Non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) has recently made great progress. However, most works to date have focused on standard translation tasks, even though some edit-based NAT models, such as the Levenshtein Transformer (LevT), seem well suited to translate with a Translation Memory (TM). This is the scenario considered here. We first analyze the vanilla LevT model and explain why it does not do well in this setting. We then propose a new variant, TM-LevT, and show how to effectively train this model. By modifying the data presentation and introducing an extra deletion operation, we obtain performance that are on par with an autoregressive approach, while reducing the decoding load. We also show that incorporating TMs during training dispenses to use knowledge distillation, a well-known trick used to mitigate the multimodality issue.

In our globalized world, a growing number of situations arise where people are required to communicate in one or several foreign languages. In the case of written communication, users with a good command of a foreign language may find assistance from computer-aided translation (CAT) technologies. These technologies often allow users to access external resources, such as dictionaries, terminologies or bilingual concordancers, thereby interrupting and considerably hindering the writing process. In addition, CAT systems assume that the source sentence is fixed and also restrict the possible changes on the target side. In order to make the writing process smoother, we present BiSync, a bilingual writing assistant that allows users to freely compose text in two languages, while maintaining the two monolingual texts synchronized. We also include additional functionalities, such as the display of alternative prefix translations and paraphrases, which are intended to facilitate the authoring of texts. We detail the model architecture used for synchronization and evaluate the resulting tool, showing that high accuracy can be attained with limited computational resources. The interface and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jmcrego/BiSync and a demonstration video can be watched on YouTube https://youtu.be/_l-ugDHfNgU.

Machine Translation (MT) is usually viewed as a one-shot process that generates the target language equivalent of some source text from scratch. We consider here a more general setting which assumes an initial target sequence, that must be transformed into a valid translation of the source, thereby restoring parallelism between source and target. For this bilingual synchronization task, we consider several architectures (both autoregressive and non-autoregressive) and training regimes, and experiment with multiple practical settings such as simulated interactive MT, translating with Translation Memory (TM) and TM cleaning. Our results suggest that one single generic edit-based system, once fine-tuned, can compare with, or even outperform, dedicated systems specifically trained for these tasks.

This presentation demonstrates data augmentation methods for Neural Machine Translation to make use of similar translations, in a comparable way a human translator employs fuzzy matches. We show how we simply feed the neural model with information on both source and target sides of the fuzzy matches, and we also extend the similarity to include semantically related translations retrieved using distributed sentence representations. We show that translations based on fuzzy matching provide the model with “copy” information while translations based on embedding similarities tend to extend the translation “context”. Results indicate that the effect from both similar sentences are adding up to further boost accuracy, are combining naturally with model fine-tuning and are providing dynamic adaptation for unseen translation pairs. Tests on multiple data sets and domains show consistent accuracy improvements.

As the amount of audio-visual content increases, the need to develop automatic captioning and subtitling solutions to match the expectations of a growing international audience appears as the only viable way to boost throughput and lower the related post-production costs. Automatic captioning and subtitling often need to be tightly intertwined to achieve an appropriate level of consistency and synchronization with each other and with the video signal. In this work, we assess a dual decoding scheme to achieve a strong coupling between these two tasks and show how adequacy and consistency are increased, with virtually no additional cost in terms of model size and training complexity.

Machine translation is generally understood as generating one target text from an input source document. In this paper, we consider a stronger requirement: to jointly generate two texts so that each output side effectively depends on the other. As we discuss, such a device serves several practical purposes, from multi-target machine translation to the generation of controlled variations of the target text. We present an analysis of possible implementations of dual decoding, and experiment with four applications. Viewing the problem from multiple angles allows us to better highlight the challenges of dual decoding and to also thoroughly analyze the benefits of generating matched, rather than independent, translations.

Code-Switching (CSW) is a common phenomenon that occurs in multilingual geographic or social contexts, which raises challenging problems for natural language processing tools. We focus here on Machine Translation (MT) of CSW texts, where we aim to simultaneously disentangle and translate the two mixed languages. Due to the lack of actual translated CSW data, we generate artificial training data from regular parallel texts. Experiments show this training strategy yields MT systems that surpass multilingual systems for code-switched texts. These results are confirmed in an alternative task aimed at providing contextual translations for a L2 writing assistant.

This paper describes LISN’s submissions to two shared tasks at WMT’21. For the biomedical translation task, we have developed resource-heavy systems for the English-French language pair, using both out-of-domain and in-domain corpora. The target genre for this task (scientific abstracts) corresponds to texts that often have a standardized structure. Our systems attempt to take this structure into account using a hierarchical system of sentence-level tags. Translation systems were also prepared for the News task for the French-German language pair. The challenge was to perform unsupervised adaptation to the target domain (financial news). For this, we explored the potential of retrieval-based strategies, where sentences that are similar to test instances are used to prime the decoder.

This paper explores data augmentation methods for training Neural Machine Translation to make use of similar translations, in a comparable way a human translator employs fuzzy matches. In particular, we show how we can simply present the neural model with information of both source and target sides of the fuzzy matches, we also extend the similarity to include semantically related translations retrieved using sentence distributed representations. We show that translations based on fuzzy matching provide the model with “copy” information while translations based on embedding similarities tend to extend the translation “context”. Results indicate that the effect from both similar sentences are adding up to further boost accuracy, combine naturally with model fine-tuning and are providing dynamic adaptation for unseen translation pairs. Tests on multiple data sets and domains show consistent accuracy improvements. To foster research around these techniques, we also release an Open-Source toolkit with efficient and flexible fuzzy-match implementation.

Priming is a well known and studied psychology phenomenon based on the prior presentation of one stimulus (cue) to influence the processing of a response. In this paper, we propose a framework to mimic the process of priming in the context of neural machine translation (NMT). We evaluate the effect of using similar translations as priming cues on the NMT network. We propose a method to inject priming cues into the NMT network and compare our framework to other mechanisms that perform micro-adaptation during inference. Overall, experiments conducted in a multi-domain setting confirm that adding priming cues in the NMT decoder can go a long way towards improving the translation accuracy. Besides, we show the suitability of our framework to gather valuable information for an NMT network from monolingual resources.

This paper describes Systran’s submissions to WAT 2019 Russian-Japanese News Commentary task. A challenging translation task due to the extremely low resources available and the distance of the language pair. We have used the neural Transformer architecture learned over the provided resources and we carried out synthetic data generation experiments which aim at alleviating the data scarcity problem. Results indicate the suitability of the data augmentation experiments, enabling our systems to rank first according to automatic evaluations.

This work is inspired by a typical machine translation industry scenario in which translators make use of in-domain data for facilitating translation of similar or repeating sentences. We introduce a generic framework applied at inference in which a subset of segment pairs are first extracted from training data according to their similarity to the input sentences. These segments are then used to dynamically update the parameters of a generic NMT network, thus performing a lexical micro-adaptation. Our approach demonstrates strong adaptation performance to new and existing datasets including pseudo in-domain data. We evaluate our approach on a heterogeneous English-French training dataset showing accuracy gains on all evaluated domains when compared to strong adaptation baselines.