United Arab Emirates

Customer feedback can be an important signal for improving commercial machine translation systems. One solution for fixing specific translation errors is to remove the related erroneous training instances followed by re-training of the machine translation system, which we refer to as instance-specific data filtering. Influence functions (IF) have been shown to be effective in finding such relevant training examples for classification tasks such as image classification, toxic speech detection and entailment task. Given a probing instance, IF find influential training examples by measuring the similarity of the probing instance with a set of training examples in gradient space. In this work, we examine the use of influence functions for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). We propose two effective extensions to a state of the art influence function and demonstrate on the sub-problem of copied training examples that IF can be applied more generally than hand-crafted regular expressions.

EMNLP 2022

Analyzing the Use of Influence Functions for Instance-Specific Data Filtering in Neural Machine Translation

influence functions

interpretability

data filtering

machine translation

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

workshop paper

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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

This paper describes AISP-SJTU's participation in WMT 2022 shared general MT task. In this shared task, we participated in four translation directions: English-\textgreater{}Chinese, Chinese-\textgreater{}English, English-\textgreater{}Japanese and Japanese-\textgreater{}English. Our systems are based on the Transformer architecture with several novel and effective variants, including network depth and internal structure. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, large-scale back-translation, knowledge distillation, forward-translation, iterative in-domain knowledge finetune and model ensemble. The constrained systems achieve 48.8, 29.7, 39.3 and 22.0 case-sensitive BLEU scores on EN-\textgreater{}ZH, ZH-\textgreater{}EN, EN-\textgreater{}JA and JA-\textgreater{}EN, respectively.

The AISP-SJTU Translation System for WMT 2022

This submission to the WMT22: General MT Task, consists of translations produced from a series of NMT models of the following two language pairs: german-to-english and german-to-french.  All the models are trained using only the parallel training data specified by WMT22, and no monolingual training data was used. The models follow the transformer architecture employing 8 attention heads and 6 layers in both the encoder and decoder. It is also worth mentioning that, in order to limit the computational resources that we would use during the training process, we decided to train the majority of models by limiting the training to 21 epochs. Moreover, the translations submitted at WMT22 have been produced using the test data released by the WMT22.
The aim of our experiments has been to evaluate methods for cleaning-up a parallel corpus to determine if this will lead to a translation model producing more accurate translations. For each language pair, the base NMT models has been trained from raw parallel training corpora, while the additional NMT models have been trained with corpora subjected to a special cleaning process with the following tools: Bifixer and Bicleaner. It should be mentioned that the Bicleaner repository doesn't provide pre-trained classifiers for the above language pairs, consequently we trained probabilistic dictionaries in order to produce new models. The fundamental differences between these NMT models produced are mainly related to the quality and the quantity of the training data, while there are very few differences in the training parameters. 
To complete this work, we used the following three software packages: (i) MARIAN NMT (Version: v1.11.5), which was used for the training of the neural machine translation models and (ii) Bifixer and (iii) Bicleaner, which were used in order to correct and clean the parallel training data. Concerning the Bifixer and Bicleaner tools, we followed all the steps as described meticulously in the following article: "Ramírez-Sánchez, G., Zaragoza-Bernabeu, J., Bañón, M., \& Rojas, S.O. (2020). Bifixer and Bicleaner: two open-source tools to clean your parallel data. EAMT. '' and also in the official github pages: https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer, https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner.

Evaluating Corpus Cleanup Methods in the WMT'22 News Translation Task

The paper describes the NMT models for French-German, English-Ukranian and English-Russian, submitted by the
  eTranslation team to the WMT22 general machine translation shared
  task.  In the WMT news task last year, multilingual systems with
  deep and complex architectures utilizing immense amount of data and
  resources were dominant. This year with the task extended to cover
  less domain specific text we expected even more dominance of such
  systems. In the hope to produce competitive (constrained) systems
  despite our limited resources, this time we selected only medium
  resource language pairs, which are serviced in the European
  Commission's eTranslation system. We took the approach of exploring
  less resource intensive strategies focusing on data selection and
  filtering to improve the performance of baseline systems. With our
  submitted systems our approach scored competitively according to the
  automatic rankings, except for the the English--Russian model where
  our submission was only a baseline reference model developed as a
  by-product of the multilingual setup we built focusing primarily on
  the English-Ukranian language pair.

