Dominican Republic

This paper describes the participation of team oneNLP (LTRC, IIIT-Hyderabad) for the WMT 2021 task, similar language translation. We experimented with transformer based Neural Machine Translation and explored the use of language similarity for Tamil-Telugu and Telugu-Tamil. We incorporated use of different subword configurations, script conversion and single model training for both directions as exploratory experiments.

EMNLP 2021

Low Resource Similar Language Neural Machine Translation for Tamil-Telugu

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.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

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

Psychometric measures of ability, attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs are crucial for understanding user behavior in various contexts including health, security, e-commerce, and finance. Traditionally, psychometric dimensions have been measured and collected using survey-based methods. Inferring such constructs from user-generated text could allow timely, unobtrusive collection and analysis. In this work we construct a corpus for psychometric natural language processing (NLP) related to important dimensions such as trust, anxiety, numeracy, and literacy, in the health domain. We discuss our multi-step process to align user text with their survey-based response items and provide an overview of the resulting testbed, which encompasses survey-based psychometric measures and accompanying user-generated text from 8,502 respondents. Our testbed also encompasses self-reported demographic information, including race, sex, age, income, and education, allowing for measuring bias and benchmarking fairness of text classification methods. We report preliminary results on use of the text to predict/categorize users’ survey response labels and on the fairness of these models. We also discuss the important implications of our work and resulting testbed for future NLP research on psychometrics and fairness.

Constructing a Psychometric Testbed for Fair Natural Language Processing

We present a large, challenging dataset, COUGH, for COVID-19 FAQ retrieval. Similar to a standard FAQ dataset, COUGH consists of three parts: FAQ Bank, Query Bank and Relevance Set. The FAQ Bank contains ~16K FAQ items scraped from 55 credible websites (e.g., CDC and WHO). For evaluation, we introduce Query Bank and Relevance Set, where the former contains 1,236 human-paraphrased queries while the latter contains ~32 human-annotated FAQ items for each query. We analyze COUGH by testing different FAQ retrieval models built on top of BM25 and BERT, among which the best model achieves 48.8 under P@5, indicating a great challenge presented by COUGH and encouraging future research for further improvement. Our COUGH dataset is available at https://github.com/sunlab-osu/covid-faq.

COUGH: A Challenge Dataset and Models for COVID-19 FAQ Retrieval

We presents a Chinese dataset for evaluating pretrained language models on Word Prediction given Long-term Context (Chinese WPLC). We propose both automatic and manual selection strategies tailored to Chinese to guarantee that target words in passages collected from over 69K novels can only be predicted with long-term context beyond the scope of sentences containing the target words. Dataset analysis reveals that the types of target words range from common nouns to Chinese 4-character idioms. We also observe that linguistic relations between target words and long-range context exhibit diversity, including lexical match, synonym, summary and reasoning. Experiment results show that the Chinese pretrained language model PanGu is 45 points behind human in terms of top-1 word prediction accuracy, indicating that Chinese WPLC is a challenging dataset.

Chinese WPLC: A Chinese Dataset for Evaluating Pretrained Language Models on Word Prediction Given Long-Range Context

Reproducible benchmarks are crucial in driving progress of machine translation research. However, existing machine translation benchmarks have been mostly limited to high-resource or well-represented languages. Despite an increasing interest in low-resource machine translation, there are no standardized reproducible benchmarks for many African languages, many of which are used by millions of speakers but have less digitized textual data. To tackle these challenges, we propose AfroMT, a standardized, clean, and reproducible machine translation benchmark for eight widely spoken African languages. We also develop a suite of analysis tools for system diagnosis taking into account the unique properties of these languages. Furthermore, we explore the newly considered case of low-resource focused pretraining and develop two novel data augmentation-based strategies, leveraging word-level alignment information and pseudo-monolingual data for pretraining multilingual sequence-to-sequence models. We demonstrate significant improvements when pretraining on 11 languages, with gains of up to 2 BLEU points over strong baselines. We also show gains of up to 12 BLEU points over cross-lingual transfer baselines in data-constrained scenarios. All code and pretrained models will be released as further steps towards larger reproducible benchmarks for African languages.

