Chinese word segmentation has entered the deep learning era which greatly reduces the hassle of feature engineering. Recently, some researchers attempted to treat it as character-level translation, which further simplified model designing, but there is a performance gap between the translation-based approach and other methods. This motivates our work, in which we apply the best practices from low-resource neural machine translation to supervised Chinese segmentation. We examine a series of techniques including regularization, data augmentation, objective weighting, transfer learning, and ensembling. Compared to previous works, our low-resource translation-based method maintains the effortless model design, yet achieves the same result as state of the art in the constrained evaluation without using additional data.
Korean-Chinese is a low resource language pair, but Korean and Chinese have a lot in common in terms of vocabulary. Sino-Korean words, which can be converted into corresponding Chinese characters, account for more than fifty of the entire Korean vocabulary. Motivated by this, we propose a simple linguistically motivated solution to improve the performance of the Korean-to-Chinese neural machine translation model by using their common vocabulary. We adopt Chinese characters as a translation pivot by converting Sino-Korean words in Korean sentences to Chinese characters and then train the machin…
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-…
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机学院）
Back translation (BT) has been widely used and become one of standard techniques for data augmentation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), BT has proven to be helpful for improving the performance of translation effectively, especially for low-resource scenarios. While most works related to BT mainly focus on European languages, few of them study languages in other areas around the world. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of BT on Asia language translations between the extremely low-resource Chinese and Vietnamese language pair. We evaluate and compare the effects of different sizes o…
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…
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Idiom translation is a challenging problem in machine translation because the meaning of idioms is non-compositional, and a literal (word-by-word) translation is likely to be wrong. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the quality of idiom translation of MT systems. We introduce a new evaluation method based on an idiom-specific blacklist of literal translations, based on the insight that the occurrence of any blacklisted words in the translation output indicates a likely translation error. We introduce a dataset, CIBB (Chinese Idioms Blacklists Bank), and perform an evaluation of a state-of-…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Xinjiang University（新疆大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved notable performance recently. However, this approach has not been widely applied to the translation task between Chinese and Uyghur, partly due to the limited parallel data resource and the large proportion of rare words caused by the agglutinative nature of Uyghur. In this paper, we collect ~200,000 sentence pairs and show that with this middle-scale database, an attention-based NMT can perform very well on Chinese-Uyghur/Uyghur-Chinese translation. To tackle rare words, we propose a novel memory structure to assist the NMT inference. Our experime…
In the field of Japanese-Chinese translation linguistics, the issue of correctly translating attributive clauses has persistently proven to be challenging. Present-day machine translation tools often fail to accurately translate attributive clauses from Japanese to Chinese. In light of this, this paper investigates the linguistic problem underlying such difficulties, namely how does the semantic role of the modified noun affect the selection of translation patterns for attributive clauses, from a linguistic perspective. To ad-dress these difficulties, a pre-edit scheme is proposed, which aims …
In this paper, we study the use of deep Transformer translation model for the CCMT 2022 Chinese-Thai low-resource machine translation task. We first explore the experiment settings (including the number of BPE merge operations, dropout probability, embedding size, etc.) for the low-resource scenario with the 6-layer Transformer. Considering that increasing the number of layers also increases the regularization on new model parameters (dropout modules are also introduced when using more layers), we adopt the highest performance setting but increase the depth of the Transformer to 24 layers to o…
Semantic Prosody in Machine Translation: the English-Chinese Case of Passive Structures
Centre de Llenguatge i Computacio (CLiC), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学语言与计算中心）；Institut de Recerca en Sistemes Complesos (UBICS), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学复杂系统研究所）
Macao Polytechnic Institute（澳门理工学院）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
Although there are increasing and significant ties between China and Portuguese-speaking countries, there is not much parallel corpora in the Chinese-Portuguese language pair. Both languages are very populous, with 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers and 279 million native Portuguese speakers, the language pair, however, could be considered as low-resource in terms of available parallel corpora. In this paper, we describe our methods to curate Chinese-Portuguese parallel corpora and evaluate their quality. We extracted bilingual data from Macao government websites and proposed a hierarchical s…
There are many machine translation (MT) papers that propose novel approaches and show improvements over their self-defined baselines. The experimental setting in each paper often differs from one another. As such, it is hard to determine if a proposed approach is really useful and advances the state of the art. Chinese-to-English translation is a common translation direction in MT papers, although there is not one widely accepted experimental setting in Chinese-to-English MT. Our goal in this paper is to propose a benchmark in evaluation setup for Chinese-to-English machine translation, such t…
ADAPT Centre（ADAPT中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）
