ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Using speech technology in the translation process workflow in international organizations: A quantitative and qualitative study (2021)

In international organizations, the growing demand for translations has increased the need for post-editing. Different studies show that automatic speech recognition systems have the potential to increase the productivity of the translation process as well as the quality. In this talk, we will explore the possibilities of using speech in the translation process by conducting a post-editing experiment with three professional translators in an international organization. Our experiment consisted of comparing three translation methods: speaking the translation with MT as an inspiration (RESpeaking), post-editing the MT suggestions by typing (PE), and editing the MT suggestion using speech (SPE). BLEU and HTER scores were used to compare the three methods. Our study shows that translators did more edits under condition RES, whereas in SPE, the resulting translations were closer to the reference according to the BLEU score and required less edits. Time taken to translate was the least in SPE followed by PE, RES methods and the translators preferred using speech to typing. These results show the potential of speech when it is coupled with post-editing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study conducted on using post-editing and speech together in large scale international organizations.
Multi-Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation Through Multidimensional Tagging (2021)

Production NMT systems typically need to serve niche domains that are not covered by adequately large and readily available parallel corpora. As a result, practitioners often fine-tune general purpose models to each of the domains their organisation caters to. The number of domains however can often become large, which in combination with the number of languages that need serving can lead to an unscalable fleet of models to be developed and maintained. We propose Multi Dimensional Tagging, a method for fine-tuning a single NMT model on several domains simultaneously, thus drastically reducing development and maintenance costs. We run experiments where a single MDT model compares favourably to a set of SOTA specialist models, even when evaluated on the domain those baselines have been fine-tuned on. Besides BLEU, we report human evaluation results. MDT models are now live at Booking.com, powering an MT engine that serves millions of translations a day in over 40 different languages.
cushLEPOR uses LABSE distilled knowledge to improve correlation with human translation evaluations (2021)

Automatic MT evaluation metrics are indispensable for MT research. Augmented metrics such as hLEPOR include broader evaluation factors (recall and position difference penalty) in addition to the factors used in BLEU (sentence length, precision), and demonstrated higher accuracy. However, the obstacles preventing the wide use of hLEPOR were the lack of easy portable Python package and empirical weighting parameters that were tuned by manual work. This project addresses the above issues by offering a Python implementation of hLEPOR and automatic tuning of the parameters. We use existing translation memories (TM) as reference set and distillation modeling with LaBSE (Language-Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding) to calibrate parameters for custom hLEPOR (cushLEPOR). cushLEPOR maximizes the correlation between hLEPOR and the distilling model similarity score towards reference. It can be used quickly and precisely to evaluate MT output from different engines, without need of manual weight tuning for optimization. In this session you will learn how to tune hLEPOR to obtain automatic custom-tuned cushLEPOR metric far more precise than BLEU. The method does not require costly human evaluations, existing TM is taken as a reference translation set, and cushLEPOR is created to select the best MT engine for the reference data-set.
A Synthesis of Human and Machine: Correlating \textquotedblleftNew\textquotedblright Automatic Evaluation Metrics with Human Assessments (2021)

The session will provide an overview of some of the new Machine Translation metrics available on the market, analyze if and how these new metrics correlate at a segment level to the results of Adequacy and Fluency Human Assessments, and how they compare against TER scores and Levenshtein Distance {--} two of our currently preferred metrics {--} as well as against each of the other. The information in this session will help to get a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and make informed decisions when it comes to forecasting MT production.
Lab vs. Production: Two Approaches to Productivity Evaluation for MTPE for LSP (2021)

In the paper we propose both kind of tests as viable post-editing productivity evaluation solutions as they both deliver a clear overview of the difference in speed between HT and PE of the translators involved. The decision on whether to use the first approach or the second can be based on a number of factors, such as: availability of actual orders in the domain and language combination to be tested; time; availability of Post-editors in the domain and in the language combination to be tested. The aim of this paper will be to show that both methodologies can be useful in different settings for a preliminary evaluation of possible productivity gain with MTPE.
Dealing with the Paradox of Quality Estimation (2021)

In quality estimation (QE), the quality of translation can be predicted by referencing the source sentence and the machine translation (MT) output without access to the reference sentence. However, there exists a paradox in that constructing a dataset for creating a QE model requires non-trivial human labor and time, and it may even requires additional effort compared to the cost of constructing a parallel corpus. In this study, to address this paradox and utilize the various applications of QE, even in low-resource languages (LRLs), we propose a method for automatically constructing a pseudo-QE dataset without using human labor. We perform a comparative analysis on the pseudo-QE dataset using multilingual pre-trained language models. As we generate the pseudo dataset, we conduct experiments using various external machine translators as test sets to verify the accuracy of the results objectively. Also, the experimental results show that multilingual BART demonstrates the best performance, and we confirm the applicability of QE in LRLs using pseudo-QE dataset construction methods.
Small-Scale Cross-Language Authorship Attribution on Social Media Comments (2021)

