Ireland

This paper develops automatic song translation (AST) for tonal languages and addresses the unique challenge of aligning words&#39; tones with the melody of a song in addition to conveying the original meaning. We propose three criteria for effective AST -- preserving meaning, singability, and intelligibility -- and design metrics for these criteria. We develop a new benchmark for English--Mandarin song translation and develop an unsupervised AST system, Guided AliGnment for Automatic Song Translation (GagaST), which combines pre-training with three decoding constraints. Both automatic and human evaluations show GagaST successfully balances semantics and singability.

ACL 2022

Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages

song translation; tonal languages; controlled generation; machine translation; pretraining

This paper develops automatic song translation (AST) for tonal languages and addresses the unique challenge of aligning words' tones with the melody of a song in addition to conveying the original meaning. We propose three criteria for effective AST -- preserving meaning, singability, and intelligibility -- and design metrics for these criteria. We develop a new benchmark for English--Mandarin song translation and develop an unsupervised AST system, Guided AliGnment for Automatic Song Translation (GagaST), which combines pre-training with three decoding constraints. Both automatic and human evaluations show GagaST successfully balances semantics and singability.

findings / work in progress

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

We investigate the exploitation of self-supervised models for two Creole languages with few resources: Gwadloupéyen and Morisien. Automatic language processing tools are almost non-existent for these two languages. We propose to use about one hour of annotated data to design an automatic speech recognition system for each language. We evaluate how much data is needed to obtain a query-by-example system that is usable by linguists. Moreover, our experiments show that multilingual self-supervised models are not necessarily the most efficient for Creole languages.

Automatic Speech Recognition and Query By Example for Creole Languages Documentation

Question answering-based summarization evaluation metrics must automatically determine whether the QA model's prediction is correct or not, a task known as answer verification. In this work, we benchmark the lexical answer verification methods which have been used by current QA-based metrics as well as two more sophisticated text comparison methods, BERTScore and LERC. We find that LERC out-performs the other methods in some settings while remaining statistically indistinguishable from lexical overlap in others. However, our experiments reveal that improved verification performance does not necessarily translate to overall QA-based metric quality: In some scenarios, using a worse verification method --- or using none at all --- has comparable performance to using the best verification method, a result that we attribute to properties of the datasets.

Benchmarking Answer Verification Methods for Question Answering-Based Summarization Evaluation Metrics

Quality Estimation (QE) models have the potential to change how we evaluate and maybe even train machine translation models. However, these models still lack the robustness to achieve general adoption. We show that State-of-the-art QE models, when tested in a Parallel Corpus Mining (PCM) setting, perform unexpectedly bad due to a lack of robustness to out-of-domain examples. We propose a combination of multitask training, data augmentation and contrastive learning to achieve better and more robust QE performance. We show that our method improves QE performance significantly in the MLQE challenge and the robustness of QE models when tested in the Parallel Corpus Mining setup. We increase the accuracy in PCM by more than 0.80, making it on par with state-of-the-art PCM methods that use millions of sentence pairs to train their models. In comparison, we use a thousand times less data, 7K parallel sentences in total, and propose a novel low resource PCM method.

Better Quality Estimation for Low Resource Corpus Mining

Morphologically-rich polysynthetic languages present a challenge for NLP systems due to data sparsity, and a common strategy to handle this issue is to apply subword segmentation. We investigate a wide variety of supervised and unsupervised morphological segmentation methods for four polysynthetic languages: Nahuatl, Raramuri, Shipibo-Konibo, and Wixarika. Then, we compare the morphologically inspired segmentation methods against Byte-Pair Encodings (BPEs) as inputs for machine translation (MT) when translating to and from Spanish. We show that for all language pairs except for Nahuatl, an unsupervised morphological segmentation algorithm outperforms BPEs consistently and that, although supervised methods achieve better segmentation scores, they under-perform in MT challenges. Finally, we contribute two new morphological segmentation datasets for Raramuri and Shipibo-Konibo, and a parallel corpus for Raramuri--Spanish.