eTranslation's Submissions to the WMT22 General Machine Translation Task

This paper describes the NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT22 General MT constrained task. We participate in four directions, including Chinese→English, English→Croatian, and Livonian↔English. Our models are based on several advanced Transformer variants, e.g., Transformer-ODE, Universal Multiscale Transformer (UMST). The main workflow consists of data filtering, large-scale data augmentation (i.e., iterative back-translation, iterative knowledge distillation), and specific-domain fine-tuning. Moreover, we try several multi-domain methods, such as a multi-domain model structure and a multi-domain data clustering method, to rise to this year's newly proposed multi-domain test set challenge. For low-resource scenarios, we build a multi-language translation model to enhance the performance, and try to use the pre-trained language model (mBERT) to initialize the translation model.

The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT22

This paper describes DUTNLP Lab's submission to the WMT22 General MT Task on four translation directions: English to/from Chinese and English to/from Japanese under the constrained condition.
Our primary system are built on several Transformer variants which employ wider FFN layer or deeper encoder layer. 
The bilingual data are filtered by detailed data pre-processing strategies and four data augmentation methods are combined to enlarge the training data with the provided monolingual data.
Several common methods are also employed to further improve the model performance, such as fine-tuning, model ensemble and post-editing.
As a result, our constrained systems achieve 29.01, 63.87, 41.84, and 24.82 BLEU scores on Chinese-to-English, English-to-Chinese, English-to-Japanese, and Japanese-to-English, respectively.

DUTNLP Machine Translation System for WMT22 General MT Task

This paper presents the submissions of Huawei Translate Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT 2022 General Machine Translation Shared Task. We participate in 6 language pairs, including Zh↔En, Ru↔En, Uk↔En, Hr↔En, Uk↔Cs and Liv↔En. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via multiple variants with larger parameter sizes. We perform fine-grained pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual and monolingual datasets. For medium and highresource languages, we mainly use data augmentation strategies, including Back Translation, Self Training, Ensemble Knowledge Distillation, Multilingual, etc. For low-resource languages such as Liv, we use pre-trained machine translation models, and then continue training with Regularization Dropout (R-Drop). The previous mentioned data augmentation methods are also used. Our submissions obtain competitive results in the final evaluation.

HW-TSC's Submissions to the WMT 2022 General Machine Translation Shared Task

We participated in the WMT General MT task and focus on four high resource language pairs: English to Chinese, Chinese to English, English to Japanese and Japanese to English). The submitted systems (LanguageX) focus on data cleaning, data selection, data mixing and TM-augmented NMT. Rules and multilingual language model are used for data filtering and data selection. In the automatic evaluation, our best submitted English to Chinese system achieved 54.3 BLEU score and 63.8 COMET score, which is the highest among all the submissions.

No Domain Left behind

This paper summarizes the results of our test suite evaluation with a main focus on morphology for the language pairs English to/from German. We look at the translation of morphologically complex words (DE–EN), and evaluate
whether English noun phrases are translated as compounds vs. phrases into German. Furthermore, we investigate the preservation of morphological features (gender in EN–DE pronoun translation and number in morpho-syntactically
complex structures for DE–EN). Our results indicate that systems are able to interpret linguistic structures to obtain relevant information, but also that translation becomes more challenging with increasing complexity, as seen, for example, when translating words with negation or non-concatenative properties, and for the more
complex cases of the pronoun translation task.

Test Suite Evaluation: Morphological Challenges and Pronoun Translation

Automatic translations with critical errors may lead to misinterpretations and pose several risks for the user. As such, it is important that Machine Translation (MT) Evaluation systems are robust to these errors in order to increase the reliability and safety of Machine Translation systems. Here we introduce SMAUG a novel Sentence-level Multilingual AUGmentation approach for generating translations with critical errors and apply this approach to create a test set to evaluate the robustness of MT metrics to these errors. We show that current State-of-the-Art metrics are improving their capability to distinguish translations with and without critical errors and to penalize the first accordingly. We also show that metrics tend to struggle with errors related to named entities and numbers and that there is a high variance in the robustness of current methods to translations with critical errors.

Robust MT Evaluation with Sentence-level Multilingual Augmentation

As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of these metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.

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Next from EMNLP 2022

The AISP-SJTU Translation System for WMT 2022

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