In neural machine translation (NMT), researchers face the challenge of un-seen (or out-of-vocabulary OOV) words translation. To solve this, some researchers propose the splitting of western languages such as English and German into sub-words or compounds. In this paper, we try to address this OOV issue and improve the NMT adequacy with a harder language Chinese whose characters are even more sophisticated in composition. We integrate the Chinese radicals into the NMT model with different settings to address the unseen words challenge in Chinese to English translation. On the other hand, this a…
Machine translation has made rapid advances in recent years. Millions of people are using it today in online translation systems and mobile applications in order to communicate across language barriers. The question naturally arises whether such systems can approach or achieve parity with human translations. In this paper, we first address the problem of how to define and accurately measure human parity in translation. We then describe Microsoft's machine translation system and measure the quality of its translations on the widely used WMT 2017 news translation task from Chinese to English. We…
Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) requires only monolingual data of similar language pairs during training and can produce bi-directional translation models with relatively good performance on alphabetic languages (Lample et al., 2018). However, no research has been done to logographic language pairs. This study focuses on Chinese-Japanese UNMT trained by data containing sub-character (ideograph or stroke) level information which is decomposed from character level data. BLEU scores of both character and sub-character level systems were compared against each other and the results s…
Although, Chinese and Spanish are two of the most spoken languages in the world, not much research has been done in machine translation for this language pair. This paper focuses on investigating the state-of-the-art of Chinese-to-Spanish statistical machine translation (SMT), which nowadays is one of the most popular approaches to machine translation. For this purpose, we report details of the available parallel corpus which are Basic Traveller Expressions Corpus (BTEC), Holy Bible and United Nations (UN). Additionally, we conduct experimental work with the largest of these three corpora to e…
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.
This research presents a fine-grained human evaluation to compare the Transformer and recurrent approaches to neural machine translation (MT), on the translation direction English-to-Chinese. To this end, we develop an error taxonomy compliant with the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework that is customised to the relevant phenomena of this translation direction. We then conduct an error annotation using this customised error taxonomy on the output of state-of-the-art recurrent- and Transformer-based MT systems on a subset of WMT2019's news test set. The resulting annotation shows …
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich（苏黎世大学与苏黎世联邦理工学院神经信息学研究所）
Character-level Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have recently achieved impressive results on many language pairs. They mainly do well for Indo-European language pairs, where the languages share the same writing system. However, for translating between Chinese and English, the gap between the two different writing systems poses a major challenge because of a lack of systematic correspondence between the individual linguistic units. In this paper, we enable character-level NMT for Chinese, by breaking down Chinese characters into linguistic units similar to that of Indo-European language…
In recent years, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been proven to get impressive results. While some additional linguistic features of input words improve word-level NMT, any additional character features have not been used to improve character-level NMT so far. In this paper, we show that the radicals of Chinese characters (or kanji), as a character feature information, can be easily provide further improvements in the character-level NMT. In experiments on WAT2016 Japanese-Chinese scientific paper excerpt corpus (ASPEC-JP), we find that the proposed method improves the translation quality…
Recent research suggests that neural machine translation (MT) in the news domain has reached human-level performance, but for other professional domains, it is far below the level. In this paper, we conduct a fine-grained systematic human evaluation for four widely used Chinese-English NMT systems on scientific abstracts which are collected from published journals and books. Our human evaluation results show that all the systems return with more than 10\% error rates on average, which requires much post editing effort for real academic use. Furthermore, we categorize six main error types and a…
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been proven to achieve impressive results. The NMT system translation results depend strongly on the size and quality of parallel corpora. Nevertheless, for many language pairs, no rich-resource parallel corpora exist. As described in this paper, we propose a corpus augmentation method by segmenting long sentences in a corpus using back-translation and generating pseudo-parallel sentence pairs. The experiment results of the Japanese-Chinese and Chinese-Japanese translation with Japanese-Chinese scientific paper excerpt corpus (ASPEC-JC) show that the method…
Evaluation of Chinese-English Machine Translation of Emotion-Loaded Microblog Texts: A Human Annotated Dataset for the Quality Assessment of Emotion Translation
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Xi’an International Studies University（西安外国语大学）
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 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…
Optimising ChatGPT for creativity in literary translation: A case study from English into Dutch, Chinese, Catalan and Spanish
Centre for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen（语言与认知中心，格罗宁根大学）；Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat d’Alacant（语言与信息系统部门，阿尔阿罕特大学）；Departament de Traducció i Comunicació, Universitat Jaume I（翻译与传播部门， Jaime I 大学）
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.
