Dominican Republic

In this paper, we discuss the various techniques that we used to implement the Russian-Chinese machine translation system for the Triangular MT task at WMT 2021. Neural Machine translation systems based on transformer architecture have an encoder-decoder architecture, which are trained end-to-end and require a large amount of parallel corpus to produce good quality translations. This is the reason why neural machine translation systems are referred to as \textit{data hungry}. Such a large amount of parallel corpus is majorly available for language pairs which include English and not for non-English language pairs. This is a major problem in building neural machine translation systems for non-English language pairs. We try to utilize the resources of the English language to improve the translation of non-English language pairs. We use the pivot language, that is English, to leverage transfer learning to improve the quality of Russian-Chinese translation. Compared to the baseline transformer-based neural machine translation system, we observe that the pivot language-based transfer learning technique gives a higher BLEU score.

EMNLP 2021

Pivot based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation: CFILT IITB @ WMT 2021 Triangular MT

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

Adapting word order from one language to another is a key problem in cross-lingual structured prediction. Current sentence encoders (e.g., RNN, Transformer with position embeddings) are usually word order sensitive. Even with uniform word form representations (MUSE, mBERT), word order discrepancies may hurt the adaptation of models. In this paper, we build structured prediction models with bag-of-words inputs, and introduce a new reordering module to organizing words following the source language order, which learns task-specific reordering strategies from a general-purpose order predictor model. Experiments on zero-shot cross-lingual dependency parsing, POS tagging, and morphological tagging show that our model can significantly improve target language performances, especially for languages that are distant from the source language.

Word Reordering for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Structured Prediction

We give a general framework for inference in spanning tree models. We propose unified algorithms for the important cases of first-order expectations and second-order expectations in edge-factored, non-projective spanning-tree models. Our algorithms exploit a fundamental connection between gradients and expectations, which allows us to derive efficient algorithms. These algorithms are easy to implement with or without automatic differentiation software. We motivate the development of our framework with several cautionary tales of previous research, which has developed numerous inefficient algorithms for computing expectations and their gradients. We demonstrate how our framework efficiently computes several quantities with known algorithms, including the expected attachment score, entropy, and generalized expectation criteria. As a bonus, we give algorithms for quantities that are missing in the literature, including the KL divergence. In all cases, our approach matches the efficiency of existing algorithms and, in several cases, reduces the runtime complexity by a factor of the sentence length. We validate the implementation of our framework through runtime experiments. We find our algorithms are up to 15 and 9 times faster than previous algorithms for computing the Shannon entropy and the gradient of the generalized expectation objective, respectively.

Efficient Computation of Expectations under Spanning Tree Distributions

While numerous attempts have been made to jointly parse syntax and semantics, high performance in one domain typically comes at the price of performance in the other. This trade-off contradicts the large body of research focusing on the rich interactions at the syntax-semantics interface. We explore multiple model architectures which allow us to exploit the rich syntactic and semantic annotations contained in the Universal Decompositional Semantics (UDS) dataset, jointly parsing Universal Dependencies and UDS to obtain state-of-the-art results in both formalisms. We analyze the behaviour of a joint model of syntax and semantics, finding patterns supported by linguistic theory at the syntax-semantics interface. We then investigate to what degree joint modeling generalizes to a multilingual setting, where we find similar trends across 8 languages.

Joint Universal Syntactic and Semantic Parsing

This paper proposes a new representation for CCG derivations. CCG derivations are represented as trees whose nodes are labeled with categories strictly restricted by CCG rule schemata. This characteristic is not suitable for span-based parsing models because they predict node labels independently. In other words, span-based models may generate invalid CCG derivations that violate the rule schemata. Our proposed representation decomposes CCG derivations into several independent pieces and prevents the span-based parsing models from violating the schemata. Our experimental result shows that an off-the-shelf span-based parser with our representation is comparable with previous CCG parsers.

