ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multilingual Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics Fine-tuned on Pseudo-Negative Examples for WMT 2021 Metrics Task (2021)

This paper describes our submission to the WMT2021 shared metrics task. Our metric is operative to segment-level and system-level translations. Our belief toward a better metric is to detect a significant error that cannot be missed in the real practice cases of evaluation. For that reason, we used pseudo-negative examples in which attributes of some words are transferred to the reversed attribute words, and we build evaluation models to handle such serious mistakes of translations. We fine-tune a multilingual largely pre-trained model on the provided corpus of past years' metric task and fine-tune again further on the synthetic negative examples that are derived from the same fine-tune corpus. From the evaluation results of the WMT21`s development corpus, fine-tuning on the pseudo-negatives using WMT15-17 and WMT18-20 metric corpus achieved a better Pearson`s correlation score than the one fine-tuned without negative examples. Our submitted models,hyp+src{\_}hyp+ref and hyp+src{\_}hyp+ref.negative, are the plain model using WMT18-20 and the one additionally fine-tuned on negative samples, respectively.
RoBLEURT Submission for WMT2021 Metrics Task (2021)

In this paper, we present our submission to Shared Metrics Task: RoBLEURT (Robustly Optimizing the training of BLEURT). After investigating the recent advances of trainable metrics, we conclude several aspects of vital importance to obtain a well-performed metric model by: 1) jointly leveraging the advantages of source-included model and reference-only model, 2) continuously pre-training the model with massive synthetic data pairs, and 3) fine-tuning the model with data denoising strategy. Experimental results show that our model reaching state-of-the-art correlations with the WMT2020 human annotations upon 8 out of 10 to-English language pairs.
Linguistic Evaluation for the 2021 State-of-the-art Machine Translation Systems for German to English and English to German (2021)

We are using a semi-automated test suite in order to provide a fine-grained linguistic evaluation for state-of-the-art machine translation systems. The evaluation includes 18 German to English and 18 English to German systems, submitted to the Translation Shared Task of the 2021 Conference on Machine Translation. Our submission adds up to the submissions of the previous years by creating and applying a wide-range test suite for English to German as a new language pair. The fine-grained evaluation allows spotting significant differences between systems that cannot be distinguished by the direct assessment of the human evaluation campaign. We find that most of the systems achieve good accuracies in the majority of linguistic phenomena but there are few phenomena with lower accuracy, such as the idioms, the modal pluperfect and the German resultative predicates. Two systems have significantly better test suite accuracy in macro-average in every language direction, Online-W and Facebook-AI for German to English and VolcTrans and Online-W for English to German. The systems show a steady improvement as compared to previous years.
Pruning Neural Machine Translation for Speed Using Group Lasso (2021)

Unlike most work on pruning neural networks, we make inference faster. Group lasso regularisation enables pruning entire rows, columns or blocks of parameters that result in a smaller dense network. Because the network is still dense, efficient matrix multiply routines are still used and only minimal software changes are required to support variable layer sizes. Moreover, pruning is applied during training so there is no separate pruning step. Experiments on top of English-{\ensuremath{>}}German models, which already have state-of-the-art speed and size, show that two-thirds of feedforward connections can be removed with 0.2 BLEU loss. With 6 decoder layers, the pruned model is 34{\%} faster; with 2 tied decoder layers, the pruned model is 14{\%} faster. Pruning entire heads and feedforward connections in a 12{--}1 encoder-decoder architecture gains an additional 51{\%} speed-up. These push the Pareto frontier with respect to the trade-off between time and quality compared to strong baselines. In the WMT 2021 Efficiency Task, our pruned and quantised models are 1.9{--}2.7x faster at the cost 0.9{--}1.7 BLEU in comparison to the unoptimised baselines. Across language pairs, we see similar sparsity patterns: an ascending or U-shaped distribution in encoder feedforward and attention layers and an ascending distribution in the decoder.
Phrase-level Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2021)

Neural machine translation (NMT) is sensitive to domain shift. In this paper, we address this problem in an active learning setting where we can spend a given budget on translating in-domain data, and gradually fine-tune a pre-trained out-of-domain NMT model on the newly translated data. Existing active learning methods for NMT usually select sentences based on uncertainty scores, but these methods require costly translation of full sentences even when only one or two key phrases within the sentence are informative. To address this limitation, we re-examine previous work from the phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) era that selected not full sentences, but rather individual phrases. However, while incorporating these phrases into PBMT systems was relatively simple, it is less trivial for NMT systems, which need to be trained on full sequences to capture larger structural properties of sentences unique to the new domain. To overcome these hurdles, we propose to select both full sentences and individual phrases from unlabelled data in the new domain for routing to human translators. In a German-English translation task, our active learning approach achieves consistent improvements over uncertainty-based sentence selection methods, improving up to 1.2 BLEU score over strong active learning baselines.
Learning Feature Weights using Reward Modeling for Denoising Parallel Corpora (2021)

