United Arab Emirates

This paper introduces the joint submission of the Beijing Jiaotong University and WeChat AI to the WMT&#39;22 chat translation task for English\textless{}-\textgreater{}German. Based on the Transformer, we apply several effective variants. In our experiments, we apply the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm. In the first pre-training stage, we employ data filtering and synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, forward-translation, and knowledge distillation). In the second fine-tuning stage, we investigate speaker-aware in-domain data generation, speaker adaptation, prompt-based context modeling, target denoising fine-tuning, and boosted self-COMET-based model ensemble. Our systems achieve 81.0 and 94.6 COMET scores on English-\textgreater{}German and German-\textgreater{}English, respectively. The COMET scores of English-\textgreater{}German and German-\textgreater{}English are the highest among all submissions.

EMNLP 2022

BJTU-WeChat&#39;s Systems for the WMT22 Chat Translation Task

chat translation; pre-training; prompt learning; model ensemble

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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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 introduces the joint submission of the Beijing Jiaotong University and WeChat AI to the WMT'22 chat translation task for English\textless{}-\textgreater{}German. Based on the Transformer, we apply several effective variants. In our experiments, we apply the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm. In the first pre-training stage, we employ data filtering and synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, forward-translation, and knowledge distillation). In the second fine-tuning stage, we investigate speaker-aware in-domain data generation, speaker adaptation, prompt-based context modeling, target denoising fine-tuning, and boosted self-COMET-based model ensemble. Our systems achieve 81.0 and 94.6 COMET scores on English-\textgreater{}German and German-\textgreater{}English, respectively. The COMET scores of English-\textgreater{}German and German-\textgreater{}English are the highest among all submissions.

BJTU-WeChat's Systems for the WMT22 Chat Translation Task

workshop paper

This paper describes the submissions of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to  WMT22 chat translation shared task on English\textless{}-\textgreater{}Germany (en-de) bidirection with results of zore-shot and few-shot tracks. We use the deep transformer architecture with a lager parameter size. Our submissions to the WMT21 News Translation task are used as the baselines. We adopt strategies such as back translation, forward translation, domain transfer, data selection, and noisy forward translation in task, and achieve competitive results on the development set. We also test the effectiveness of document translation on chat tasks. Due to the lack of chat data, the results on the development set show that it is not as effective as sentence-level translation models.

HW-TSC Translation Systems for the WMT22 Chat Translation Task

This paper describes Microsoft's submission to the first shared task on sign language translation at WMT 2022, a public competition tackling sign language to spoken language translation for Swiss German sign language. The task is very challenging due to data scarcity and an unprecedented vocabulary size of more than 20k words on the target side. Moreover, the data is taken from real broadcast news, includes native signing and covers scenarios of long videos. Motivated by recent advances in action recognition, we incorporate full body information by extracting features from a pre-trained I3D model and applying a standard transformer network. The accuracy of the system is further improved by applying careful data cleaning on the target text. We obtain BLEU scores of 0.6 and 0.78 on the test and dev set respectively, which is the best score among the participants of the shared task. Also in the human evaluation the submission reaches the first place. The BLEU score is further improved to 1.08 on the dev set by applying features extracted from a lip reading model.

Clean Text and Full-Body Transformer: Microsoft's Submission to the WMT22 Shared Task on Sign Language Translation

This paper describes the DFKI-MLT submission to the WMT-SLT 2022 sign language translation (SLT) task from Swiss German Sign Language (video) into German (text). State-of-the-art techniques for SLT use a generic seq2seq architecture with customized input embeddings. Instead of word embeddings as used in textual machine translation, SLT systems use features extracted from video frames. Standard approaches often do not benefit from temporal features. In our participation, we present a system that learns spatio-temporal feature representations and translation in a single model, resulting in a real end-to-end architecture expected to better generalize to new data sets. Our best system achieved \$5\textbackslash{}pm1\$ BLEU points on the development set, but the performance on the test dropped to \$0.11\textbackslash{}pm0.06\$ BLEU points.

Spatio-temporal Sign Language Representation and Translation

We describe TTIC's model submission to WMT-SLT 2022 task on sign language translation (Swiss-German Sign Language (DSGS) -\textgreater{} German). Our model consists of an I3D backbone for image encoding and a Transformerbased encoder-decoder model for sequence modeling. The I3D is pre-trained with isolated sign recognition using the WLASL dataset. The model is based on RGB images alone and does not rely on the pre-extracted human pose. We explore a few different strategies for model training in this paper. Our system achieves 0.3 BLEU score and 0.195 Chrf score on the official test set.

