Qian Wang


2022

pdf
Addressing Asymmetry in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Fuzzy Task Clustering
Qian Wang | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) enables positive knowledge transfer among multiple translation tasks with a shared underlying model, but a unified multilingual model usually suffers from capacity bottleneck when tens or hundreds of languages are involved. A possible solution is to cluster languages and train individual model for each cluster. However, the existing clustering methods based on language similarity cannot handle the asymmetric problem in multilingual NMT, i.e., one translation task A can benefit from another translation task B but task B will be harmed by task A. To address this problem, we propose a fuzzy task clustering method for multilingual NMT. Specifically, we employ task affinity, defined as the loss change of one translation task caused by the training of another, as the clustering criterion. Next, we cluster the translation tasks based on the task affinity, such that tasks from the same cluster can benefit each other. For each cluster, we further find out a set of auxiliary translation tasks that benefit the tasks in this cluster. In this way, the model for each cluster is trained not only on the tasks in the cluster but also on the auxiliary tasks. We conduct extensive experiments for one-to-many, manyto-one, and many-to-many translation scenarios to verify the effectiveness of our method.

2020

pdf
CASIA’s System for IWSLT 2020 Open Domain Translation
Qian Wang | Yuchen Liu | Cong Ma | Yu Lu | Yining Wang | Long Zhou | Yang Zhao | Jiajun Zhang | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

This paper describes the CASIA’s system for the IWSLT 2020 open domain translation task. This year we participate in both Chinese→Japanese and Japanese→Chinese translation tasks. Our system is neural machine translation system based on Transformer model. We augment the training data with knowledge distillation and back translation to improve the translation performance. Domain data classification and weighted domain model ensemble are introduced to generate the final translation result. We compare and analyze the performance on development data with different model settings and different data processing techniques.

pdf
Touch Editing: A Flexible One-Time Interaction Approach for Translation
Qian Wang | Jiajun Zhang | Lemao Liu | Guoping Huang | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

We propose a touch-based editing method for translation, which is more flexible than traditional keyboard-mouse-based translation postediting. This approach relies on touch actions that users perform to indicate translation errors. We present a dual-encoder model to handle the actions and generate refined translations. To mimic the user feedback, we adopt the TER algorithm comparing between draft translations and references to automatically extract the simulated actions for training data construction. Experiments on translation datasets with simulated editing actions show that our method significantly improves original translation of Transformer (up to 25.31 BLEU) and outperforms existing interactive translation methods (up to 16.64 BLEU). We also conduct experiments on post-editing dataset to further prove the robustness and effectiveness of our method.

2019

pdf
NCLS: Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization
Junnan Zhu | Qian Wang | Yining Wang | Yu Zhou | Jiajun Zhang | Shaonan Wang | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is the task to produce a summary in one particular language for a source document in a different language. Existing methods simply divide this task into two steps: summarization and translation, leading to the problem of error propagation. To handle that, we present an end-to-end CLS framework, which we refer to as Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization (NCLS), for the first time. Moreover, we propose to further improve NCLS by incorporating two related tasks, monolingual summarization and machine translation, into the training process of CLS under multi-task learning. Due to the lack of supervised CLS data, we propose a round-trip translation strategy to acquire two high-quality large-scale CLS datasets based on existing monolingual summarization datasets. Experimental results have shown that our NCLS achieves remarkable improvement over traditional pipeline methods on both English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English CLS human-corrected test sets. In addition, NCLS with multi-task learning can further significantly improve the quality of generated summaries. We make our dataset and code publicly available here: http://www.nlpr.ia.ac.cn/cip/dataset.htm.

1998

pdf
System Demonstration Multilingual Weather Forecast Generation System
Tianfang Yao | Dongmo Zhang | Qian Wang
Natural Language Generation