Cross-language authorship attribution is the challenging task of classifying documents by bilingual authors where the training documents are written in a different language than the evaluation documents. Traditional solutions rely on either translation to enable the use of single-language features, or language-independent feature extraction methods. More recently, transformer-based language models like BERT can also be pre-trained on multiple languages, making them intuitive candidates for cross-language classifiers which have not been used for this task yet. We perform extensive experiments to benchmark the performance of three different approaches to a smallscale cross-language authorship attribution experiment: (1) using language-independent features with traditional classification models, (2) using multilingual pre-trained language models, and (3) using machine translation to allow single-language classification. For the language-independent features, we utilize universal syntactic features like part-of-speech tags and dependency graphs, and multilingual BERT as a pre-trained language model. We use a small-scale social media comments dataset, closely reflecting practical scenarios. We show that applying machine translation drastically increases the performance of almost all approaches, and that the syntactic features in combination with the translation step achieve the best overall classification performance. In particular, we demonstrate that pre-trained language models are outperformed by traditional models in small scale authorship attribution problems for every language combination analyzed in this paper.
Morphologically-Guided Segmentation For Translation of Agglutinative Low-Resource Languages (2021)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for Low Resource Languages (LRL) is often limited by the lack of available training data, making it necessary to explore additional techniques to improve translation quality. We propose the use of the Prefix-Root-Postfix-Encoding (PRPE) subword segmentation algorithm to improve translation quality for LRLs, using two agglutinative languages as case studies: Quechua and Indonesian. During the course of our experiments, we reintroduce a parallel corpus for Quechua-Spanish translation that was previously unavailable for NMT. Our experiments show the importance of appropriate subword segmentation, which can go as far as improving translation quality over systems trained on much larger quantities of data. We show this by achieving state-of-the-art results for both languages, obtaining higher BLEU scores than large pre-trained models with much smaller amounts of data.
Active Learning for Massively Parallel Translation of Constrained Text into Low Resource Languages (2021)

We translate a closed text that is known in advance and available in many languages into a new and severely low resource language. Most human translation efforts adopt a portionbased approach to translate consecutive pages/chapters in order, which may not suit machine translation. We compare the portion-based approach that optimizes coherence of the text locally with the random sampling approach that increases coverage of the text globally. Our results show that the random sampling approach performs better. When training on a seed corpus of {\ensuremath{\sim}}1,000 lines from the Bible and testing on the rest of the Bible ({\ensuremath{\sim}}30,000 lines), random sampling gives a performance gain of +11.0 BLEU using English as a simulated low resource language, and +4.9 BLEU using Eastern Pokomchi, a Mayan language. Furthermore, we compare three ways of updating machine translation models with increasing amount of human post-edited data through iterations. We find that adding newly post-edited data to training after vocabulary update without self-supervision performs the best. We propose an algorithm for human and machine to work together seamlessly to translate a closed text into a severely low resource language.
Love Thy Neighbor: Combining Two Neighboring Low-Resource Languages for Translation (2021)

Low-resource languages sometimes take on similar morphological and syntactic characteristics due to their geographic nearness and shared history. Two low-resource neighboring languages found in Peru, Quechua and Ashaninka, can be considered, at first glance, two languages that are morphologically similar. In order to translate the two languages, various approaches have been taken. For Quechua, neural machine transfer-learning has been used along with byte-pair encoding. For Ashaninka, the language of the two with fewer resources, a finite-state transducer is used to transform Ashaninka texts and its dialects for machine translation use. We evaluate and compare two approaches by attempting to use newly-formed Ashaninka corpora for neural machine translation. Our experiments show that combining the two neighboring languages, while similar in morphology, word sharing, and geographical location, improves Ashaninka{--} Spanish translation but degrades Quechua{--}Spanish translations.
Structural Biases for Improving Transformers on Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages (2021)

Machine translation has seen rapid progress with the advent of Transformer-based models. These models have no explicit linguistic structure built into them, yet they may still implicitly learn structured relationships by attending to relevant tokens. We hypothesize that this structural learning could be made more robust by explicitly endowing Transformers with a structural bias, and we investigate two methods for building in such a bias. One method, the TP-Transformer, augments the traditional Transformer architecture to include an additional component to represent structure. The second method imbues structure at the data level by segmenting the data with morphological tokenization. We test these methods on translating from English into morphologically rich languages, Turkish and Inuktitut, and consider both automatic metrics and human evaluations. We find that each of these two approaches allows the network to achieve better performance, but this improvement is dependent on the size of the dataset. In sum, structural encoding methods make Transformers more sample-efficient, enabling them to perform better from smaller amounts of data.
A Comparison of Different NMT Approaches to Low-Resource Dutch-Albanian Machine Translation (2021)

Low-resource languages can be understood as languages that are more scarce, less studied, less privileged, less commonly taught and for which there are less resources available (Singh, 2008; Cieri et al., 2016; Magueresse et al., 2020). Natural Language Processing (NLP) research and technology mainly focuses on those languages for which there are large data sets available. To illustrate differences in data availability: there are 6 million Wikipedia articles available for English, 2 million for Dutch, and merely 82 thousand for Albanian. The scarce data issue becomes increasingly apparent when large parallel data sets are required for applications such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT). In this work, we investigate to what extent translation between Albanian (SQ) and Dutch (NL) is possible comparing a one-to-one (SQ{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}AL) model, a low-resource pivot-based approach (English (EN) as pivot) and a zero-shot translation (ZST) (Johnson et al., 2016; Mattoni et al., 2017) system. From our experiments, it results that the EN-pivot-model outperforms both the direct one-to-one and the ZST model. Since often, small amounts of parallel data are available for low-resource languages or settings, experiments were conducted using small sets of parallel NL{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}SQ data. The ZST appeared to be the worst performing models. Even when the available parallel data (NL{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}SQ) was added, i.e. in a few-shot setting (FST), it remained the worst performing system according to the automatic (BLEU and TER) and human evaluation.
Manipuri-English Machine Translation using Comparable Corpus (2021)

Unsupervised Machine Translation (MT) model, which has the ability to perform MT without parallel sentences using comparable corpora, is becoming a promising approach for developing MT in low-resource languages. However, majority of the studies in unsupervised MT have considered resource-rich language pairs with similar linguistic characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of unsupervised MT models over a Manipuri-English comparable corpus. Manipuri is a low-resource language having different linguistic characteristics from that of English. This paper focuses on identifying challenges in building unsupervised MT models over the comparable corpus. From various experimental observations, it is evident that the development of MT over comparable corpus using unsupervised methods is feasible. Further, the paper also identifies future directions of developing effective MT for Manipuri-English language pair under unsupervised scenarios.
EnKhCorp1.0: An English--Khasi Corpus (2021)

In machine translation, corpus preparation is one of the crucial tasks, particularly for lowresource pairs. In multilingual countries like India, machine translation plays a vital role in communication among people with various linguistic backgrounds. There are available online automatic translation systems by Google and Microsoft which include various languages which lack support for the Khasi language, which can hence be considered lowresource. This paper overviews the development of EnKhCorp1.0, a corpus for English{--}Khasi pair, and implemented baseline systems for EnglishtoKhasi and KhasitoEnglish translation based on the neural machine translation approach.
Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation with Self-Learning Cycle (2021)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) approaches employing monolingual data are showing steady improvements in resource-rich conditions. However, evaluations using real-world lowresource languages still result in unsatisfactory performance. This work proposes a novel zeroshot NMT modeling approach that learns without the now-standard assumption of a pivot language sharing parallel data with the zero-shot source and target languages. Our approach is based on three stages: initialization from any pre-trained NMT model observing at least the target language, augmentation of source sides leveraging target monolingual data, and learning to optimize the initial model to the zero-shot pair, where the latter two constitute a selflearning cycle. Empirical findings involving four diverse (in terms of a language family, script and relatedness) zero-shot pairs show the effectiveness of our approach with up to +5.93 BLEU improvement against a supervised bilingual baseline. Compared to unsupervised NMT, consistent improvements are observed even in a domain-mismatch setting, attesting to the usability of our method.
Findings of the LoResMT 2021 Shared Task on COVID and Sign Language for Low-resource Languages (2021)

We present the findings of the LoResMT 2021 shared task which focuses on machine translation (MT) of COVID-19 data for both low-resource spoken and sign languages. The organization of this task was conducted as part of the fourth workshop on technologies for machine translation of low resource languages (LoResMT). Parallel corpora is presented and publicly available which includes the following directions: English{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}Irish, English{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}Marathi, and Taiwanese Sign language{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}Traditional Chinese. Training data consists of 8112, 20933 and 128608 segments, respectively. There are additional monolingual data sets for Marathi and English that consist of 21901 segments. The results presented here are based on entries from a total of eight teams. Three teams submitted systems for English{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}Irish while five teams submitted systems for English{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}Marathi. Unfortunately, there were no systems submissions for the Taiwanese Sign language{\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}}Traditional Chinese task. Maximum system performance was computed using BLEU and follow as 36.0 for English{--}Irish, 34.6 for Irish{--}English, 24.2 for English{--}Marathi, and 31.3 for Marathi{--}English.
A3-108 Machine Translation System for LoResMT Shared Task @MT Summit 2021 Conference (2021)

