Multilingual pretraining approaches in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have shown that training models to denoise synthetic code-switched data can yield impressive performance gains — owing to better multilingual semantic representations and transfer learning. However, they generated the synthetic code-switched data using non-contextual, one-to-one word translations obtained from lexicons - which can lead to significant noise in a variety of cases, including the poor handling of polysemes and multi-word expressions, violation of linguistic agreement and inability to scale to agglutinative languages. To overcome these limitations, we propose an approach called Contextual Code-Switching (CCS), where contextual, many-to-many word translations are generated using a ‘base’ NMT model. We conduct experiments on 3 different language families - Romance, Uralic, and Indo-Aryan - and show significant improvements (by up to 5.5 spBLEU points) over the previous lexicon-based SOTA approaches. We also observe that small CCS models can perform comparably or better than massive models like mBART50 and mRASP2, depending on the size of data provided. We empirically analyse several key factors responsible for these - including context, many-to-many substitutions, code-switching language count etc. - and prove that they all contribute to enhanced pretraining of multilingual NMT models.

The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT22 shared task on code-mixed translation. This consists of two subtasks: i) generating code-mixed Hindi/English (Hinglish) text generation from parallel Hindi and English sentences and ii) machine translation from Hinglish to English. As both subtasks are considered low-resource, we focused our efforts on careful data generation and curation, especially the use of backtranslation from monolingual resources. For subtask 1 we explored the effects of constrained decoding on English and transliterated subwords in order to produce Hinglish. For subtask 2, we investigated different pretraining techniques, namely comparing simple initialisation from existing machine translation models and aligned augmentation. For both subtasks, we found that our baseline systems worked best. Our systems for both subtasks were one of the overall top-performing submissions.

Ontology Alignment is an important research problem applied to various fields such as data integration, data transfer, data preparation, etc. State-of-the-art (SOTA) Ontology Alignment systems typically use naive domain-dependent approaches with handcrafted rules or domain-specific architectures, making them unscalable and inefficient. In this work, we propose VeeAlign, a Deep Learning based model that uses a novel dual-attention mechanism to compute the contextualized representation of a concept which, in turn, is used to discover alignments. By doing this, not only is our approach able to exploit both syntactic and semantic information encoded in ontologies, it is also, by design, flexible and scalable to different domains with minimal effort. We evaluate our model on four different datasets from different domains and languages, and establish its superiority through these results as well as detailed ablation studies. The code and datasets used are available at https://github.com/Remorax/VeeAlign.

Increased internet bandwidth at low cost is leading to the creation of large volumes of unstructured data. This data explosion opens up opportunities for the creation of a variety of data-driven intelligent systems, such as the Semantic Web. Ontologies form one of the most crucial layers of semantic web, and the extraction and enrichment of ontologies given this data explosion becomes an inevitable research problem. In this paper, we survey the literature on semi-automatic and automatic ontology extraction and enrichment and classify them into four broad categories based on the approach. Then, we proceed to narrow down four algorithms from each of these categories, implement and analytically compare them based on parameters like context relevance, efficiency and precision. Lastly, we propose a Long Short Term Memory Networks (LSTM) based deep learning approach to try and overcome the gaps identified in these approaches.