An Empirical Study on Chinese Character Decomposition in Multiword Expression-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）；ADAPT Research Centre（ADAPT研究中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）
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）
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Buddhism is an influential religion with a long-standing history and profound philosophy. Nowadays, more and more people worldwide aspire to learn the essence of Buddhism, attaching importance to Buddhism dissemination. However, Buddhist scriptures written in classical Chinese are obscure to most people and machine translation applications. For instance, general Chinese-English neural machine translation (NMT) fails in this domain. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to building a practical NMT model for Buddhist scriptures. The performance of our translation pipeline acquired highly p…
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.
Chinese dialects are different variations of Chinese and can be considered as different languages in the same language family with Mandarin. Though they all use Chinese characters, the pronunciations, grammar and idioms can vary significantly, and even local speakers may find it hard to input correct written forms of dialect. Besides, using Mandarin text as text-to-speech inputs would generate speech with poor naturalness. In this paper, we propose a novel Chinese dialect TTS frontend with a translation module, which converts Mandarin text into dialectic expressions to improve the intelligibil…
Bidirectional Chinese and English Passive Sentences Dataset for Machine Translation
Centre de Llenguatge i Computacio (CLiC), Universitat de Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那大学语言与计算中心，西班牙）；Institut de Recerca en Sistemes Complexos (UBICS), Universitat de Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那大学复杂系统研究中心，西班牙）
Existing research generally treats Chinese character as a minimum unit for representation. However, such Chinese character representation will suffer two bottlenecks: 1) Learning bottleneck, the learning cannot benefit from its rich internal features (e.g., radicals and strokes); and 2) Parameter bottleneck, each individual character has to be represented by a unique vector. In this paper, we introduce a novel representation method for Chinese characters to break the bottlenecks, namely StrokeNet, which represents a Chinese character by a Latinized stroke sequence (e.g., "ao1 (concave)" to "aj…
Recent neural machine translation (NMT) systems have been greatly improved by encoder-decoder models with attention mechanisms and sub-word units. However, important differences between languages with logographic and alphabetic writing systems have long been overlooked. This study focuses on these differences and uses a simple approach to improve the performance of NMT systems utilizing decomposed sub-character level information for logographic languages. Our results indicate that our approach not only improves the translation capabilities of NMT systems between Chinese and English, but also f…
Conventional Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models benefit from the training with an additional agent, e.g., dual learning, and bidirectional decoding with one agent decoding from left to right and the other decoding in the opposite direction. In this paper, we extend the training framework to the multi-agent scenario by introducing diverse agents in an interactive updating process. At training time, each agent learns advanced knowledge from others, and they work together to improve translation quality. Experimental results on NIST Chinese-English, IWSLT 2014 German-English, WMT 2014 English…
Due to the absence of labeled data, discourse parsing still remains challenging in some languages. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method to conduct zero-shot Chinese text-level dependency parsing by leveraging English discourse labeled data and parsing techniques. We first construct the Chinese-English mapping from the level of sentence and elementary discourse unit (EDU), and then exploit the parsing results of the corresponding English translations to obtain the discourse trees for the Chinese text. This method can automatically conduct Chinese discourse parsing, with no ne…
Conversion of Chinese Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) plays an important role in Mandarin Chinese Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems, where one of the biggest challenges is the task of polyphone disambiguation. Most of the previous polyphone disambiguation models are trained on manually annotated datasets, and publicly available datasets for polyphone disambiguation are scarce. In this paper we propose a simple back-translation-style data augmentation method for mandarin Chinese polyphone disambiguation, utilizing a large amount of unlabeled text data. Inspired by the back-translation technique proposed i…
Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Simultaneous translation has many important application scenarios and attracts much attention from both academia and industry recently. Most existing frameworks, however, have difficulties in balancing between the translation quality and latency, i.e., the decoding policy is usually either too aggressive or too conservative. We propose an opportunistic decoding technique with timely correction ability, which always (over-)generates a certain mount of extra words at each step to keep the audience on track with the latest information. At the same time, it also corrects, in a timely fashion, the …
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 Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
Classical Chinese poetry is a jewel in the treasure house of Chinese culture. Previous poem generation models only allow users to employ keywords to interfere the meaning of generated poems, leaving the dominion of generation to the model. In this paper, we propose a novel task of generating classical Chinese poems from vernacular, which allows users to have more control over the semantic of generated poems. We adapt the approach of unsupervised machine translation (UMT) to our task. We use segmentation-based padding and reinforcement learning to address under-translation and over-translation …
This paper describes DiDi AI Labs' submission to the WMT2020 news translation shared task. We participate in the translation direction of Chinese->English. In this direction, we use the Transformer as our baseline model, and integrate several techniques for model enhancement, including data filtering, data selection, back-translation, fine-tuning, model ensembling, and re-ranking. As a result, our submission achieves a BLEU score of $36.6$ in Chinese->English.
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Sogou, Inc.（搜狗公司）
Chinese pinyin input methods are very important for Chinese language processing. Actually, users may make typos inevitably when they input pinyin. Moreover, pinyin typo correction has become an increasingly important task with the popularity of smartphones and the mobile Internet. How to exploit the knowledge of users typing behaviors and support the typo correction for acronym pinyin remains a challenging problem. To tackle these challenges, we propose KNPTC, a novel approach based on neural machine translation (NMT). In contrast to previous work, KNPTC is able to integrate explicit knowledge…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；Xiamen Meiya Pico information Co Ltd.（厦门美亚柏科信息股份有限公司）
In this paper, we propose an additionsubtraction twin-gated recurrent network (ATR) to simplify neural machine translation. The recurrent units of ATR are heavily simplified to have the smallest number of weight matrices among units of all existing gated RNNs. With the simple addition and subtraction operation, we introduce a twin-gated mechanism to build input and forget gates which are highly correlated. Despite this simplification, the essential non-linearities and capability of modeling long-distance dependencies are preserved. Additionally, the proposed ATR is more transparent than LSTM/G…
This paper introduces WeChat AI's participation in WMT 2021 shared news translation task on English->Chinese, English->Japanese, Japanese->English and English->German. Our systems are based on the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) with several novel and effective variants. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, large-scale synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, knowledge distillation, forward-translation, iterative in-domain knowledge transfer), advanced finetuning approaches, and boosted Self-BLEU based model ensemble. Our constrained systems achieve 36.9, 46.9, 27.8 and 3…
This study adapts Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) annotation to Mandarin Chinese and demonstrates that the same supersense categories are appropriate for Chinese adposition semantics. We annotated 15 chapters of The Little Prince, with high interannotator agreement. The parallel corpus gives insight into differences in construal between the two languages' adpositions, namely a number of construals that are frequent in Chinese but rare or unattested in the English corpus. The annotated corpus can further support automatic disambiguation of adpositions in Chinese, and…