In this paper, we describe our submissions for LoResMT Shared Task @MT Summit 2021 Conference. We built statistical translation systems in each direction for English {\ensuremath{\Leftarrow}}{\ensuremath{\Rightarrow}} Marathi language pair. This paper outlines initial baseline experiments with various tokenization schemes to train models. Using optimal tokenization scheme we create synthetic data and further train augmented dataset to create more statistical models. Also, we reorder English to match Marathi syntax to further train another set of baseline and data augmented models using various tokenization schemes. We report configuration of the submitted systems and results produced by them.
The UCF Systems for the LoResMT 2021 Machine Translation Shared Task (2021)

We present the University of Central Florida systems for the LoResMT 2021 Shared Task, participating in the English-Irish and English-Marathi translation pairs. We focused our efforts on constrained track of the task, using transfer learning and subword segmentation to enhance our models given small amounts of training data. Our models achieved the highest BLEU scores on the fully constrained tracks of English-Irish, Irish-English, and Marathi-English with scores of 13.5, 21.3, and 17.9 respectively
Attentive fine-tuning of Transformers for Translation of low-resourced languages @LoResMT 2021 (2021)

This paper reports the Machine Translation (MT) systems submitted by the IIITT team for the English{\textrightarrow}Marathi and English{\ensuremath{\Leftrightarrow}}Irish language pairs LoResMT 2021 shared task. The task focuses on getting exceptional translations for rather low-resourced languages like Irish and Marathi. We fine-tune IndicTrans, a pretrained multilingual NMT model for English{\textrightarrow}Marathi, using external parallel corpus as input for additional training. We have used a pretrained Helsinki-NLP Opus MT English{\ensuremath{\Leftrightarrow}}Irish model for the latter language pair. Our approaches yield relatively promising results on the BLEU metrics. Under the team name IIITT, our systems ranked 1, 1, and 2 in English{\textrightarrow}Marathi, Irish{\textrightarrow}English, and English{\textrightarrow}Irish respectively. The codes for our systems are published1 .
Machine Translation in the Covid domain: an English-Irish case study for LoResMT 2021 (2021)

Translation models for the specific domain of translating Covid data from English to Irish were developed for the LoResMT 2021 shared task. Domain adaptation techniques, using a Covid-adapted generic 55k corpus from the Directorate General of Translation, were applied. Fine-tuning, mixed fine-tuning and combined dataset approaches were compared with models trained on an extended in-domain dataset. As part of this study, an English-Irish dataset of Covid related data, from the Health and Education domains, was developed. The highestperforming model used a Transformer architecture trained with an extended in-domain Covid dataset. In the context of this study, we have demonstrated that extending an 8k in-domain baseline dataset by just 5k lines improved the BLEU score by 27 points.
English-Marathi Neural Machine Translation for LoResMT 2021 (2021)

In this paper, we (team - oneNLP-IIITH) describe our Neural Machine Translation approaches for English-Marathi (both direction) for LoResMT-20211 . We experimented with transformer based Neural Machine Translation and explored the use of different linguistic features like POS and Morph on subword unit for both English-Marathi and Marathi-English. In addition, we have also explored forward and backward translation using web-crawled monolingual data. We obtained 22.2 (overall 2 nd) and 31.3 (overall 1 st) BLEU scores for English-Marathi and Marathi-English on respectively
Evaluating the Performance of Back-translation for Low Resource English-Marathi Language Pair: CFILT-IITBombay @ LoResMT 2021 (2021)

In this paper, we discuss the details of the various Machine Translation (MT) systems that we have submitted for the English-Marathi LoResMT task. As a part of this task, we have submitted three different Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems; a Baseline English-Marathi system, a Baseline Marathi-English system, and an English-Marathi system that is based on the back-translation technique. We explore the performance of these NMT systems between English and Marathi languages, which forms a low resource language pair due to unavailability of sufficient parallel data. We also explore the performance of the back-translation technique when the back-translated data is obtained from NMT systems that are trained on a very less amount of data. From our experiments, we observe that the back-translation technique can help improve the MT quality over the baseline for the English-Marathi language pair.