TTIC's WMT-SLT 22 Sign Language Translation System

This paper describes the system developed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya for the Workshop on Machine Translation 2022 Sign Language Translation Task, in particular, for the sign-to-text direction. 
We use a Transformer model implemented with the Fairseq modeling toolkit. We have experimented with the vocabulary size, data augmentation techniques and pretraining the model with the PHOENIX-14T dataset. 
Our system obtains 0.50 BLEU score for the test set, improving the organizers' baseline by 0.38 BLEU. We remark the poor results for both the baseline and our system, and thus, the unreliability of our findings.

Tackling Low-Resourced Sign Language Translation: UPC at WMT-SLT 22

We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the given noisy data using a sentence-pair classifier that was built by fine-tuning a pre-trained language model. To train the classifier, we obtain positive samples (i.e. high-quality parallel sentences) from a gold-standard curated dataset and extract negative samples (i.e. low-quality parallel sentences) from automatically aligned parallel data by choosing sentences with low alignment scores. Our final machine translation model was then trained on filtered data, instead of the entire noisy dataset. We empirically validate our approach by evaluating on two common datasets and show that data filtering generally improves overall translation quality, in some cases even significantly.

Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages

This paper describes Tencent's multilingual machine translation systems for the WMT22 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. We participated in the constrained translation track in which only the data and pretrained models provided by the organizer are allowed. The task is challenging due to three problems, including the absence of training data for some to-be-evaluated language pairs, the uneven optimization of language pairs caused by data imbalance, and the curse of multilinguality.  To address these problems, we adopt data augmentation, distributionally robust optimization, and language family grouping, respectively, to develop our multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) models. Our submissions won the 1st place on the blind test sets in terms of the automatic evaluation metrics. Codes, models, and detailed competition results are available at https://github.com/wxjiao/WMT2022-Large-Scale-African.

Tencent's Multilingual Machine Translation System for WMT22 Large-Scale African Languages

This report describes our VolcTrans system for the WMT22 shared task on large-scale multilingual machine translation. We participated in the unconstrained track which allows the use of external resources. Our system is a transformer-based multilingual model trained on data from multiple sources including the public training set from the data track, NLLB data provided by Meta AI, self-collected parallel corpora, and pseudo bitext from back-translation. Both bilingual and monolingual texts are cleaned by a series of heuristic rules. On the official test set, our system achieves \$17.3\$ BLEU, \$21.9\$ spBLEU, and \$41.9\$ chrF2++ on average over all language pairs. Averaged inference speed is \$11.5\$ sentences per second using a single Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU.

The VolcTrans System for WMT22 Multilingual Machine Translation Task

WebCrawl African is a mixed domain multilingual parallel corpora for a  pool of African languages compiled by ANVITA machine translation team of Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab, primarily for accelerating research on low-resource and extremely low-resource machine translation and is part of the submission to WMT 2022 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the data track. The corpora is compiled through web data mining and comprises 695K parallel sentences spanning 74 different language pairs from English and 15 African languages, many of which fall under low and extremely low resource categories. As a measure of corpora usefulness, a MNMT model for 24 African languages to English is trained by combining WebCrawl African corpora with existing corpus and evaluation on FLORES200 shows that inclusion of WebCrawl African corpora could improve BLEU score by 0.01-1.66 for 12 out of 15 African to English translation directions and even by 0.18-0.68 for the 4 out of 9 African to English translation directions which are not part of WebCrawl African corpora. WebCrawl African corpora includes more parallel sentences for many language pairs in comparison to OPUS public repository. This data description paper captures creation of corpora and results obtained along with datasheets. The WebCrawl African corpora is hosted on github repository.

WebCrawl African : A Multilingual Parallel Corpora for African Languages

This paper describes ANVITA African NMT system submitted by team ANVITA for WMT 2022 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the constrained translation track. The team participated in 24 African languages to English MT directions. For better handling of relatively low resource language pairs and effective transfer learning, models are trained in multilingual setting. Heuristic based corpus filtering is applied and it improved performance by 0.04-2.06 BLEU across 22 out of 24 African to English directions and also improved training time by 5x. Use of deep transformer with 24 layers of encoder and 6 layers of decoder significantly improved performance by 1.1-7.7 BLEU across all the 24 African to English directions compared to base transformer. For effective selection of source vocabulary in multilingual setting, joint and language wise vocabulary selection strategies are explored at the source side. Use of language wise vocabulary selection however did not consistently improve performance of low resource languages in comparison to joint vocabulary selection. Empirical results indicate that training using deep transformer with filtered corpora seems to be a better choice than using base transformer on the whole corpora both in terms of accuracy and training time.

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