A New Representation for Span-based CCG Parsing

This paper presents a novel unsupervised abstractive summarization method for opinionated texts. While the basic variational autoencoder-based models assume a unimodal Gaussian prior for the latent code of sentences, we alternate it with a recursive Gaussian mixture, where each mixture component corresponds to the latent code of a topic sentence and is mixed by a tree-structured topic distribution. By decoding each Gaussian component, we generate sentences with tree-structured topic guidance, where the root sentence conveys generic content, and the leaf sentences describe specific topics. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated topic sentences are appropriate as a summary of opinionated texts, which are more informative and cover more input contents than those generated by the recent unsupervised summarization model (Bražinskas et al., 2020). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the variance of latent Gaussians represents the granularity of sentences, analogous to Gaussian word embedding (Vilnis and McCallum, 2015).

Unsupervised Abstractive Opinion Summarization by Generating Sentences with Tree-Structured Topic Guidance

This paper describes Tencent Translation systems for the WMT21 shared task. We participate in the news translation task on three language pairs: Chinese-English, English-Chinese and German-English. Our systems are built on various Transformer models with novel techniques adapted from our recent research work. First, we combine different data augmentation methods including back-translation, forward-translation and right-to-left training to enlarge the training data. We also apply language coverage bias, data rejuvenation and uncertainty-based sampling approaches to select content-relevant and high-quality data from large parallel and monolingual corpora. Expect for in-domain fine-tuning, we also propose a fine-grained "one model one domain" approach to model characteristics of different news genres at fine-tuning and decoding stages. Besides, we use greed-based ensemble algorithm and transductive ensemble method to further boost our systems. Based on our success in the last WMT, we continuously employed advanced techniques such as large batch training, data selection and data filtering. Finally, our constrained Chinese-English system achieves 33.4 case-sensitive BLEU score, which is the highest among all submissions. The German-English system is ranked at second place accordingly.

Tencent Translation System for the WMT21 News Translation Task

We describe our two NMT systems submitted to the WMT2021 shared task in English-Czech news translation: CUNI-DocTransformer (document-level CUBBITT) and CUNI-Marian-Baselines.
We improve the former with a better sentence-segmentation pre-processing
and a post-processing for fixing errors in numbers and units.
We use the latter for experiments with various backtranslation techniques.

CUNI Systems in WMT21: Revisiting Backtranslation Techniques for English-Czech NMT

This paper describes the NiuTrans system for the WMT21 translation efficiency task\footnote{\url{http://statmt.org/wmt21/efficiency-task.html}}. Following last year's work, we explore various techniques to improve the efficiency while maintaining translation quality. We investigate the combinations of lightweight Transformer architectures and knowledge distillation strategies. Also, we improve the translation efficiency with graph optimization, low precision, dynamic batching, and parallel pre/post-processing. Putting these together, our system can translate 247,000 words per second on an NVIDIA A100, being 3$\times$ faster than our last year's system. Our system is the fastest and has the lowest memory consumption on the GPU-throughput track. The code, model, and pipeline will be available at NiuTrans.NMT\footnote{\url{https://github.com/NiuTrans/NiuTrans.NMT}}.

The NiuTrans System for the WMT 2021 Efficiency Task

This paper describes Kakao Enterprise's submission to the WMT21 shared Machine Translation using Terminologies task. We integrate terminology constraints by pre-training with target lemma annotations and fine-tuning with exact target annotations utilizing the given terminology dataset. This approach yields a model that achieves outstanding results in terms of both translation quality and term consistency, ranking first based on COMET in the En→Fr language direction. Furthermore, we explore various methods such as back-translation, explicitly training terminologies as additional parallel data, and in-domain data selection.

Kakao Enterprise’s WMT21 Machine Translation using Terminologies Task Submission

This paper presents Imperial College London's submissions to the WMT21 Quality Estimation (QE) Shared Task 3: Critical Error Detection. Our approach builds on cross-lingual pre-trained representations in a sequence classification model. We further improve the base classifier by (i) adding a weighted sampler to deal with unbalanced data and (ii) introducing feature engineering, where features related to toxicity, named-entities and sentiment, which are potentially indicative of critical errors, are extracted using existing tools and integrated to the model in different ways. We train models with one type of feature at a time and ensemble those models that improve over the base classifier on the development (dev) set. Our official submissions achieve very competitive results, ranking second for three out of four language pairs.

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Pivot based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation: CFILT IITB @ WMT 2021 Triangular MT

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Word Reordering for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Structured Prediction

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