Dominican Republic

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.

EMNLP 2021

Linguistic evaluation for the 2021 state-of-the-art Machine Translation systems for German to English and English to German

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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.

Masked language models (MLMs) have contributed to drastic performance improvements with regard to zero anaphora resolution (ZAR). To further improve this approach, in this study, we made two proposals. The first is a new pretraining task that trains MLMs on anaphoric relations with explicit supervision, and the second proposal is a new finetuning method that remedies a notorious issue, the pretrainfinetune discrepancy. Our experiments on Japanese ZAR demonstrated that our two proposals boost the state-of-the-art performance, and our detailed analysis provides new insights on the remaining challenges.

Pseudo Zero Pronoun Resolution Improves Zero Anaphora Resolution

In this paper, we propose to align sentence representations from different languages into a unified embedding space, where semantic similarities (both cross-lingual and monolingual) can be computed with a simple dot product. Pre-trained language models are fine-tuned with the translation ranking task. Existing work (Feng et al., 2020) uses sentences within the same batch as negatives, which can suffer from the issue of easy negatives. We adapt MoCo (He et al., 2020) to further improve the quality of alignment. As the experimental results show, the sentence representations produced by our model achieve the new state-of-the-art on several tasks, including Tatoeba en-zh similarity search (Artetxe and Schwenk, 2019b), BUCC en-zh bitext mining, and semantic textual similarity on 7 datasets.

Aligning Cross-lingual Sentence Representations with Dual Momentum Contrast

This paper investigates continual learning for semantic parsing. In this setting, a neural semantic parser learns tasks sequentially without accessing full training data from previous tasks. Direct application of the SOTA continual learning algorithms to this problem fails to achieve comparable performance with re-training models with all seen tasks because they have not considered the special properties of structured outputs yielded by semantic parsers. Therefore, we propose TotalRecall, a continual learning method designed for neural semantic parsers from two aspects: i) a sampling method for memory replay that diversifies logical form templates and balances distributions of parse actions in a memory; ii) a two-stage training method that significantly improves generalization capability of the parsers across tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to study the research problems involved in continual semantic parsing and demonstrate that a neural semantic parser trained with TotalRecall achieves superior performance than the one trained directly with the SOTA continual learning algorithms and achieve a 3-6 times speedup compared to re-training from scratch.

Total Recall: a Customized Continual Learning Method for Neural Semantic Parsers

Resolving pronouns to their referents has long been studied as a fundamental natural language understanding problem. Previous works on pronoun coreference resolution (PCR) mostly focus on resolving pronouns to mentions in text while ignoring the exophoric scenario. Exophoric pronouns are common in daily communications, where speakers may directly use pronouns to refer to some objects present in the environment without introducing the objects first. Although such objects are not mentioned in the dialogue text, they can often be disambiguated by the general topics of the dialogue. Motivated by this, we propose to jointly leverage the local context and global topics of dialogues to solve the out-of-text PCR problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of adding topic regularization for resolving exophoric pronouns.

Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Topic Regularization

We propose a method to distil language-agnostic meaning embedding using a multilingual sentence encoder. By removing language-specific information from the original embedding, we retrieve an embedding that fully represents the meaning of the sentence. The proposed method relies only on parallel corpora without any human annotations. Our meaning embedding allows for efficient cross-lingual sentence similarity estimation using a simple cosine similarity calculation. Experimental results of both the quality estimation of machine translation and cross-lingual semantic textual similarity tasks reveal that our method consistently outperforms the strong baselines using the original multilingual embeddings. The method also consistently improves the performance of any pre-trained multilingual sentence encoder, even in low-resource language pairs, where only tens of thousands of parallel sentence pairs are available.

Language-agnostic Representation from Multilingual Sentence Encoders for Cross-lingual Similarity Estimation

This paper describes SYSTRAN submissions to the WMT 2021 terminology shared task. We participate in the English-to-French translation direction with a standard Transformer neural machine translation network that we enhance with the ability to dynamically include terminology constraints, a very common industrial practice. Two state-of-the-art terminology insertion methods are evaluated based (i) on the use of placeholders complemented with morphosyntactic annotation and (ii) on the use of target constraints injected in the source stream. Results show the suitability of the presented approaches in the evaluated scenario where terminology is used in a system trained on generic data only.

SYSTRAN @ WMT 2021: Terminology Task

The main idea of this solution has been to focus on corpus cleaning and preparation and after that, use an out of box solution (OpenNMT) with its default published transformer model. To prepare the corpus, we have used set of standard tools (as Moses scripts or python packages), but also, among other python scripts, a python custom tokenizer with the ability to replace numbers for variables, solve the upper/lower case issue of the vocabulary and provide good segmentation for most of the punctuation. We also have started a line to clean corpus based on statistical probability estimation of source-target corpus, with unclear results. Also, we have run some tests with syllabical word segmentation, again with unclear results, so at the end, after word sentence tokenization we have used BPE SentencePiece for subword units to feed OpenNMT.

T4T Solution: WMT21 Similar Language Task for the Spanish-Catalan and Spanish-Portuguese Language Pair

This paper describes POSTECH's quality estimation systems submitted to Task 2 of the WMT 2021 quality estimation shared task: Word and Sentence-Level Post-editing Effort.
We notice that it is possible to improve the stability of the latest quality estimation models that have only one encoder based on the self-attention mechanism to simultaneously process both of the two input data, a source sequence and its machine translation, in that such models have neglected to take advantage of pre-trained monolingual representations, which are generally accepted as reliable representations for various natural language processing tasks.
Therefore, our model uses two pre-trained monolingual encoders and then exchanges the information of two encoded representations through two additional cross attention networks.
According to the official leaderboard, our systems outperform the baseline systems in terms of the Matthews correlation coefficient for machine translations' word-level quality estimation and in terms of the Pearson's correlation coefficient for sentence-level quality estimation by 0.4126 and 0.5497 respectively.

Quality Estimation Using Dual Encoders with Transfer Learning

The paper presents our submission to the WMT2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). We participate in sentence-level predictions of human judgments and post-editing effort. We propose a glass-box approach based on attention weights extracted from machine translation systems. In contrast to the previous works, we directly explore attention weight matrices without replacing them with general metrics (like entropy). We show that some of our models can be trained with a small amount of a high-cost labelled data. In the absence of training data our approach still demonstrates a moderate linear correlation, when trained with synthetic data.

Direct Exploitation of Attention Weights for Translation Quality Estimation

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2021 Triangular MT Shared Task. We participate in the Russian-to-Chinese task under the constrained condition. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via a variant with larger parameter sizes. We perform detailed data pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual data. Several strategies are used to train our models, such as Multilingual Translation, Back Translation, Forward Translation, Data Denoising, Average Checkpoint, Ensemble, Fine-tuning, etc. Our system obtains 32.5 BLEU on the dev set and 27.7 BLEU on the test set, the highest score among all submissions.

Next from EMNLP 2021

Pseudo Zero Pronoun Resolution Improves Zero Anaphora Resolution

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