Articles

AbstractThis work is inspired by a typical machine translation industry scenario in which translators make use of in-domain data for facilitating translation of similar or repeating sentences. We introduce a generic framework applied at inference in which a subset of segment pairs are first extracted from training data according to …...

AbstractSupervised machine translation works well when the train and test data are sampled from the same distribution. When this is not the case, adaptation techniques help ensure that the knowledge learned from out-of-domain texts generalises to in-domain sentences. We study here a related setting, multi-domain adaptation, where the number of …...

AbstractIn Neural Machine Translation (NMT) the usage of sub􏰃words and characters as source and target units offers a simple and flexible solution for translation of rare and unseen words. However, selecting the optimal subword segmentation involves a trade-off between expressiveness and flexibility, and is language and dataset-dependent. We present Block …...

AbstractProminently used in support vector machines and logistic re-gressions, kernel functions (kernels) can implicitly map data points into high dimensional spaces and make it easier to learn complex decision boundaries. In this work, by replacing the inner product function in the softmax layer, we explore the use of kernels for …...

AbstractDevising metrics to assess translation quality has always been at the core of machine translation (MT) research. Traditional automatic reference-based metrics, such as BLEU, have shown correlations with human judgements of adequacy and fluency and have been paramount for the advancement of MT system development. Crowd-sourcing has popularised and enabled …...

AbstractIn Machine Translation, considering the document as a whole can help to resolve ambiguities and inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a simple yet promising approach to add contextual information in Neural Machine Translation. We present a method to add source context that capture the whole document with accurate boundaries, …...

AbstractIn this work we analyze and compare the behavior of the Transformer architecture when using different positional encoding methods. While absolute and relative positional encoding perform equally strong overall, we show that relative positional encoding is vastly superior (4.4% to 11.9% BLEU) when translating a sentence that is longer than …...

AbstractWord alignments identify translational correspondences between words in a parallel sentence pair and is used, for instance, to learn bilingual dictionaries, to train statistical machine translation systems, or to perform quality estimation. In most areas of natural lan- guage processing, neural network models nowadays constitute the preferred approach, a situation …...

AbstractFor automatic speech translation (AST), end-to-end approaches are outperformed by cascaded models that transcribe with automatic speech recognition (ASR), then trans- late with machine translation (MT). A major cause of the performance gap is that, while existing AST corpora are small, massive datasets exist for both the ASR and MT …...

AbstractWe evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PRENORM) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large learning rates. Second, we propose l2 normalization with a single scale parameter (SCALENORM) for faster training and better performance. Finally, we reaffirm the …...

AbstractMultilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) for low- resource languages (LRL) can be enhanced by the presence of related high-resource languages (HRL), but the relatedness of HRL usually relies on predefined linguistic assumptions about language similarity. Recently, adapting MNMT to a LRL has shown to greatly improve performance. In this work, …...

AbstractWhile translating between East Asian languages, many works have discovered clear advantages of using characters as the translation unit. Unfortunately, traditional recurrent neural machine translation systems hinder the practical usage of those character-based systems due to their architectural limitations. They are unfavorable in handling extremely long sequences as well as …...

AbstractThis work investigates a simple data augmentation technique, SpecAugment, for end-to-end speech translation. SpecAugment is a low-cost implementation method applied directly to the audio input features and it consists of masking blocks of frequency channels, and/or time steps. We apply SpecAugment on end-to-end speech translation tasks and achieve up to …...

AbstractThis paper describes FBK’s submission to the end-to-end speech translation (ST) task at IWSLT 2019. The task consists in the “direct” translation (i.e. without intermediate discrete representation) of English speech data derived from TED Talks or lectures into German texts. Our participation had a twofold goal: i) testing our latest …...

AbstractIn this paper, we describe KIT’s submission for the IWSLT 2019 shared task on text translation. Our system is based on the transformer model [1] using our in-house implementation. We augment the available training data using back-translation and employ fine-tuning for the final model. For our best results, we used …...

AbstractThis paper describes the submission to IWSLT 2019 End- to-End speech translation task by Samsung R&D Institute, Poland. We decided to focus on end-to-end English to German TED lectures translation and did not provide any submission for other speech tasks. We used a slightly altered Transformer architecture with standard convolutional …...

AbstractIn Neural Machine Translation (NMT) the usage of sub-words and characters as source and target units offers a simple and flexible solution for translation of rare and unseen words. However, selecting the optimal subword segmentation involves a trade-off between expressiveness and flexibility, and is language and dataset-dependent. We present Block …...

AbstractWe describe our four NMT systems submitted to the IWSLT19 shared task in English→Czech text-to-text translation of TED talks. The goal of this study is to understand the interactions between document-level NMT and domain adaptation. All our systems are based on the Transformer model implemented in the Tensor2Tensor framework. Two …...

AbstractThis paper describes our end-to-end speech translation system for the speech translation task of lectures and TED talks from English to German for IWSLT Evaluation 2019. We propose layer-tied self-attention for end-to-end speech translation. Our method takes advantage of sharing weights of speech encoder and text decoder. The representation of …...

AbstractThis paper describes the cascaded multimodal speech translation systems developed by Imperial College London for the IWSLT 2019 evaluation campaign. The architecture consists of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system followed by a Transformer-based multimodal machine translation (MMT) system. While the ASR component is identical across the experiments, the MMT …...