Articles

AbstractA multilingual tokenizer is a fundamental component of multilingual neural machine translation. It is trained from a multilingual corpus. Since a skewed data distribution is considered to be harmful, a sampling strategy is usually used to balance languages in the corpus. However, few works have systematically answered how language imbalance …...

AbstractNeural Machine Translation (NMT) is an open vocabulary problem. As a result, dealing with the words not occurring during training (a.k.a. out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words) have long been a fundamental challenge for NMT systems. The predominant method to tackle this problem is Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) which splits words, including OOV …...

AbstractChatbots or conversational systems are used in various sectors such as banking, healthcare, e-commerce, customer support, etc. These chatbots are mainly available for resource-rich languages like English, often limiting their widespread usage to multilingual users. Therefore, making these services or agents available in non-English languages has become essential for their …...

AbstractStudies show machine translation systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where a small change to the input produces an undesirable change in system behavior. This work considers whether this vulnerability exists for attacks crafted with limited information about the target: without access to ground truth references or the particular MT …...

AbstractThis paper proposes a simple and effective method to improve direct translation for the zero-shot case 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 …...

AbstractMultilingual Neural Machine Translation has been showing great success using transformer models. Deploying these models is challenging because they usually require large vocabulary (vocab) sizes for various languages. This limits the speed of predicting the output tokens in the last vocab projection layer. To alleviate these challenges, this paper proposes …...

AbstractVery large language models have been shown to translate with few-shot in-context examples. However, they have not achieved state-of-art results for translating out of English. In this work, we investigate an extremely lightweight fixed-parameter method for conditioning a large language model to better translate into the target language. Our method …...

AbstractPretrained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models have been successful in improving translation performance for mid- and lower-resourced languages. However, it is unclear if these models are helpful in the domain adaptation setting, and if so, how to best adapt them to both the domain and translation language pair. Therefore, in this work, …...

AbstractPreservation of domain knowledge from the source to target is crucial in any translation workflow. It is common in the translation industry to receive highly-specialized projects, where there is hardly any parallel in-domain data. In such scenarios where there is insufficient in-domain data to fine-tune Machine Translation (MT) models, producing …...

AbstractBuilding Machine Translation systems for a specific domain requires a sufficiently large and good quality parallel corpus in that domain. However, this is a bit challenging task due to the lack of parallel data in many domains such as economics, science and technology, sports etc. In this work, we build …...

AbstractLearning sentence embeddings in an unsupervised manner is fundamental in natural language processing. Recent common practice is to couple pre-trained language models with unsupervised contrastive learning, whose success relies on augmenting a sentence with a semantically-close positive instance to construct contrastive pairs. Nonetheless, existing approaches usually depend on a mono-augmenting …...

AbstractIn response to the increasing interest towards automatic subtitling, this EAMT-funded project aimed at collecting subtitle post-editing data in a real use case scenario where professional subtitlers edit automatically generated subtitles. The post-editing setting includes, for the first time, automatic generation of timestamps and segmentation, and focuses on the effect …...

AbstractThe popularity of multimodal dialogue has stimulated the need for a new generation of dialogue agents with multimodal interactivity. When users communicate with customer service, they may express their requirements by means of text, images, or even videos. Visual information usually acts as discriminators for product models, or indicators of …...

AbstractModeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records, while they neglect the rich social context and valuable expert knowledge for holistic ideological analysis. In this paper, …...

AbstractPre-trained multilingual language models are the foundation of many NLP approaches, including cross-lingual transfer solutions. However, languages with small available monolingual corpora are often not well-supported by these models leading to poor performance. We propose an unsupervised approach to improve the cross-lingual representations of low-resource languages by bootstrapping word translation …...

AbstractWe present Twin Answer Sentences Attack (TASA), an adversarial attack method for question answering (QA) models that produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. Despite phenomenal progress on general adversarial attacks, few works have investigated the vulnerability and attack specifically for QA models. In this work, we …...

AbstractNLP benchmarks have largely focused on short texts, such as sentences and paragraphs, even though long texts comprise a considerable amount of natural language in the wild. We introduce SCROLLS, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts. We examine existing long-text datasets, and handpick ones where the …...

AbstractSolid evaluation of neural machine translation (NMT) is key to its understanding and improvement. Current evaluation of an NMT system is usually built upon a heuristic decoding algorithm (e.g., beam search) and an evaluation metric assessing similarity between the translation and golden reference. However, this system-level evaluation framework is limited …...

AbstractPre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast …...

AbstractThe use of emojis affords a visual modality to, often private, textual communication. The task of predicting emojis however provides a challenge for machine learning as emoji use tends to cluster into the frequently used and the rarely used emojis.Much of the machine learning research on emoji use has focused …...