally sourced translations…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
In this paper, we introduce DOCmT5, a multilingual sequence-to-sequence language model pretrained with large scale parallel documents. While previous approaches have focused on leveraging sentence-level parallel data, we try to build a general-purpose pretrained model that can understand and generate long documents. We propose a simple and effective pretraining objective - Document reordering Machine Translation (DrMT), in which the input documents that are shuffled and masked need to be translated. DrMT brings consistent improvements over strong baselines on a variety of document-level genera…
In recent times, there has been definitive progress in the field of NLP, with its applications growing as the utility of our language models increases with advances in their performance. However, these models require a large amount of computational power and data to train, consequently leading to large carbon footprints. Therefore, it is imperative that we study the carbon efficiency and look for alternatives to reduce the overall environmental impact of training models, in particular large language models. In our work, we assess the performance of models for machine translation, across multip…
Distinguishing Translations by Human, NMT, and ChatGPT: A Linguistic and Statistical Approach
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学外国语学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系）；Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University（上海外国语大学语料库研究与应用研究院）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology（莫拉纳·阿布·卡拉姆·阿扎德科技大学）
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a new methodology that offers a fresh perspective on interpreting polarization through the lens of machine translation. With a novel proposition that two sub-communities are speaking in two different \emph{languages}, we demonstrate that modern machine translation methods can provide a simple yet powerful and interpretable framework to understand the differenc…
Extending Multilingual Machine Translation through Imitation Learning
Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Minzu University of China（民族大学）
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（日本国立信息通信技术研究所）
In this paper we present our open-source neural machine translation (NMT) toolkit called "Yet Another Neural Machine Translation Toolkit" abbreviated as YANMTT which is built on top of the Transformers library. Despite the growing importance of sequence to sequence pre-training there surprisingly few, if not none, well established toolkits that allow users to easily do pre-training. Toolkits such as Fairseq which do allow pre-training, have very large codebases and thus they are not beginner friendly. With regards to transfer learning via fine-tuning most toolkits do not explicitly allow the u…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Jacobs University（雅各布斯大学）
Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with 1500-2000 documented languages and many more undocumented or extinct languages(Lewis, 2009; Bendor-Samuel, 2017). This makes it hard to keep track of the MT research, models and dataset that have been developed for some of them. As the internet and social media make up the daily lives of more than half of the world(Lin, 2020), as well as over 40% of Africans…
Generating code-switched text is a problem of growing interest, especially given the scarcity of corpora containing large volumes of real code-switched text. In this work, we adapt a state-of-the-art neural machine translation model to generate Hindi-English code-switched sentences starting from monolingual Hindi sentences. We outline a carefully designed curriculum of pretraining steps, including the use of synthetic code-switched text, that enable the model to generate high-quality code-switched text. Using text generated from our model as data augmentation, we show significant reductions in…
Yandex Research（Yandex研究院）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；HSE University（俄罗斯国立高等经济大学）
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is known to suffer from a beam-search problem: after a certain point, increasing beam size causes an overall drop in translation quality. This effect is especially pronounced for long sentences. While much work was done analyzing this phenomenon, primarily for autoregressive NMT models, there is still no consensus on its underlying cause. In this work, we analyze errors that cause major quality degradation with large beams in NMT and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We show that a factor that strongly contributes to the quality degradation with large beams i…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Meta AI
With multilingual machine translation (MMT) models continuing to grow in size and number of supported languages, it is natural to reuse and upgrade existing models to save computation as data becomes available in more languages. However, adding new languages requires updating the vocabulary, which complicates the reuse of embeddings. The question of how to reuse existing models while also making architectural changes to provide capacity for both old and new languages has also not been closely studied. In this work, we introduce three techniques that help speed up effective learning of the new …
Towards Better Chinese-centric Neural Machine Translation for Low-resource Languages
College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学电气与信息工程学院）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Experimental High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学附属实验中学）
Over the past decade, deep learning (DL) has led to significant advancements in various fields of artificial intelligence, including machine translation (MT). These advancements would not be possible without the ever-growing volumes of data and the hardware that allows large DL models to be trained efficiently. Due to the large amount of computing cores as well as dedicated memory, graphics processing units (GPUs) are a more effective hardware solution for training and inference with DL models than central processing units (CPUs). However, the former is very power demanding. The electrical pow…
Critical Learning Periods: Leveraging Early Training Dynamics for Efficient Data Pruning
Cohere For AI Community（Cohere For AI社区）；University of Cape Town（开普敦大学）；African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）；South African Astronomical Observatory（南非天文台）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Cohere For AI
Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯塞勒基金会）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Growing needs in localising audiovisual content in multiple languages through subtitles call for the development of automatic solutions for human subtitling. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can contribute to the automatisation of subtitling, facilitating the work of human subtitlers and reducing turn-around times and related costs. NMT requires high-quality, large, task-specific training data. The existing subtitling corpora, however, are missing both alignments to the source language audio and important information about subtitle breaks. This poses a significant limitation for developing eff…
We demonstrate, in this study, that an open-domain conversational system trained on idioms or figurative language generates more fitting responses to prompts containing idioms. Idioms are part of everyday speech in many languages, across many cultures, but they pose a great challenge for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that involve tasks such as Information Retrieval (IR) and Machine Translation (MT), besides conversational AI. We utilize the Potential Idiomatic Expression (PIE)-English idioms corpus for the two tasks that we investigate: classification and conversation generati…
The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a fast-growing sub-field of computational linguistics. Until now, the most popular automatic metric to measure the quality of SMT is BiLingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score. Lately, SMT along with the BLEU metric has been applied to a Software Engineering task named code migration. (In)Validating the use of BLEU score could advance the research and development of SMT-based code migration tools. Unfortunately, there is no study to approve or disapprove the use of BLEU score for source code. In this paper, we conducted an empirical study on BLEU scor…
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德州联邦大学）
Recently there has been a growing concern about machine bias, where trained statistical models grow to reflect controversial societal asymmetries, such as gender or racial bias. A significant number of AI tools have recently been suggested to be harmfully biased towards some minority, with reports of racist criminal behavior predictors, Iphone X failing to differentiate between two Asian people and Google photos' mistakenly classifying black people as gorillas. Although a systematic study of such biases can be difficult, we believe that automated translation tools can be exploited through gend…
This paper proposes a simple yet effective method to improve direct (X-to-Y) translation for both cases: zero-shot and when direct data is available. We modify the input tokens at both the encoder and decoder to include signals for the source and target languages. We show a performance gain when training from scratch, or finetuning a pretrained model with the proposed setup. In the experiments, our method shows nearly 10.0 BLEU points gain on in-house datasets depending on the checkpoint selection criteria. In a WMT evaluation campaign, From-English performance improves by 4.17 and 2.87 BLEU p…
