United Arab Emirates

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&#39;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.

EMNLP 2022

The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT22

multi-language translation model

specific-domain fine-tuning

iterative knowledge distillation

general mt task

constrained

iterative back-translation

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.

workshop paper

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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.

ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics

Contextual word embeddings extracted from pre-trained models have become the basis for many downstream NLP tasks, including machine translation automatic evaluations. Metrics that leverage embeddings claim better capture of synonyms and changes in word orders, and thus better correlation with human ratings than surface-form matching metrics (e.g. BLEU). However, few studies have been done to examine robustness of these metrics. This report uses a challenge set to uncover the brittleness of reference-based and reference-free metrics. Our challenge set1 aims at examining metrics' capability to correlate synonyms in different areas and to discern catastrophic errors at both word- and sentence-levels. The results show that although embedding-based metrics perform relatively well on discerning sentence-level negation/affirmation errors, their performances on relating synonyms are poor. In addition, we find that some metrics are susceptible to text styles so their generalizability compromised.

Exploring Robustness of Machine Translation Metrics: A Study of Twenty-Two Automatic Metrics in the WMT22 Metric Task

We develop two new metrics that build on top of the COMET architecture. 
The main contribution is collecting a ten-times larger corpus of human judgements than COMET and investigating how to filter out problematic human judgements. We propose filtering human judgements where human reference is statistically worse than machine translation. Furthermore, we average scores of all equal segments evaluated multiple times.
The results comparing automatic metrics on source-based DA and MQM-style human judgement show state-of-the-art performance on a system-level pair-wise system ranking.
We release both of our metrics for public use.

MS-COMET: More and Better Human Judgements Improve Metric Performance

In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT22 metrics shared task. Our metric focuses on computing contextual and syntactic equivalences along with lexical, morphological, and semantic similarity. The intent is to capture the fluency and context of the MT outputs along with their adequacy. Fluency is captured using syntactic similarity and context is captured using sentence similarity leveraging sentence embeddings. The final sentence translation score is the weighted combination of three similarity scores: a) Syntactic Similarity b) Lexical, Morphological and Semantic Similarity, and c) Contextual Similarity. This paper outlines two improved versions of MEE i.e., MEE2 and MEE4. Additionally, we report our experiments on language pairs of en-de, en-ru and zh-en from WMT17-19 testset and further depict the correlation with human assessments.

Unsupervised Embedding-based Metric for MT Evaluation with Improved Human Correlation

This paper describes our submission to the WMT2022 shared metrics task. Our unsupervised metric estimates the translation quality at chunk-level and sentence-level. Source and target sentence chunks are retrieved by using a multi-lingual chunker. The chunk-level similarity is computed by leveraging BERT contextual word embeddings and sentence similarity scores are calculated by leveraging sentence embeddings of Language-Agnostic BERT models. The final quality estimation score is obtained by mean pooling the chunk-level and sentence-level similarity scores. This paper outlines our experiments and also reports the correlation with human judgements for en-de, en-ru and zh-en language pairs of WMT17, WMT18 and WMT19 test sets.

The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT22

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The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT22

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Next from EMNLP 2022

DUTNLP Machine Translation System for WMT22 General MT Task

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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