Community Question-Answering (CQA) portals serve as a valuable tool for helping users within an organization. However, making them accessible to non-English-speaking users continues to be a challenge. Translating questions can broaden the community’s reach, benefiting individuals with similar inquiries in various languages. Translating questions using Neural Machine Translation (NMT) poses more challenges, especially in noisy environments, where the grammatical correctness of the questions is not monitored. These questions may be phrased as statements by non-native speakers, with incorrect subject-verb order and sometimes even missing question marks. Creating a synthetic parallel corpus from such data is also difficult due to its noisy nature. To address this issue, we propose a training methodology that fine-tunes the NMT system only using source-side data. Our approach balances adequacy and fluency by utilizing a loss function that combines BERTScore and Masked Language Model (MLM) Score. Our method surpasses the conventional Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) based fine-tuning approach, which relies on synthetic target data, by achieving a 1.9 BLEU score improvement. Our model exhibits robustness while we add noise to our baseline, and still achieve 1.1 BLEU improvement and large improvements on TER and BLEURT metrics. Our proposed methodology is model-agnostic and is only necessary during the training phase. We make the codes and datasets publicly available at https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html#DomainAdapt for facilitating further research.

Chatbots or conversational systems are used in various sectors such as banking, healthcare, e-commerce, customer support, etc. These chatbots are mainly available for resource-rich languages like English, often limiting their widespread usage to multilingual users. Therefore, making these services or agents available in non-English languages has become essential for their broader applicability. Machine Translation (MT) could be an effective way to develop multilingual chatbots. Further, to help users be confident about a product, feedback and recommendation from the end-user community are essential. However, these question-answers (QnA) can be in a different language than the users. The use of MT systems can reduce these issues to a large extent. In this paper, we provide a benchmark setup for Chat and QnA translation for English-Hindi, a relatively low-resource language pair. We first create the English-Hindi parallel corpus comprising of synthetic and gold standard parallel sentences. Thereafter, we develop several sentence-level and context-level neural machine translation (NMT) models, and measure their effectiveness on the newly created datasets. We achieve a BLEU score of 58.7 and 62.6 on the English-Hindi and Hindi-English subset of the gold-standard version of the WMT20 Chat dataset. Further, we achieve BLEU scores of 52.9 and 76.9 on the gold-standard Multi-modal Dialogue Dataset (MMD) English-Hindi and Hindi-English datasets. For QnA, we achieve a BLEU score of 49.9. Further, we achieve BLEU scores of 50.3 and 50.4 on question and answers subsets, respectively. We also perform thorough qualitative analysis of the outputs by the real users.

Multilingual chatbots are the need of the hour for modern business. There is increasing demand for such systems all over the world. A multilingual chatbot can help to connect distant parts of the world together, without sharing a common language. We participated in WMT22 Chat Translation Shared Task. In this paper, we report descriptions of methodologies used for participation. We submit outputs from multi-encoder based transformer model, where one encoder is for context and another for source utterance. We consider one previous utterance as context. We obtain COMET scores of 0.768 and 0.907 on English-to-German and German-to-English directions, respectively. We submitted outputs without using context at all, which generated worse results in English-to-German direction. While for German-to-English, the model achieved a lower COMET score but slightly higher chrF and BLEU scores. Further, to understand the effectiveness of the context encoder, we submitted a run after removing the context encoder during testing and we obtain similar results.

Machine Translation (MT) systems often fail to preserve different stylistic and pragmatic properties of the source text (e.g. sentiment and emotion and gender traits and etc.) to the target and especially in a low-resource scenario. Such loss can affect the performance of any downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) task and such as sentiment analysis and that heavily relies on the output of the MT systems. The susceptibility to sentiment polarity loss becomes even more severe when an MT system is employed for translating a source content that lacks a legitimate language structure (e.g. review text). Therefore and we must find ways to minimize the undesirable effects of sentiment loss in translation without compromising with the adequacy. In our current work and we present a deep re-inforcement learning (RL) framework in conjunction with the curriculum learning (as per difficulties of the reward) to fine-tune the parameters of a pre-trained neural MT system so that the generated translation successfully encodes the underlying sentiment of the source without compromising the adequacy unlike previous methods. We evaluate our proposed method on the English–Hindi (product domain) and French–English (restaurant domain) review datasets and and found that our method brings a significant improvement over several baselines in the machine translation and and sentiment classification tasks.

Product reviews provide valuable feedback of the customers and however and they are available today only in English on most of the e-commerce platforms. The nature of reviews provided by customers in any multilingual country poses unique challenges for machine translation such as code-mixing and ungrammatical sentences and presence of colloquial terms and lack of e-commerce parallel corpus etc. Given that 44% of Indian population speaks and operates in Hindi language and we address the above challenges by presenting an English–to–Hindi neural machine translation (NMT) system to translate the product reviews available on e-commerce websites by creating an in-domain parallel corpora and handling various types of noise in reviews via two data augmentation techniques and viz. (i). a novel phrase augmentation technique (PhrRep) where the syntactic noun phrases in sentences are replaced by the other noun phrases carrying different meanings but in similar context; and (ii). a novel attention guided noise augmentation (AttnNoise) technique to make our NMT model robust towards various noise. Evaluation shows that using the proposed augmentation techniques we achieve a 6.67 BLEU score improvement over the baseline model. In order to show that our proposed approach is not language-specific and we also perform experiments for two other language pairs and viz. En-Fr (MTNT18 corpus) and En-De (IWSLT17) that yield the improvements of 2.55 and 0.91 BLEU points and respectively and over the baselines.

Reviews written by the users for a particular product or service play an influencing role for the customers to make an informative decision. Although online e-commerce portals have immensely impacted our lives, available contents predominantly are in English language- often limiting its widespread usage. There is an exponential growth in the number of e-commerce users who are not proficient in English. Hence, there is a necessity to make these services available in non-English languages, especially in a multilingual country like India. This can be achieved by an in-domain robust machine translation (MT) system. However, the reviews written by the users pose unique challenges to MT, such as misspelled words, ungrammatical constructions, presence of colloquial terms, lack of resources such as in-domain parallel corpus etc. We address the above challenges by presenting an English–Hindi review domain parallel corpus. We train an English–to–Hindi neural machine translation (NMT) system to translate the product reviews available on e-commerce websites. By training the Transformer based NMT model over the generated data, we achieve a score of 33.26 BLEU points for English–to–Hindi translation. In order to make our NMT model robust enough to handle the noisy tokens in the reviews, we integrate a character based language model to generate word vectors and map the noisy tokens with their correct forms. Experiments on four language pairs, viz. English-Hindi, English-German, English-French, and English-Czech show the BLUE scores of 35.09, 28.91, 34.68 and 14.52 which are the improvements of 1.61, 1.05, 1.63 and 1.94, respectively, over the baseline.