Dominican Republic

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.

EMNLP 2021

Language model pretraining and transfer learning for very low resource languages

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

A currently popular research area in end-to-end speech translation is the use of knowledge distillation from a machine translation~(MT) task to improve the speech translation~(ST) task. However, such scenario obviously allows only a one way transfer, limiting the overall effectiveness of the approach by the performance of the pre-trained teacher model. Therefore, we pose that in this respect knowledge distillation-based approaches are sub-optimal. We propose an alternative---a trainable mutual-learning scenario, where the MT and ST models are collaboratively trained and are considered as peers, rather than teacher/student. This allows us to improve the performance of end-to-end ST more effectively than with a teacher-student paradigm. As a side benefit, performance of the MT model also improves.

Mutual-Learning Improves End-to-End Speech Translation

Visual Dialog is assumed to require the dialog history to generate correct responses during a dialog. However, it is not clear from previous work how dialog history is needed for visual dialog. In this paper we define what it means for visual questions to require dialog history and we propose a methodology for identifying them. We release a subset of the Guesswhat?! questions for which their dialog history completely changes their responses. We propose a novel interpretable representation that visually grounds dialog history: the Region under Discussion. It constrains the image's spatial features according to a semantic representation of the history inspired by the information structure notion of Question under Discussion. We evaluate the architecture on task-specific multimodal models and the visual transformer model LXMERT and show that there is still room for improvement.

Region under Discussion for visual dialog

Multimodal abstractive summarization (MAS) aims to take advantage of data from multiple modalities and provides a short, concise and readable textual summary to let users quickly acquire their essential information. Recently, large-scale generative pre-trained language models (GPLMs) have shown remarkable performance on abstractive text summarization. However, leveraging and adapting GPLMs to MAS is still an unexplored research direction. Our contributions in this work are threefold: 1. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to inject visual information into text-only GPLMs, and to use it for the MAS task. 2. We systematically study two research questions: 1) how to inject visual information into GPLMs without hurting their generation ability; and 2) where is the optimal place in GPLMs to inject the visual information? 3. Our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model on the How2 dataset, and the injected visual guidance contributes 83.6% of the overall improvement.

Vision Guided Generative Pre-trained Language Models for Multimodal Abstractive Summarization

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

We present a grounded neural dialogue model that successfully collaborates with people in a partially-observable reference game. We focus on a setting where two agents each observe an overlapping part of a world context and need to identify and agree on some object they share. Therefore, the agents should pool their information and communicate pragmatically to solve the task. Our dialogue agent accurately grounds referents from the partner's utterances using a structured reference resolver, conditions on these referents using a recurrent memory, and uses a pragmatic generation procedure to ensure the partner can resolve the references the agent produces. We evaluate on the OneCommon spatial grounding dialogue task (Udagawa and Aizawa 2019), involving a number of dots arranged on a board with continuously varying positions, sizes, and shades. Our agent substantially outperforms the previous state of the art for the task, obtaining a 20% relative improvement in successful task completion in self-play evaluations and a 50% relative improvement in success in human evaluations.

Reference-Centric Models for Grounded Collaborative Dialogue

In this work, we investigate methods for the challenging task of translating between low- resource language pairs that exhibit some level of similarity. In particular, we consider the utility of transfer learning for translating between several Indo-European low-resource languages from the Germanic and Romance language families. In particular, we build two main classes of transfer-based systems to study how relatedness can benefit the translation performance. The primary system fine-tunes a model pre-trained on a related language pair and the contrastive system fine-tunes one pre-trained on an unrelated language pair. Our experiments show that although relatedness is not necessary for transfer learning to work, it does benefit model performance.

Machine Translation of Low-Resource Indo-European Languages

We investigate transfer learning based on pre-trained neural machine translation models to translate between (low-resource) similar languages. This work is part of our contribution to the WMT 2021 Similar Languages Translation Shared Task where we submitted models for different language pairs, including French-Bambara, Spanish-Catalan, and Spanish-Portuguese in both directions. Our models for Catalan-Spanish (82.79 BLEU)and Portuguese-Spanish (87.11 BLEU) rank top 1 in the official shared task evaluation, and we are the only team to submit models for the French-Bambara pairs.

Improving Similar Language Translation With Transfer Learning

This paper describes our work in the WMT 2021 Machine Translation using Terminologies shared Task. We participate in the shared translation terminologies task in English to Chinese language pair. To satisfy terminology constraints on translation, we use a terminology data augmentation strategy based on Transformer model. We used tags to mark and add the term translations into the matched sentences. In the training procedure, we created synthetic term data by filtering a phrase table. Detailed pre-processing and filtering on data, in-domain finetuning and ensemble method are also used in our system. Our submission obtains competitive results in the terminology-targeted evaluation.

TermMind: Alibaba's WMT21 Machine Translation using Terminologies Task Submission

This paper describes the Fujitsu DMATH systems used for WMT 2021
News Translation and Biomedical Translation tasks.
We focused on low-resource pairs, using a simple system.
We conducted experiments on English-Hausa, Xhosa-Zulu and English-Basque,
and submitted the results for
Xhosa→Zulu
in the News Translation Task, and
English→Basque
in the Biomedical Translation Task,
abstract and terminology translation subtasks.
Our system combines BPE dropout, sub-subword features and back-translation
with a Transformer (base) model, achieving good results on the evaluation sets.

The Fujitsu DMATH submissions for WMT21 News Translation and Biomedical Translation Tasks

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.

Language model pretraining and transfer learning for very low resource languages

Next from EMNLP 2021

Mutual-Learning Improves End-to-End Speech Translation

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Back-translation for Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation

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