Large web-crawled corpora represent an excellent resource for improving the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems across several language pairs. However, since these corpora are typically extremely noisy, their use is fairly limited. Current approaches to deal with this problem mainly focus on filtering using heuristics or single features such as language model scores or bi-lingual similarity. This work presents an alternative approach which learns weights for multiple sentence-level features. These feature weights which are optimized directly for the task of improving translation performance, are used to score and filter sentences in the noisy corpora more effectively. We provide results of applying this technique to building NMT systems using the Paracrawl corpus for Estonian-English and show that it beats strong single feature baselines and hand designed combinations. Additionally, we analyze the sensitivity of this method to different types of noise and explore if the learned weights generalize to other language pairs using the Maltese-English Paracrawl corpus.
Monotonic Simultaneous Translation with Chunk-wise Reordering and Refinement (2021)

Recent work in simultaneous machine translation is often trained with conventional full sentence translation corpora, leading to either excessive latency or necessity to anticipate as-yet-unarrived words, when dealing with a language pair whose word orders significantly differ. This is unlike human simultaneous interpreters who produce largely monotonic translations at the expense of the grammaticality of a sentence being translated. In this paper, we thus propose an algorithm to reorder and refine the target side of a full sentence translation corpus, so that the words/phrases between the source and target sentences are aligned largely monotonically, using word alignment and non-autoregressive neural machine translation. We then train a widely used wait-k simultaneous translation model on this reordered-and-refined corpus. The proposed approach improves BLEU scores and resulting translations exhibit enhanced monotonicity with source sentences.
Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation with Constituent Label Prediction (2021)

Simultaneous translation is a task in which translation begins before the speaker has finished speaking, so it is important to decide when to start the translation process. However, deciding whether to read more input words or start to translate is difficult for language pairs with different word orders such as English and Japanese. Motivated by the concept of pre-reordering, we propose a couple of simple decision rules using the label of the next constituent predicted by incremental constituent label prediction. In experiments on English-to-Japanese simultaneous translation, the proposed method outperformed baselines in the quality-latency trade-off.
Contrastive Learning for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation Using Coreference Information (2021)

Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) incorporates contextual information of surrounding texts, that can improve the translation quality of document-level machine translation. Many existing works on context-aware NMT have focused on developing new model architectures for incorporating additional contexts and have shown some promising results. However, most of existing works rely on cross-entropy loss, resulting in limited use of contextual information. In this paper, we propose CorefCL, a novel data augmentation and contrastive learning scheme based on coreference between the source and contextual sentences. By corrupting automatically detected coreference mentions in the contextual sentence, CorefCL can train the model to be sensitive to coreference inconsistency. We experimented with our method on common context-aware NMT models and two document-level translation tasks. In the experiments, our method consistently improved BLEU of compared models on English-German and English-Korean tasks. We also show that our method significantly improves coreference resolution in the English-German contrastive test suite.
OkwuGb\'e: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo (2021)

Language is a fundamental component of human communication. African low-resourced languages have recently been a major subject of research in machine translation, and other text-based areas of NLP. However, there is still very little comparable research in speech recognition for African languages. OkwuGb{\'e} is a step towards building speech recognition systems for African low-resourced languages. Using Fon and Igbo as our case study, we build two end-to-end deep neural network-based speech recognition models. We present a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Fon, and a benchmark ASR model result for Igbo. Our findings serve both as a guide for future NLP research for Fon and Igbo in particular, and the creation of speech recognition models for other African low-resourced languages in general. The Fon and Igbo models source code have been made publicly available. Moreover, Okwugbe, a python library has been created to make easier the process of ASR model building and training.
TEET! Tunisian Dataset for Toxic Speech Detection (2021)

The complete freedom of expression in social media has its costs especially in spreading harmful and abusive content that may induce people to act accordingly. Therefore, the need of detecting automatically such a content becomes an urgent task that will help and enhance the efficiency in limiting this toxic spread. Compared to other Arabic dialects which are mostly based on MSA, the Tunisian dialect is a combination of many other languages like MSA, Tamazight, Italian and French. Because of its rich language, dealing with NLP problems can be challenging due to the lack of large annotated datasets. In our context of detecting hate and abusive speech for tunisian dialect, the only existing annotated dataset is T-HSAB combining 6,039 annotated comments as hateful, abusive or normal. In this paper we are introducing a larger annotated dataset composed of approximately 10k of comments. We provide an in-depth exploration of its vocabulary as well as the results of the classification performance of machine learning classifiers like NB and SVM and deep learning models such as ARBERT, MARBERT and XLM-R.
Developing Keyboards for the Endangered Livonian Language (2021)

We present our current work on developing keyboard layouts for a critically endangered Uralic language called Livonian. Our layouts work on Windows, MacOS and Linux. In addition, we have developed keyboard apps with predictive text for Android and iOS. This work has been conducted in collaboration with the language community.
Natural language processing as a tool to identify the Reddit particularities of cancer survivors around the time of diagnosis and remission: A pilot study (2021)

In the current study, we analyzed 15297 texts from 39 cancer survivors who posted or commented on Reddit in order to detect the language particularities of cancer survivors from online discourse. We performed a computational linguistic analysis (part-of-speech analysis, emoji detection, sentiment analysis) on submissions around the time of the cancer diagnosis and around the time of remission. We found several significant differences in the texts posted around the time of remission compared to those around the time of diagnosis. Though our results need to be backed up by a higher corpus of data, they do cue to the fact that cancer survivors, around the time of remission, focus more on others, are more active on social media, and do not see the glass as half empty as suggested by the valence of the emojis.
The Development of Pre-processing Tools and Pre-trained Embedding Models for Amharic (2021)

Amharic is the second most spoken Semitic language after Arabic and serves as the official working language of Ethiopia. While Amharic NLP research is getting wider attention recently, the main bottleneck is that the resources and related tools are not publicly released, which makes it still a low-resource language. Due to this reason, we observe that different researchers try to repeat the same NLP research again and again. In this work, we investigate the existing approach in Amharic NLP and take the first step to publicly release tools, datasets, and models to advance Amharic NLP research. We build Python-based preprocessing tools for Amharic (tokenizer, sentence segmenter, and text cleaner) that can easily be used and integrated for the development of NLP applications. Furthermore, we compiled the first moderately large-scale Amharic text corpus (6.8m sentences) along with the word2Vec, fastText, RoBERTa, and FLAIR embeddings models. Finally, we compile benchmark datasets and build classification models for the named entity recognition task.
Overview of the 8th Workshop on Asian Translation (2021)

This paper presents the results of the shared tasks from the 8th workshop on Asian translation (WAT2021). For the WAT2021, 28 teams participated in the shared tasks and 24 teams submitted their translation results for the human evaluation. We also accepted 5 research papers. About 2,100 translation results were submitted to the automatic evaluation server, and selected submissions were manually evaluated.
NHK`s Lexically-Constrained Neural Machine Translation at WAT 2021 (2021)

This paper describes the system of our team (NHK) for the WAT 2021 Japanese-English restricted machine translation task. In this task, the aim is to improve quality while maintaining consistent terminology for scientific paper translation. This task has a unique feature, where some words in a target sentence are given in addition to a source sentence. In this paper, we use a lexically-constrained neural machine translation (NMT), which concatenates the source sentence and constrained words with a special token to input them into the encoder of NMT. The key to the successful lexically-constrained NMT is the way to extract constraints from a target sentence of training data. We propose two extraction methods: proper-noun constraint and mistranslated-word constraint. These two methods consider the importance of words and fallibility of NMT, respectively. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our lexical-constraint method.
Input Augmentation Improves Constrained Beam Search for Neural Machine Translation: NTT at WAT 2021 (2021)

This paper describes our systems that were submitted to the restricted translation task at WAT 2021. In this task, the systems are required to output translated sentences that contain all given word constraints. Our system combined input augmentation and constrained beam search algorithms. Through experiments, we found that this combination significantly improves translation accuracy and can save inference time while containing all the constraints in the output. For both En-{\ensuremath{>}}Ja and Ja-{\ensuremath{>}}En, our systems obtained the best evaluation performances in automatic and human evaluation.
NICT`s Neural Machine Translation Systems for the WAT21 Restricted Translation Task (2021)

This paper describes our system (Team ID: nictrb) for participating in the WAT`21 restricted machine translation task. In our submitted system, we designed a new training approach for restricted machine translation. By sampling from the translation target, we can solve the problem that ordinary training data does not have a restricted vocabulary. With the further help of constrained decoding in the inference phase, we achieved better results than the baseline, confirming the effectiveness of our solution. In addition, we also tried the vanilla and sparse Transformer as the backbone network of the model, as well as model ensembling, which further improved the final translation performance.
Machine Translation with Pre-specified Target-side Words Using a Semi-autoregressive Model (2021)

We introduce our TMU Japanese-to-English system, which employs a semi-autoregressive model, to tackle the WAT 2021 restricted translation task. In this task, we translate an input sentence with the constraint that some words, called restricted target vocabularies (RTVs), must be contained in the output sentence. To satisfy this constraint, we use a semi-autoregressive model, namely, RecoverSAT, due to its ability (known as {\textquotedblleft}forced translation{\textquotedblright}) to insert specified words into the output sentence. When using {\textquotedblleft}forced translation,{\textquotedblright} the order of inserting RTVs is a critical problem. In this work, we aligned the source sentence and the corresponding RTVs using GIZA++. In our system, we obtain word alignment between a source sentence and the corresponding RTVs and then sort the RTVs in the order of their corresponding words or phrases in the source sentence. Using the model with sorted order RTVs, we succeeded in inserting all the RTVs into output sentences in more than 96{\%} of the test sentences. Moreover, we confirmed that sorting RTVs improved the BLEU score compared with random order RTVs.
NECTEC`s Participation in WAT-2021 (2021)

In this paper, we report the experimental results of Machine Translation models conducted by a NECTEC team for the translation tasks of WAT-2021. Basically, our models are based on neural methods for both directions of English-Myanmar and Myanmar-English language pairs. Most of the existing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models mainly focus on the conversion of sequential data and do not directly use syntactic information. However, we conduct multi-source neural machine translation (NMT) models using the multilingual corpora such as string data corpus, tree data corpus, or POS-tagged data corpus. The multi-source translation is an approach to exploit multiple inputs (e.g. in two different formats) to increase translation accuracy. The RNN-based encoder-decoder model with attention mechanism and transformer architectures have been carried out for our experiment. The experimental results showed that the proposed models of RNN-based architecture outperform the baseline model for English-to-Myanmar translation task, and the multi-source and shared-multi-source transformer models yield better translation results than the baseline.
Hybrid Statistical Machine Translation for English-Myanmar: UTYCC Submission to WAT-2021 (2021)

In this paper we describe our submissions to WAT-2021 (Nakazawa et al., 2021) for English-to-Myanmar language (Burmese) task. Our team, ID: {\textquotedblleft}YCC-MT1{\textquotedblright}, focused on bringing transliteration knowledge to the decoder without changing the model. We manually extracted the transliteration word/phrase pairs from the ALT corpus and applying XML markup feature of Moses decoder (i.e. -xml-input exclusive, -xml-input inclusive). We demonstrate that hybrid translation technique can significantly improve (around 6 BLEU scores) the baseline of three well-known {\textquotedblleft}Phrase-based SMT{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}Operation Sequence Model{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}Hierarchical Phrase-based SMT{\textquotedblright}. Moreover, this simple hybrid method achieved the second highest results among the submitted MT systems for English-to-Myanmar WAT2021 translation share task according to BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) and AMFM scores (Banchs et al., 2015).
NICT-2 Translation System at WAT-2021: Applying a Pretrained Multilingual Encoder-Decoder Model to Low-resource Language Pairs (2021)

In this paper, we present the NICT system (NICT-2) submitted to the NICT-SAP shared task at the 8th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT-2021). A feature of our system is that we used a pretrained multilingual BART (Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer; mBART) model. Because publicly available models do not support some languages in the NICT-SAP task, we added these languages to the mBART model and then trained it using monolingual corpora extracted from Wikipedia. We fine-tuned the expanded mBART model using the parallel corpora specified by the NICT-SAP task. The BLEU scores greatly improved in comparison with those of systems without the pretrained model, including the additional languages.
Rakuten`s Participation in WAT 2021: Examining the Effectiveness of Pre-trained Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation (2021)

This paper introduces our neural machine translation systems' participation in the WAT 2021 shared translation tasks (team ID: sakura). We participated in the (i) NICT-SAP, (ii) Japanese-English multimodal translation, (iii) Multilingual Indic, and (iv) Myanmar-English translation tasks. Multilingual approaches such as mBART (Liu et al., 2020) are capable of pre-training a complete, multilingual sequence-to-sequence model through denoising objectives, making it a great starting point for building multilingual translation systems. Our main focus in this work is to investigate the effectiveness of multilingual finetuning on such a multilingual language model on various translation tasks, including low-resource, multimodal, and mixed-domain translation. We further explore a multimodal approach based on universal visual representation (Zhang et al., 2019) and compare its performance against a unimodal approach based on mBART alone.