BPE vs. Morphological Segmentation: A Case Study on Machine Translation of Four Polysynthetic Languages

Charts are very popular for analyzing data. When exploring charts, people often ask a variety of complex reasoning questions that involve several logical and arithmetic operations. They also commonly refer to visual features of a chart in their questions. However, most existing datasets do not focus on such complex reasoning questions as their questions are template-based and answers come from a fixed-vocabulary. In this work, we present a large-scale benchmark covering 9.6K human-written questions as well as 23.1K questions generated from human-written chart summaries. To address the unique challenges in our benchmark involving visual and logical reasoning over charts, we present two transformer-based models that combine visual features and the data table of the chart in a unified way to answer questions. While our models achieve the state-of-the-art results on the previous datasets as well as on our benchmark, the evaluation also reveals several challenges in answering complex reasoning questions.

ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning

Static and contextual multilingual embeddings have complementary strengths. Static embeddings, while less expressive than contextual language models, can be more straightforwardly aligned across multiple languages. We combine the strengths of static and contextual models to improve multilingual representations. We extract static embeddings for 40 languages from XLM-R, validate those embeddings with cross-lingual word retrieval, and then align them using VecMap. This results in high-quality, highly multilingual static embeddings. Then we apply a novel continued pre-training approach to XLM-R, leveraging the high quality alignment of our static embeddings to better align the representation space of XLM-R. We show positive results for multiple complex semantic tasks. We release the static embeddings and the continued pre-training code. Unlike most previous work, our continued pre-training approach does not require parallel text.

Combining Static and Contextualised Multilingual Embeddings

The filtering and/or selection of training data is one of the core aspects to be considered when building a strong machine translation system.
In their influential work, Khayrallah and Koehn (2018) investigated the impact of different types of noise on the performance of machine translation systems.
In the same year the WMT introduced a shared task on parallel corpus filtering, which went on to be repeated in the following years, and resulted in many different filtering approaches being proposed.
In this work we aim to combine the recent achievements in data filtering with the original analysis of Khayrallah and Koehn (2018) and investigate whether state-of-the-art filtering systems are capable of removing all the suggested noise types.
We observe that most of these types of noise can be detected with an accuracy of over 90% by modern filtering systems when operating in a well studied high resource setting.
However, we also find that when confronted with more refined noise categories or when working with a less common language pair, the performance of the filtering systems is far from optimal, showing that there is still room for improvement in this area of research.

Detecting Various Types of Noise for Neural Machine Translation

Generalising to unseen domains is under-explored and remains a challenge in neural machine translation. Inspired by recent research in parameter-efficient transfer learning from pretrained models, this paper proposes a fusion-based generalisation method that learns to combine domain-specific parameters. We propose a leave-one-domain-out training strategy to avoid information leaking to address the challenge of not knowing the test domain during training time. Empirical results on three language pairs show that our proposed fusion method outperforms other baselines up to +0.8 BLEU score on average.

Domain Generalisation of NMT: Fusing Adapters with Leave-One-Domain-Out Training

Code switching (CS) refers to the phenomenon of interchangeably using words and phrases from different languages. CS can pose significant accuracy challenges to NLP, due to the often monolingual nature of the underlying systems. In this work, we focus on CS in the context of English/Spanish conversations for the task of speech translation (ST), generating and evaluating both transcript and translation. To evaluate model performance on this task, we create a novel ST corpus derived from existing public data sets. We explore various ST architectures across two dimensions: cascaded (transcribe then translate) vs end-to-end (jointly transcribe and translate) and unidirectional (source -> target) vs bidirectional (source <-> target). We show that our ST architectures, and especially our bidirectional end-to-end architecture, perform well on CS speech, even when no CS training data is used.

End-to-End Speech Translation for Code Switched Speech

Generating machine translations via beam search seeks the most likely output under a model. However, beam search has been shown to amplify demographic biases exhibited by a model. We aim to address this, focusing on gender bias resulting from systematic errors in grammatical gender translation. Almost all prior work on this problem adjusts the training data or the model itself. By contrast, our approach changes only the inference procedure.

We constrain beam search to improve gender diversity in n-best lists, and rerank n-best lists using gender features obtained from the source sentence. Combining these strongly improves WinoMT gender translation accuracy for three language pairs without additional bilingual data or retraining. We also demonstrate our approach’s utility for consistently gendering named entities, and its flexibility to handle new gendered language beyond the binary.

Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages

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Automatic Speech Recognition and Query By Example for Creole Languages Documentation