Dominican Republic

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translate Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT 2021 News Translation Shared Task. We participate in 7 language pairs, including Zh/En, De/En, Ja/En, Ha/En, Is/En, Hi/Bn, and Xh/Zu in both directions under the constrained condition. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via multiple variants with larger parameter sizes. We perform detailed pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual and monolingual datasets. Several commonly used strategies are used to train our models, such as Back Translation, Forward Translation, Multilingual Translation, Ensemble Knowledge Distillation, etc. Our submission obtains competitive results in the final evaluation.

EMNLP 2021

HW-TSC’s Participation in the WMT 2021 News Translation Shared Task

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

Code summarization aims to generate concise natural language descriptions of source code, which can help improve program comprehension and maintenance. Recent studies show that syntactic and structural information extracted from abstract syntax trees (ASTs) is conducive to summary generation. However, existing approaches fail to fully capture the rich information in ASTs because of the large size/depth of ASTs. In this paper, we propose a novel model CAST that hierarchically splits and reconstructs ASTs. First, we hierarchically split a large AST into a set of subtrees and utilize a recursive neural network to encode the subtrees. Then, we aggregate the embeddings of subtrees by reconstructing the split ASTs to get the representation of the complete AST. Finally, AST representation, together with source code embedding obtained by a vanilla code token encoder, is used for code summarization. Extensive experiments, including the ablation study and the human evaluation, on benchmarks have demonstrated the power of CAST.

CAST: Enhancing Code Summarization with Hierarchical Splitting and Reconstruction of Abstract Syntax Trees

In the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task an embodied agent navigates a 3D environment, following natural language instructions. A challenge in this task is how to handle 'off the path' scenarios where an agent veers from a reference path. Prior work supervises the agent with actions based on the shortest path from the agent’s location to the goal, but such goal-oriented supervision is often not in alignment with the instruction. Furthermore, the evaluation metrics employed by prior work do not measure how much of a language instruction the agent is able to follow. In this work, we propose a simple and effective language-aligned supervision scheme, and a new metric that measures the number of sub-instructions the agent has completed during navigation.

Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

A method for creating a vision-and-language (V&L) model is to extend a language model through structural modifications and V&L pre-training. Such an extension aims to make a V&L model inherit the capability of natural language understanding (NLU) from the original language model. To see how well this is achieved, we propose to evaluate V&L models using an NLU benchmark (GLUE). We compare five V&L models, including single-stream and dual-stream models, trained with the same pre-training. Dual-stream models, with their higher modality independence achieved by approximately doubling the number of parameters, are expected to preserve the NLU capability better. Our main finding is that the dual-stream scores are not much different than the single-stream scores, contrary to expectation. Further analysis shows that pre-training causes the performance drop in NLU tasks with few exceptions. These results suggest that adopting a single-stream structure and devising the pre-training could be an effective method for improving the maintenance of language knowledge in V&L extensions.

Effect of Visual Extensions on Natural Language Understanding in Vision-and-Language Models

Generative spoken language modeling involves learning jointly the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of a language from raw audio only (without text or labels). We introduce metrics to automatically evaluate the generated output in terms of acoustic and linguistic quality in two associated end-to-end tasks, respectively: speech resynthesis (repeating the speech input using the system's own voice), and speech generation (producing novel speech outputs conditional on a spoken prompt, or unconditionally), and validate these metrics with human judgment. We test baseline systems consisting of a discrete speech encoder (returning discrete, low bitrate, pseudo-text units), a generative language model (trained on pseudo-text units), and a speech decoder (generating a waveform from pseudo-text). By comparing three state-of-the-art unsupervised speech encoders (Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC), wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT), and varying the number of discrete units (50, 100, 200), we investigate how the generative performance depends on the quality of the learned units as measured by unsupervised metrics (zero-shot probe tasks). We will open source our evaluation stack and baseline models.

Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio

This paper presents the NICT Kyoto submission for the WMT'21 Quality Estimation (QE) Critical Error Detection shared task (Task 3). Our approach relies mainly on QE model pretraining for which we used 11 language pairs, three sentence-level and three word-level translation quality metrics. Starting from an XLM-R checkpoint, we perform continued training by modifying the learning objective, switching from masked language modeling to QE oriented signals, before finetuning and ensembling the models. Results obtained on the test set in terms of correlation coefficient and F-score show that automatic metrics and synthetic data perform well for pretraining, with our submissions ranked first for two out of four language pairs. A deeper look at the impact of each metric on the downstream task indicates higher performance for token oriented metrics, while an ablation study emphasizes the usefulness of conducting both self-supervised and QE pretraining.

NICT Kyoto Submission for the WMT’21 Quality Estimation Task: Multimetric Multilingual Pretraining for Critical Error Detection

This paper describes our submission for the shared task on Unsupervised MT and Very Low Resource Supervised MT at WMT 2021. We submitted systems for two language pairs: German ↔ Upper Sorbian (de ↔ hsb) and German-Lower Sorbian (de ↔ dsb). For de ↔ hsb, we pretrain our system using MASS (Masked Sequence to Sequence) objective and then finetune using iterative back-translation. Final finetunng is performed using the parallel data provided for translation objective. For de ↔ dsb, no parallel data is provided in the task, we use final de ↔ hsb model as initialization of the de ↔ dsb model and train it further using iterative back-translation, using the same vocabulary as used in the de ↔ hsb model.

Language model pretraining and transfer learning for very low resource languages

This paper describes DUT-NLP Lab's submission to the WMT-21 triangular machine translation shared task. The participants are not allowed to use other data and the translation direction of this task is Russian-to-Chinese. In this task, we use the Transformer as our baseline model, and integrate several techniques to enhance the performance of the baseline, including data filtering, data selection, fine-tuning, and post-editing. Further, to make use of the English resources, such as Russian/English and Chinese/English parallel data, the relationship triangle is constructed by multilingual neural machine translation systems. As a result, our submission achieves a BLEU score of 21.9 in Russian-to-Chinese.

DUTNLP Machine Translation System for WMT21 Triangular Translation Task

This paper describes Charles University sub-mission for Terminology translation Shared Task at WMT21. The objective of this task is to design a system which translates certain terms based on a provided terminology database, while preserving high overall translation quality. We competed in English-French language pair. Our approach is based on providing the desired translations alongside the input sentence and training the model to use these provided terms. We lemmatize the terms both during the training and inference, to allow the model to learn how to produce correct surface forms of the words, when they differ from the forms provided in the terminology database. Our submission ranked second in Exact Match metric which evaluates the ability of the model to produce desired terms in the translation.

CUNI systems for WMT21: Terminology translation Shared Task

The majority of language domains require prudent use of terminology to ensure clarity and adequacy of information conveyed. While the correct use of terminology for some languages and domains can be achieved by adapting general-purpose MT systems on large volumes of in-domain parallel data, such quantities of domain-specific data are seldom available for less-resourced languages and niche domains. Furthermore, as exemplified by COVID-19 recently, no domain-specific parallel data is readily available for emerging domains. However, the gravity of this recent calamity created a high demand for reliable translation of critical information regarding pandemic and infection prevention. This work is part of WMT2021 Shared Task: Machine Translation using Terminologies, where we describe Tilde MT systems that are capable of dynamic terminology integration at the time of translation. Our systems achieve up to 94% COVID-19 term use accuracy on the test set of the EN-FR language pair without having access to any form of in-domain information during system training.

Dynamic Terminology Integration for COVID-19 and other Emerging Domains

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2021 Efficiency Shared Task. We explore the sentence-level teacher-student distillation technique and train several small-size models that find a balance between efficiency and quality. Our models feature deep encoder, shallow decoder and light-weight RNN with SSRU layer. We use Huawei Noah’s Bolt, an efficient and light-weight library for on-device inference. Leveraging INT8 quantization, self-defined General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) operator, shortlist, greedy search and caching, we submit four small-size and efficient translation models with high translation quality for the one CPU core latency track.

HW-TSC’s Participation in the WMT 2021 News Translation Shared Task

Next from EMNLP 2021

CAST: Enhancing Code Summarization with Hierarchical Splitting and Reconstruction of Abstract Syntax Trees

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HW-TSC's Participation in the WMT 2021 Large-Scale Multilingual Translation Task