AfroMT: Pretraining Strategies and Reproducible Benchmarks for Translation of 8 African Languages

The neural machine translation approach has gained popularity in machine translation because of its context analysing ability and its handling of long-term dependency issues. We have participated in the WMT21 shared task of similar language translation on a Tamil-Telugu pair with the team name: CNLP-NITS. In this task, we utilized monolingual data via pre-train word embeddings in transformer model based neural machine translation to tackle the limitation of parallel corpus. Our model has achieved a bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score of 4.05, rank-based intuitive bilingual evaluation score (RIBES) score of 24.80 and translation edit rate (TER) score of 97.24 for both Tamil-to-Telugu and Telugu-to-Tamil translations respectively.

Neural Machine Translation for Tamil--Telugu Pair

This paper describes the participation of the BSC team in the WMT2021’s Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for Indo-European Languages Shared Task. The system aims to solve the Subtask 2: Wikipedia cultural heritage articles, which involves translation in four Romance languages: Catalan, Italian, Occitan and Romanian.

The submitted system is a multilingual semi-supervised machine translation model. It is based on a pre-trained language model, namely XLM-RoBERTa, that is later fine-tuned with parallel data obtained mostly from OPUS. Unlike other works, we only use XLM to initialize the encoder and randomly initialize a shallow decoder. The reported results are robust and perform well for all tested languages.

Transfer Learning with Shallow Decoders: BSC at WMT2021's Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for Indo-European Languages Shared Task

This paper describes the submission to the WMT 2021 news translation shared task by the UPC Machine Translation group. The goal of the task is to translate German to French (De-Fr) and French to German (Fr-De). Our submission focuses on fine-tuning a pre-trained model to take advantage of monolingual data. We fine-tune mBART50 using the filtered data, and additionally, we train a Transformer model on the same data from scratch. In the experiments, we show that fine-tuning mBART50 results in 31.69 BLEU for De-Fr and 23.63 BLEU for Fr-De, which increases 2.71 and 1.90 BLEU accordingly, as compared to the model we train from scratch. Our final submission is an ensemble of these two models, further increasing 0.3 BLEU for Fr-De.

The TALP-UPC Participation in WMT21 News Translation Task: an mBART-based NMT Approach

This paper reports the optimization of using the out-of-domain data in the Biomedical translation task. We firstly optimized our parallel training dataset using the BabelNet in-domain terminology words. Afterward, to increase the training set, we studied the effects of the out-of-domain data on biomedical translation tasks, and we created a mixture of in-domain and out-of-domain training sets and added more in-domain data using forward translation in the English-Spanish task. Finally, with a simple bpe optimization method, we increased the number of in-domain sub-words in our mixed training set and trained the Transformer model on the generated data. Results show improvements using our proposed method.

High frequent in-domain words segmentation and forward translation for the WMT21 Biomedical task

We describe Facebook's multilingual model submission to the WMT2021 shared task on news translation. We participate in 14 language directions: English to and from Czech, German, Hausa, Icelandic, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese. To develop systems covering all these directions, we focus on multilingual models. We utilize data from all available sources --- WMT, large-scale data mining, and in-domain backtranslation --- to create high quality bilingual and multilingual baselines. Subsequently, we investigate strategies for scaling multilingual model size, such that one system has sufficient capacity for high quality representations of all eight languages. Our final submission is an ensemble of dense and sparse Mixture-of-Expert multilingual translation models, followed by finetuning on in-domain news data and noisy channel reranking. Compared to previous year's winning submissions, our multilingual system improved the translation quality on all language directions, with an average improvement of 2.0 BLEU. In the WMT2021 task, our system ranks first in 10 directions based on automatic evaluation.

Facebook AI’s WMT21 News Translation Task Submission

This paper describes the Microsoft Egypt Development Center (EgDC) submission to the constrained track of WMT21 shared news translation task. We focus on the three relatively low resource language pairs Bengali ↔ Hindi, English ↔ Hausa and Xhosa ↔ Zulu. To overcome the limitation of relatively low parallel data we train a multilingual model using a multitask objective employing both parallel and monolingual data. In addition, we augment the data using back translation. We also train a bilingual model incorporating back translation and knowledge distillation then combine the two models using sequence-to-sequence mapping. We see around 70% relative gain in BLEU point for En ↔ Ha and around 25% relative improvements for Bn ↔ Hi and Xh ↔ Zu compared to bilingual baselines.

Low Resource Similar Language Neural Machine Translation for Tamil-Telugu

Next from EMNLP 2021

Constructing a Psychometric Testbed for Fair Natural Language Processing

Similar lecture

Back-translation for Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES