2025
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Can Explicit Gender Information Improve Zero-Shot Machine Translation?
Van-Hien Tran
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Huy Hien Vu
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Hideki Tanaka
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Masao Utiyama
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot machine translation (MT) performance but often exhibit gender bias that is present in their training data, especially when translating into grammatically gendered languages. In this paper, we investigate whether explicitly providing gender information can mitigate this issue and improve translation quality. We propose a two-step approach: (1) inferring entity gender from context, and (2) incorporating this information into prompts using either Structured Tagging or Natural Language. Experiments with five LLMs across four language pairs show that explicit gender cues consistently reduce gender errors, with structured tagging yielding the largest gains. Our results highlight prompt-level gender disambiguation as a simple yet effective strategy for more accurate and fair zero-shot MT.
2024
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Context-Aware Machine Translation with Source Coreference Explanation
Huy Hien Vu
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Hidetaka Kamigaito
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Taro Watanabe
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 12
Despite significant improvements in enhancing the quality of translation, context-aware machine translation (MT) models underperform in many cases. One of the main reasons is that they fail to utilize the correct features from context when the context is too long or their models are overly complex. This can lead to the explain-away effect, wherein the models only consider features easier to explain predictions, resulting in inaccurate translations. To address this issue, we propose a model that explains the decisions made for translation by predicting coreference features in the input. We construct a model for input coreference by exploiting contextual features from both the input and translation output representations on top of an existing MT model. We evaluate and analyze our method in the WMT document-level translation task of English-German dataset, the English-Russian dataset, and the multilingual TED talk dataset, demonstrating an improvement of over 1.0 BLEU score when compared with other context-aware models.
2022
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NAIST-NICT-TIT WMT22 General MT Task Submission
Hiroyuki Deguchi
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Kenji Imamura
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Masahiro Kaneko
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Yuto Nishida
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Yusuke Sakai
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Justin Vasselli
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Huy Hien Vu
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Taro Watanabe
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
In this paper, we describe our NAIST-NICT-TIT submission to the WMT22 general machine translation task. We participated in this task for the English ↔ Japanese language pair. Our system is characterized as an ensemble of Transformer big models, k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) (Khandelwal et al., 2021), and reranking.In our translation system, we construct the datastore for kNN-MT from back-translated monolingual data and integrate kNN-MT into the ensemble model. We designed a reranking system to select a translation from the n-best translation candidates generated by the translation system. We also use a context-aware model to improve the document-level consistency of the translation.
2016
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A Two-Phase Approach for Building Vietnamese WordNet
Thai Phuong Nguyen
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Van-Lam Pham
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Hoang-An Nguyen
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Huy-Hien Vu
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Ngoc-Anh Tran
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Thi-Thu-Ha Truong
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)
Wordnets play an important role not only in linguistics but also in natural language processing (NLP). This paper reports major results of a project which aims to construct a wordnet for Vietnamese language. We propose a two-phase approach to the construction of Vietnamese WordNet employing available language resources and ensuring Vietnamese specific linguistic and cultural characteristics. We also give statistical results and analyses to show characteristics of the wordnet.