United Arab Emirates

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). Our team participated in all three subtasks: (i) Sentence and Word-level Quality Prediction; (ii) Explainable QE; and (iii) Critical Error Detection.  For all tasks we build on top of the COMET framework, connecting it with the predictor-estimator architecture of OpenKiwi, and equipping it with a word-level sequence tagger and an explanation extractor. Our results suggest that incorporating references during pretraining improves performance across several language pairs on downstream tasks, and that jointly training with sentence and word-level objectives yields a further boost. Furthermore, combining attention and gradient information proved to be the top strategy for extracting good explanations of sentence-level QE models. Overall, our submissions achieved the best results for all three tasks for almost all language pairs by a considerable margin.

EMNLP 2022

CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

quality estimation machine translation evaluation

workshop paper

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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.

Quality estimation (QE) is a crucial method to investigate automatic methods for estimating the quality of machine translation results without reference translations. This paper presents Huawei Translation Services Center's (HW-TSC's) work called CrossQE in WMT 2022 QE shared tasks 1 and 2, namely sentence- and word- level quality prediction and explainable QE.CrossQE employes the framework of predictor-estimator for task 1, concretely with a pre-trained cross-lingual XLM-RoBERTa large as predictor and task-specific classifier or regressor as estimator. An extensive set of experimental results show that after adding bottleneck adapter layer, mean teacher loss, masked language modeling task loss and MC dropout methods in CrossQE, the performance has improved to a certain extent. For task 2, CrossQE calculated the cosine similarity between each word feature in the target and each word feature in the source by task 1 sentence-level QE system's predictor, and used the inverse value of maximum similarity between each word in the target and the source as the word translation error risk value. Moreover, CrossQE has outstanding performance on QE test sets of WMT 2022.

CrossQE: HW-TSC 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

We participated in all tracks of the WMT 2022 efficient machine translation task: single-core CPU, multi-core CPU, and GPU hardware with throughput and latency conditions.  Our submissions explores a number of several efficiency strategies: knowledge distillation, a simpler simple recurrent unit (SSRU) decoder with one or two layers, shortlisting, deep encoder, shallow decoder, pruning and bidirectional decoder.  For the CPU track, we used quantized 8-bit models. For the GPU track, we used FP16 quantisation. We explored various pruning strategies and combination of one or more of the above methods.

Edinburgh's Submission to the WMT 2022 Efficiency Task

This paper describes the submission of the RoyalFlush neural machine translation system for the WMT 2022 translation efficiency task. Unlike the commonly used autoregressive translation system, we adopted a two-stage translation paradigm called Hybrid Regression Translation (HRT) to combine the advantages of autoregressive and non-autoregressive translation. Specifically, HRT first autoregressively generates a discontinuous sequence (e.g., make a prediction every k tokens, k\textgreater{}1) and then fills in all previously skipped tokens at once in a non-autoregressive manner. Thus, we can easily trade off the translation quality and speed by adjusting k. In addition, by integrating other modeling techniques (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation and deep-encoder-shallow-decoder layer allocation strategy) and a mass of engineering efforts, HRT improves 80\% inference speed and achieves equivalent translation performance with the same-capacity AT counterpart. Our fastest system reaches 6k+ words/second on the GPU latency setting, estimated to be about 3.1x faster than the last year's winner.

The RoyalFlush System for the WMT 2022 Efficiency Task

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2022 Efficiency Shared Task. For this year's task, we still apply sentence-level distillation strategy to train small models with different configurations. Then, we integrate the average attention mechanism into the lightweight RNN model to pursue more efficient decoding. We tried adding a retrain step to our 8-bit and 4-bit models to achieve a balance between model size and quality. We still use Huawei Noah's Bolt for INT8 inference and 4-bit storage. Coupled with Bolt's support for batch inference and multi-core parallel computing, we finally submit models with different configurations to the CPU latency and throughput tracks to explore the Pareto frontiers.

HW-TSC's Submission for the WMT22 Efficiency Task

This paper describes IIT Bombay's submission to the WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) shared task for the English-Marathi (En-Mr) language pair. We follow the curriculum training strategy to train our APE system. First, we train an encoder-decoder model to perform translation from English to Marathi. Next, we add another encoder to the model and train the resulting \textbackslash{}textit\{dual-encoder single-decoder\} model for the APE task. This involves training the model using the synthetic APE data in multiple training stages and then fine-tuning it using the real APE data. We use the LaBSE technique to ensure the quality of the synthetic APE data. For data augmentation, along with using candidates obtained from an external machine translation (MT) system, we also use the phrase-level APE triplets generated using phrase table injection. As APE systems are prone to the problem of `over-correction', we use a sentence-level quality estimation (QE) system to select the final output between an original translation and the corresponding output generated by the APE model. Our approach improves the TER and BLEU scores on the development set by -3.92 and +4.36 points, respectively. Also, the final results on the test set show that our APE system outperforms the baseline system by -3.49 TER points and +5.37 BLEU points.

