Ryan Liu


2024

This paper describes the CloudSheep translation system for WMT24 Discourse-Level Literary Translation shared task. We participated in the Chinese-English direction on the unconstrained track. Our approach to the task used a pipeline of different tools in order to maximize the translation accuracy and flow of the text by combining the strengths of each tool. In particular, our focus was to translate names consistently and idioms correctly. To achieve consistent names throughout a text, a custom name dictionary was generated for each text, containing person and place names, along with their translations. A common honorific dictionary was applied for consistency with titles, especially in historical or cultivation novels. The names were found and translated with GPT 3.5-turbo. To achieve accurate and concise translations of idioms, which are often translated literally and verbosely, we integrated the CC-CEDICT library to provide official definitions. Then, we used GPT-4 to pick the best dictionary definition that fit the context and rephrase it to fit grammatically within a sentence. For the translation of non-name and non-idiom terms, we used Google Translate. We compared our approach’s performance with Google Translate as a baseline using BLEU, chrF, and COMET, as well as A/B testing.

2023

A persistent challenge to table question answering (TableQA) by generating executable programs has been adapting to varied table structures, typically requiring domain-specific logical forms. In response, this paper introduces a unified TableQA framework that: (1) provides a unified representation for structured tables as multi-index Pandas data frames, (2) uses Python as a powerful querying language, and (3) uses few-shot prompting to translate NL questions into Python programs, which are executable on Pandas data frames. Furthermore, to answer complex relational questions with extended program functionality and external knowledge, our framework allows customized APIs that Python programs can call. We experiment with four TableQA datasets that involve tables of different structures — relational, multi-table, and hierarchical matrix shapes — and achieve prominent improvements over past state-of-the-art systems. In ablation studies, we (1) show benefits from our multi-index representation and APIs over baselines that use only an LLM, and (2) demonstrate that our approach is modular and can incorporate additional APIs.