Dominican Republic

Current Machine Translation (MT) systems achieve very good results on a growing variety of language pairs and datasets. However, they are known to produce fluent translation outputs that can contain important meaning errors, thus undermining their reliability in practice. Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of automatically assessing the performance of MT systems at test time. Thus, in order to be useful, QE systems should be able to detect such errors. However, this ability is yet to be tested in the current evaluation practices, where QE systems are assessed only in terms of their correlation with human judgements. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a general methodology for adversarial testing of QE for MT. First, we show that despite a high correlation with human judgements achieved by the recent SOTA, certain types of meaning errors are still problematic for QE to detect. Second, we show that on average, the ability of a given model to discriminate between meaning-preserving and meaning-altering perturbations is predictive of its overall performance, thus potentially allowing for comparing QE systems without relying on manual quality annotation.

EMNLP 2021

Pushing the Right Buttons: Adversarial Evaluation of Quality Estimation

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

workshop paper

We develop a unified system to answer directly from text open-domain questions that may require a varying number of retrieval steps. We employ a single multi-task transformer model to perform all the necessary subtasks---retrieving supporting facts, reranking them, and predicting the answer from all retrieved documents---in an iterative fashion. We avoid crucial assumptions of previous work that do not transfer well to real-world settings, including exploiting knowledge of the fixed number of retrieval steps required to answer each question or using structured metadata like knowledge bases or web links that have limited availability. Instead, we design a system that can answer open-domain questions on any text collection without prior knowledge of reasoning complexity. To emulate this setting, we construct a new benchmark, called BeerQA, by combining existing one- and two-step datasets with a new collection of 530 questions that require three Wikipedia pages to answer, unifying Wikipedia corpora versions in the process. We show that our model demonstrates competitive performance on both existing benchmarks and this new benchmark. We make the new benchmark available at https://beerqa.github.io/.

Answering Open-Domain Questions of Varying Reasoning Steps from Text

The task of generating explanatory notes for language learners is known as feedback comment generation. Although various generation techniques are available, little is known about which methods are appropriate for this task. Nagata (2019) demonstrates the effectiveness of neural-retrieval-based methods in generating feedback comments for preposition use. Retrieval-based methods have limitations in that they can only output feedback comments existing in a given training data. Furthermore, feedback comments can be made on other grammatical and writing items than preposition use, which is still unaddressed. To shed light on these points, we investigate a wider range of methods for generating many feedback comments in this study. Our close analysis of the type of task leads us to investigate three different architectures for comment generation: (i) a neural-retrieval-based method as a baseline, (ii) a pointer-generator-based generation method as a neural seq2seq method, (iii) a retrieve-and-edit method, a hybrid of (i) and (ii). Intuitively, the pointer-generator should outperform neural-retrieval, and retrieve-and-edit should perform best. However, in our experiments, this expectation is completely overturned. We closely analyze the results to reveal the major causes of these counter-intuitive results and report on our findings from the experiments.

Exploring Methods for Generating Feedback Comments for Writing Learning

Much of the existing linguistic data in many languages of the world is locked away in non-digitized books and documents. Optical character recognition (OCR) can be used to produce digitized text, and previous work has demonstrated the utility of neural post-correction methods that improve the results of general-purpose OCR systems on recognition of less-well-resourced languages. However, these methods rely on manually curated post-correction data, which are relatively scarce compared to the non-annotated raw images that need to be digitized. 

In this paper, we present a semi-supervised learning method that makes it possible to utilize these raw images to improve performance, specifically through the use of self-training, a technique where a model is iteratively trained on its own outputs. In addition, to enforce consistency in the recognized vocabulary, we introduce a lexically aware decoding method that augments the neural post-correction model with a count-based language model constructed from the recognized texts, implemented using weighted finite-state automata (WFSA) for efficient and effective decoding.

Results on four endangered languages demonstrate the utility of the proposed method, with relative error reductions of 15-29%, where we find the combination of self-training and lexically-aware decoding essential for achieving consistent improvements

Lexically-Aware Semi-Supervised Learning for OCR Post-Correction

**Anthology paper link:**

https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.158/

**Abstract:**



Segment, Mask, and Predict: Augmenting Chinese Word Segmentation with Self-Supervision

Multi-hop Question Answering (QA) is a challenging task because it requires precise reasoning with entity relations at every step towards the answer. The relations can be represented in terms of labels in knowledge graph (e.g., spouse) or text in text corpus (e.g., they have been married for 26 years). Existing models usually infer the answer by predicting the sequential relation path or aggregating the hidden graph features. The former is hard to optimize, and the latter lacks interpretability. In this paper, we propose TransferNet, an effective and transparent model for multi-hop QA, which supports both label and text relations in a unified framework. TransferNet jumps across entities at multiple steps. At each step, it attends to different parts of the question, computes activated scores for relations, and then transfer the previous entity scores along activated relations in a differentiable way. We carry out extensive experiments on three datasets and demonstrate that TransferNet surpasses the state-of-the-art models by a large margin. In particular, on MetaQA, it achieves 100% accuracy in 2-hop and 3-hop questions. By qualitative analysis, we show that TransferNet has transparent and interpretable intermediate results.

TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graph

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.

Phrase-level Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation

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.

Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation with Constituent Label Prediction

Despite the increasing number of large and comprehensive machine translation (MT) systems, evaluation of these methods in various languages has been restrained by the lack of high-quality parallel corpora as well as engagement with the people that speak these languages. In this study, we present an evaluation of state-of-the-art approaches to training and evaluating MT systems in 22 languages from the Turkic language family, most of which being extremely under-explored. First, we adopt the TIL Corpus with a few key improvements to the training and the evaluation sets. Then, we train 26 bilingual baselines as well as a multi-way neural MT (MNMT) model using the corpus and perform an extensive analysis using automatic metrics as well as human evaluations. We find that the MNMT model outperforms almost all bilingual baselines in the out-of-domain test sets and finetuning the model on a downstream task of a single pair also results in a huge performance boost in both low- and high-resource scenarios. Our attentive analysis of evaluation criteria for MT models in Turkic languages also points to the necessity for further research in this direction. We release the corpus splits, test sets as well as models to the public.

Evaluating Multiway Multilingual NMT in the Turkic Languages

Adapter layers are lightweight, learnable units inserted between transformer layers. Recent work explores using such layers for neural machine translation (NMT), to adapt pre-trained models to new domains or language pairs, training only a small set of parameters for each new setting (language pair or domain).
In this work we study the compositionality of language and domain adapters in the context of Machine Translation. We aim to study, 1) parameter-efficient adaptation to multiple domains and languages simultaneously (full-resource scenario) and 2) cross-lingual transfer in domains where parallel data is unavailable for certain language pairs (partial-resource scenario).
We find that in the partial resource scenario a naive combination of domain-specific and language-specific adapters often results in `catastrophic forgetting' of the missing languages. We study other ways to combine the adapters to alleviate this issue and maximize cross-lingual transfer.
With our best adapter combinations, we obtain improvements of 3-4 BLEU on average for source languages that do not have in-domain data. For target languages without in-domain data, we achieve a similar improvement by combining adapters with back-translation.
Supplementary material is available at https://tinyurl.com/r66stbxj.

Multilingual Domain Adaptation for NMT: Decoupling Language and Domain Information with Adapters

In this paper, we show that automatically-generated questions and answers can be used to evaluate the quality of Machine Translation (MT) systems. Building on recent work on the evaluation of abstractive text summarization, we propose a new metric for system-level MT evaluation, compare it with other state-of-the-art solutions, and show its robustness by conducting experiments for various MT directions.

Pushing the Right Buttons: Adversarial Evaluation of Quality Estimation

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