IIT Bombay's WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing Shared Task Submission

By learning the human post-edits, the automatic post-editing (APE) models are often used to modify the output of the machine translation (MT) system to make it as close as possible to human translation. We introduce the system used in our submission of WMT'22 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) English-Marathi (En-Mr) shared task. In this task, we first train the MT system of En-Mr to generate additional machine-translation sentences. Then we use the additional triple to bulid our APE model and use APE dataset to further fine-tuning. Inspired by the mixture of experts (MoE), we use GMM algorithm to roughly divide the text of APE dataset into three categories. After that, the experts are added to the APE model and different domain data are sent to different experts. Finally, we ensemble the models to get better performance. Our APE system significantly improves the translations of provided MT results by -2.848 and +3.74 on the development dataset in terms of TER and BLEU, respectively. Finally, the TER and BLEU scores are improved by -1.22 and +2.41 respectively on the blind test set.

LUL's WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing Shared Task Submission

This paper describes the SPECTRANS sub- mission for the WMT 2022 biomedical shared task. We present the results of our experiments using the training corpora and the JoeyNMT (Kreutzer et al., 2019) and SYSTRAN Pure Neural Server/ Advanced Model Studio toolk- its for the language directions English to French and French to English. We compare the pre- dictions of the different toolkits. We also use JoeyNMT to fine-tune the model with a selec- tion of texts from WMT, Khresmoi and UFAL data sets. We report our results and assess the respective merits of the different translated texts.

The SPECTRANS System Description for the WMT22 Biomedical Task

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) often take advantage of the monolingual and multilingual dataset that is freely available online to acquire general or mixed domain knowledge before deployment into specific tasks. Extra-large PLMs (xLPLMs) are proposed very recently to claim supreme performances over smaller-sized PLMs such as in machine translation (MT) tasks. These xLPLMs include Meta-AI's wmt21-dense-24-wide-en-X (2021) and NLLB (2022). In this work, we examine if xLPLMs are absolutely superior to smaller-sized PLMs in fine-tuning toward domain-specific MTs. We use two different in-domain data of different sizes: commercial automotive in-house data and clinical shared task data from the ClinSpEn2022 challenge at WMT2022. We choose the popular Marian Helsinki as smaller sized PLM and two massive-sized Mega-Transformers from Meta-AI as xLPLMs. Our experimental investigation shows that 1) on smaller-sized in-domain commercial automotive data, xLPLM wmt21-dense-24-wide-en-X indeed shows much better evaluation scores using SacreBLEU and hLEPOR metrics than smaller-sized Marian, even though its score increase rate is lower than Marian after fine-tuning; 2) on relatively larger-size well prepared clinical data fine-tuning, the xLPLM NLLB tends to lose its advantage over smaller-sized Marian on two sub-tasks (clinical terms and ontology concepts) using ClinSpEn offered metrics METEOR, COMET, and ROUGE-L, and totally lost to Marian on Task-1 (clinical cases) on all official metrics including SacreBLEU and BLEU; 3) metrics do not always agree with each other on the same tasks using the same model outputs; 4) clinic-Marian ranked No.2 on Task- 1 (via SacreBLEU/BLEU) and Task-3 (via METEOR and ROUGE) among all submissions.

Examining Large Pre-Trained Language Models for Machine Translation: What You Don't Know about It

This paper introduces WeChat's participation in WMT 2022 shared biomedical translation
task on Chinese→English. Our systems are based on the Transformer(Vaswani et al., 2017),
and use several different Transformer structures to improve the quality of translation. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, data generation, several variants of Transformer,
fine-tuning and model ensemble. Our Chinese→English system, named Summer, achieves the highest  BLEU score among all submissions.

Summer: WeChat Neural Machine Translation Systems for the WMT22 Biomedical Translation Task

This paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center's neural machine translation system ("BabelTar"). Our submission to the WMT22 biomedical translation shared task covers language directions between English and the other seven languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese). During the past four years, our participation in this domain-specific track has witnessed a paradigm shift of methodology from a purely data-driven focus to embracing diversified techniques, including pre-trained multilingual NMT models, homograph disambiguation, ensemble learning, and preprocessing methods. We illustrate practical insights and measured performance improvements relating to how we further improve our domain-specific NMT system.

CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

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CrossQE: HW-TSC 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

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CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

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Next from EMNLP 2022

CrossQE: HW-TSC 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads