Current machine translation (MT) systems perform well in the domains on which they were trained, but adaptation to unseen domains remains a challenge. Rather than fine-tuning on domain data or modifying the architecture for training, an alternative approach exploits large language models (LLMs), which are performant across NLP tasks especially when presented with in-context examples. We focus on adapting a pre-trained LLM to a domain at inference through in-context example selection. For MT, examples are usually randomly selected from a development set. Some more recent methods though select using the more intuitive basis of test source similarity. We employ topic models to select examples based on abstract semantic relationships below the level of a domain. We test the relevance of these statistical models and use them to select informative examples even for out-of-domain inputs, experimenting on 7 diverse domains and 11 language pairs of differing resourcedness. Our method outperforms baselines on challenging multilingual out-of-domain tests, though it does not match performance with strong baselines for the in-language setting. We find that adding few-shot examples and related keywords consistently improves translation quality, that example diversity must be balanced with source similarity, and that our pipeline is overly restrictive for example selection when a targeted development set is available.

This paper presents the results of the General Machine Translation Task organised as part of the 2023 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT). In the general MT task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 8 language pairs (corresponding to 14 translation directions), to be evaluated on test sets consisting of up to four different domains. We evaluate system outputs with professional human annotators using a combination of source-based Direct Assessment and scalar quality metric (DA+SQM).

We present an overview of the Biomedical Translation Task that was part of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT23). The aim of the task was the automatic translation of biomedical abstracts from the PubMed database. It included twelve language directions, namely, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Russian, from and into English. We received submissions from 18 systems and for all the test sets that we released. Our comparison system was based on ChatGPT 3.5 and performed very well in comparison to many of the submissions.

RoCS-MT, a Robust Challenge Set for Machine Translation (MT), is designed to test MT systems’ ability to translate user-generated content (UGC) that displays non-standard characteristics, such as spelling errors, devowelling, acronymisation, etc. RoCS-MT is composed of English comments from Reddit, selected for their non-standard nature, which have been manually normalised and professionally translated into five languages: French, German, Czech, Ukrainian and Russian. In the context of the WMT23 test suite shared task, we analyse the models submitted to the general MT task for all from-English language pairs, offering some insights into the types of problems faced by state-of-the-art MT models when dealing with non-standard UGC texts. We compare automatic metrics for MT quality, including quality estimation to see if the same conclusions can be drawn without references. In terms of robustness, we find that many of the systems struggle with non-standard variants of words (e.g. due to phonetically inspired spellings, contraction, truncations, etc.), but that this depends on the system and the amount of training data, with the best overall systems performing better across all phenomena. GPT4 is the clear front-runner. However we caution against drawing conclusions about generalisation capacity as it and other systems could be trained on the source side of RoCS and also on similar data.

The NLP community recently saw the release of a new large open-access multilingual language model, BLOOM (BigScience et al., 2022) covering 46 languages. We focus on BLOOM’s multilingual ability by evaluating its machine translation performance across several datasets (WMT, Flores-101 and DiaBLa) and language pairs (high- and low-resourced). Our results show that 0-shot performance suffers from overgeneration and generating in the wrong language, but this is greatly improved in the few-shot setting, with very good results for a number of language pairs. We study several aspects including prompt design, model sizes, cross-lingual transfer and the use of discursive context.

Multilingual language models have shown impressive cross-lingual transfer ability across a diverse set of languages and tasks. To improve the cross-lingual ability of these models, some strategies include transliteration and finer-grained segmentation into characters as opposed to subwords. In this work, we investigate lexical sharing in multilingual machine translation (MT) from Hindi, Gujarati, Nepali into English. We explore the trade-offs that exist in translation performance between data sampling and vocabulary size, and we explore whether transliteration is useful in encouraging cross-script generalisation. We also verify how the different settings generalise to unseen languages (Marathi and Bengali). We find that transliteration does not give pronounced improvements and our analysis suggests that our multilingual MT models trained on original scripts are already robust to cross-script differences even for relatively low-resource languages.

One of the major challenges of machine translation (MT) is ambiguity, which can in some cases be resolved by accompanying context such as images. However, recent work in multimodal MT (MMT) has shown that obtaining improvements from images is challenging, limited not only by the difficulty of building effective cross-modal representations, but also by the lack of specific evaluation and training data. We present a new MMT approach based on a strong text-only MT model, which uses neural adapters, a novel guided self-attention mechanism and which is jointly trained on both visually-conditioned masking and MMT. We also introduce CoMMuTE, a Contrastive Multilingual Multimodal Translation Evaluation set of ambiguous sentences and their possible translations, accompanied by disambiguating images corresponding to each translation. Our approach obtains competitive results compared to strong text-only models on standard English→French, English→German and English→Czech benchmarks and outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art MMT systems by a large margin on our contrastive test set. Our code and CoMMuTE are freely available.

Neural language models play an increasingly central role for language processing, given their success for a range of NLP tasks. In this study, we compare some canonical strategies in language modeling for low-resource scenarios, evaluating all models by their (finetuned) performance on a POS-tagging downstream task. We work with five (extremely) low-resource dialects from the Indic dialect continuum (Braj, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili), which are closely related to each other and the standard mid-resource dialect, Hindi. The strategies we evaluate broadly include from-scratch pretraining, and cross-lingual transfer between the dialects as well as from different kinds of off-the- shelf multilingual models; we find that a model pretrained on other mid-resource Indic dialects and languages, with extended pretraining on target dialect data, consistently outperforms other models. We interpret our results in terms of dataset sizes, phylogenetic relationships, and corpus statistics, as well as particularities of this linguistic system.

Cette contribution présente le projet MaTOS (Machine Translation for Open Science), qui vise à développer de nouvelles méthodes pour la traduction automatique (TA) intégrale de documents scientifiques entre le français et l’anglais, ainsi que des métriques automatiques pour évaluer la qualité des traductions produites. Pour ce faire, MaTOS s’intéresse (a) au recueil de ressources ouvertes pour la TA spécialisée; (b) à la description des marqueurs de cohérence textuelle pour les articles scientifiques; (c) au développement de nouvelles méthodes de traitement multilingue pour les documents; (d) aux métriques mesurant les progrès de la traduction de documents complets.

Spelling normalisation is a useful step in the study and analysis of historical language texts, whether it is manual analysis by experts or automatic analysis using downstream natural language processing (NLP) tools. Not only does it help to homogenise the variable spelling that often exists in historical texts, but it also facilitates the use of off-the-shelf contemporary NLP tools, if contemporary spelling conventions are used for normalisation. We present FREEMnorm, a new benchmark for the normalisation of Early Modern French (from the 17th century) into contemporary French and provide a thorough comparison of three different normalisation methods: ABA, an alignment-based approach and MT-approaches, (both statistical and neural), including extensive parameter searching, which is often missing in the normalisation literature.

anguage models for historical states of language are becoming increasingly important to allow the optimal digitisation and analysis of old textual sources. Because these historical states are at the same time more complex to process and more scarce in the corpora available, this paper presents recent efforts to overcome this difficult situation. These efforts include producing a corpus, creating the model, and evaluating it with an NLP task currently used by scholars in other ongoing projects.

Detecting divergences in the applications of the law (where the same legal text is applied differently by two rulings) is an important task. It is the mission of the French Cour de Cassation. The first step in the detection of divergences is to detect similar cases, which is currently done manually by experts. They rely on summarised versions of the rulings (syntheses and keyword sequences), which are currently produced manually and are not available for all rulings. There is also a high degree of variability in the keyword choices and the level of granularity used. In this article, we therefore aim to provide automatic tools to facilitate the search for similar rulings. We do this by (i) providing automatic keyword sequence generation models, which can be used to improve the coverage of the analysis, and (ii) providing measures of similarity based on the available texts and augmented with predicted keyword sequences. Our experiments show that the predictions improve correlations of automatically obtained similarities against our specially colelcted human judgments of similarity.

This paper presents the results of the General Machine Translation Task organised as part of the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2022. In the general MT task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 11 language pairs, to be evaluated on test sets consisting of four different domains. We evaluate system outputs with human annotators using two different techniques: reference-based direct assessment and (DA) and a combination of DA and scalar quality metric (DA+SQM).

This paper describes the Inria ALMAnaCH team submission to the WMT 2022 general translation shared task. Participating in the language directions cs,ru,uk→en and cs↔uk, we experiment with the use of a dedicated Latin-script transcription convention aimed at representing all Slavic languages involved in a way that maximises character- and word-level correspondences between them as well as with the English language. Our hypothesis was that bringing the source and target language closer could have a positive impact on machine translation results. We provide multiple comparisons, including bilingual and multilingual baselines, with and without transcription. Initial results indicate that the transcription strategy was not successful, resulting in lower results than baselines. We nevertheless submitted our multilingual, transcribed models as our primary systems, and in this paper provide some indications as to why we got these negative results.

In the seventh edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of seven languagepairs, namely English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, English/Chinese, English/Russian, English/Italian. This year’s test sets covered three types of biomedical text genre. In addition to scientific abstracts and terminology items used in previous editions, we released test sets of clinical cases. The evaluation of clinical cases translations were given special attention by involving clinicians in the preparation of reference translations and manual evaluation. For the main MEDLINE test sets, we received a total of 609 submissions from 37 teams. For the ClinSpEn sub-task, we had the participation of five teams.

We present a survey covering the state of the art in low-resource machine translation (MT) research. There are currently around 7,000 languages spoken in the world and almost all language pairs lack significant resources for training machine translation models. There has been increasing interest in research addressing the challenge of producing useful translation models when very little translated training data is available. We present a summary of this topical research field and provide a description of the techniques evaluated by researchers in several recent shared tasks in low-resource MT.

En dépit de leur qualité certaine, les ressources et outils disponibles pour l’analyse du français d’Ancien Régime ne sont plus à même de répondre aux enjeux de la recherche en linguistique et en littérature pour cette période. Après avoir précisément défini le cadre chronologique retenu, nous présentons les corpus mis à disposition et les résultats obtenus avec eux pour plusieurs tâches de TAL fondamentales à l’étude de la langue et de la littérature.

Machine translation (MT) models used in industries with constantly changing topics, such as translation or news agencies, need to adapt to new data to maintain their performance over time. Our aim is to teach a pre-trained MT model to translate previously unseen words accurately, based on very few examples. We propose (i) an experimental setup allowing us to simulate novel vocabulary appearing in human-submitted translations, and (ii) corresponding evaluation metrics to compare our approaches. We extend a data augmentation approach using a pretrained language model to create training examples with similar contexts for novel words. We compare different fine-tuning and data augmentation approaches and show that adaptation on the scale of one to five examples is possible. Combining data augmentation with randomly selected training sentences leads to the highest BLEU score and accuracy improvements. Impressively, with only 1 to 5 examples, our model reports better accuracy scores than a reference system trained with on average 313 parallel examples.

In the sixth edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of eight language pairs, namely English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, English/Chinese, English/Russian, English/Italian, and English/Basque. Further, our tests were composed of three types of textual test sets. New to this year, we released a test set of summaries of animal experiments, in addition to the test sets of scientific abstracts and terminologies. We received a total of 107 submissions from 15 teams from 6 countries.

This paper presents an example architecture for a scalable, secure and resilient Machine Translation (MT) platform, using components available via Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is increasingly common for a single news organisation to publish and monitor news sources in multiple languages. A growth in news sources makes this increasingly challenging and time-consuming but MT can help automate some aspects of this process. Building a translation service provides a single integration point for news room tools that use translation technology allowing MT models to be integrated into a system once, rather than each time the translation technology is needed. By using a range of services provided by AWS, it is possible to architect a platform where multiple pre-existing technologies are combined to build a solution, as opposed to developing software from scratch for deployment on a single virtual machine. This increases the speed at which a platform can be developed and allows the use of well-maintained services. However, a single service also provides challenges. It is key to consider how the platform will scale when handling many users and how to ensure the platform is resilient.

We investigate a long-perceived shortcoming in the typical use of BLEU: its reliance on a single reference. Using modern neural paraphrasing techniques, we study whether automatically generating additional *diverse* references can provide better coverage of the space of valid translations and thereby improve its correlation with human judgments. Our experiments on the into-English language directions of the WMT19 metrics task (at both the system and sentence level) show that using paraphrased references does generally improve BLEU, and when it does, the more diverse the better. However, we also show that better results could be achieved if those paraphrases were to specifically target the parts of the space most relevant to the MT outputs being evaluated. Moreover, the gains remain slight even when human paraphrases are used, suggesting inherent limitations to BLEU’s capacity to correctly exploit multiple references. Surprisingly, we also find that adequacy appears to be less important, as shown by the high results of a strong sampling approach, which even beats human paraphrases when used with sentence-level BLEU.

Current approaches to machine translation (MT) either translate sentences in isolation, disregarding the context they appear in, or model context at the level of the full document, without a notion of any internal structure the document may have. In this work we consider the fact that documents are rarely homogeneous blocks of text, but rather consist of parts covering different topics. Some documents, such as biographies and encyclopedia entries, have highly predictable, regular structures in which sections are characterised by different topics. We draw inspiration from Louis and Webber (2014) who use this information to improve statistical MT and transfer their proposal into the framework of neural MT. We compare two different methods of including information about the topic of the section within which each sentence is found: one using side constraints and the other using a cache-based model. We create and release the data on which we run our experiments - parallel corpora for three language pairs (Chinese-English, French-English, Bulgarian-English) from Wikipedia biographies, which we extract automatically, preserving the boundaries of sections within the articles.

In this paper we provide a systematic comparison of existing and new document-level neural machine translation solutions. As part of this comparison, we introduce and evaluate a document-level variant of the recently proposed Star Transformer architecture. In addition to using the traditional metric BLEU, we report the accuracy of the models in handling anaphoric pronoun translation as well as coherence and cohesion using contrastive test sets. Finally, we report the results of human evaluation in terms of Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and analyse the correlation of the results obtained by the automatic metrics with human judgments.

We describe the University of Edinburgh’s submissions to the WMT20 news translation shared task for the low resource language pair English-Tamil and the mid-resource language pair English-Inuktitut. We use the neural machine translation transformer architecture for all submissions and explore a variety of techniques to improve translation quality to compensate for the lack of parallel training data. For the very low-resource English-Tamil, this involves exploring pretraining, using both language model objectives and translation using an unrelated high-resource language pair (German-English), and iterative backtranslation. For English-Inuktitut, we explore the use of multilingual systems, which, despite not being part of the primary submission, would have achieved the best results on the test set.

This paper describes the joint submission of the University of Edinburgh and Uppsala University to the WMT’20 chat translation task for both language directions (English-German). We use existing state-of-the-art machine translation models trained on news data and fine-tune them on in-domain and pseudo-in-domain web crawled data. Our baseline systems are transformer-big models that are pre-trained on the WMT’19 News Translation task and fine-tuned on pseudo-in-domain web crawled data and in-domain task data. We also experiment with (i) adaptation using speaker and domain tags and (ii) using different types and amounts of preceding context. We observe that contrarily to expectations, exploiting context degrades the results (and on analysis the data is not highly contextual). However using domain tags does improve scores according to the automatic evaluation. Our final primary systems use domain tags and are ensembles of 4 models, with noisy channel reranking of outputs. Our en-de system was ranked second in the shared task while our de-en system outperformed all the other systems.

Machine translation of scientific abstracts and terminologies has the potential to support health professionals and biomedical researchers in some of their activities. In the fifth edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of eight language pairs. Five language pairs were previously addressed in past editions of the shared task, namely, English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, and English/Chinese. Three additional languages pairs were also introduced this year: English/Russian, English/Italian, and English/Basque. The task addressed the evaluation of both scientific abstracts (all language pairs) and terminologies (English/Basque only). We received submissions from a total of 20 teams. For recurring language pairs, we observed an improvement in the translations in terms of automatic scores and qualitative evaluations, compared to previous years.

We describe parBLEU, parCHRF++, and parESIM, which augment baseline metrics with automatically generated paraphrases produced by PRISM (Thompson and Post, 2020a), a multilingual neural machine translation system. We build on recent work studying how to improve BLEU by using diverse automatically paraphrased references (Bawden et al., 2020), extending experiments to the multilingual setting for the WMT2020 metrics shared task and for three base metrics. We compare their capacity to exploit up to 100 additional synthetic references. We find that gains are possible when using additional, automatically paraphrased references, although they are not systematic. However, segment-level correlations, particularly into English, are improved for all three metrics and even with higher numbers of paraphrased references.

The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT19 Shared Task on News Translation in six language directions: English↔Gujarati, English↔Chinese, German→English, and English→Czech. For all translation directions, we created or used back-translations of monolingual data in the target language as additional synthetic training data. For English↔Gujarati, we also explored semi-supervised MT with cross-lingual language model pre-training, and translation pivoting through Hindi. For translation to and from Chinese, we investigated character-based tokenisation vs. sub-word segmentation of Chinese text. For German→English, we studied the impact of vast amounts of back-translated training data on translation quality, gaining a few additional insights over Edunov et al. (2018). For English→Czech, we compared different preprocessing and tokenisation regimes.

In the fourth edition of the WMT Biomedical Translation task, we considered a total of six languages, namely Chinese (zh), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Portuguese (pt), and Spanish (es). We performed an evaluation of automatic translations for a total of 10 language directions, namely, zh/en, en/zh, fr/en, en/fr, de/en, en/de, pt/en, en/pt, es/en, and en/es. We provided training data based on MEDLINE abstracts for eight of the 10 language pairs and test sets for all of them. In addition to that, we offered a new sub-task for the translation of terms in biomedical terminologies for the en/es language direction. Higher BLEU scores (close to 0.5) were obtained for the es/en, en/es and en/pt test sets, as well as for the terminology sub-task. After manual validation of the primary runs, some submissions were judged to be better than the reference translations, for instance, for de/en, en/es and es/en.

For machine translation to tackle discourse phenomena, models must have access to extra-sentential linguistic context. There has been recent interest in modelling context in neural machine translation (NMT), but models have been principally evaluated with standard automatic metrics, poorly adapted to evaluating discourse phenomena. In this article, we present hand-crafted, discourse test sets, designed to test the models’ ability to exploit previous source and target sentences. We investigate the performance of recently proposed multi-encoder NMT models trained on subtitles for English to French. We also explore a novel way of exploiting context from the previous sentence. Despite gains using BLEU, multi-encoder models give limited improvement in the handling of discourse phenomena: 50% accuracy on our coreference test set and 53.5% for coherence/cohesion (compared to a non-contextual baseline of 50%). A simple strategy of decoding the concatenation of the previous and current sentence leads to good performance, and our novel strategy of multi-encoding and decoding of two sentences leads to the best performance (72.5% for coreference and 57% for coherence/cohesion), highlighting the importance of target-side context.

In this article, we provide several approaches to the automatic identification of parallel sentences that require sentence-external linguistic context to be correctly translated. Our long-term goal is to automatically construct a test set of context-dependent sentences in order to evaluate machine translation models designed to improve the translation of contextual, discursive phenomena. We provide a discussion and critique that show that current approaches do not allow us to achieve our goal, and suggest that for now evaluating individual phenomena is likely the best solution.

In this paper, we address the problem of generating English tag questions (TQs) (e.g. it is, isn’t it?) in Machine Translation (MT). We propose a post-edition solution, formulating the problem as a multi-class classification task. We present (i) the automatic annotation of English TQs in a parallel corpus of subtitles and (ii) an approach using a series of classifiers to predict TQ forms, which we use to post-edit state-of-the-art MT outputs. Our method provides significant improvements in English TQ translation when translating from Czech, French and German, in turn improving the fluidity, naturalness, grammatical correctness and pragmatic coherence of MT output.

Whilst the focus of Machine Translation (MT) has for a long time been the translation of planned, written texts, more and more research is being dedicated to translating speech-like texts (informal or spontaneous discourse or dialogue). To achieve high quality and natural translation of speechlike texts, the integration of context is needed, whether it is extra-linguistic (speaker identity, the interaction between speaker and interlocutor) or linguistic (coreference and stylistic phenomena linked to the spontaneous and informal nature of the texts). However, the integration of contextual information in MT systems remains limited in most current systems. In this paper, we present and critique three experiments for the integration of context into a MT system, each focusing on a different type of context and exploiting a different method: adaptation to speaker gender, cross-lingual pronoun prediction and the generation of tag questions from French into English.

We present an efficient model selection method using boosting for transition-based constituency parsing. It is designed for exploring a high-dimensional search space, defined by a large set of feature templates, as for example is typically the case when parsing morphologically rich languages. Our method removes the need to manually define heuristic constraints, which are often imposed in current state-of-the-art selection methods. Our experiments for French show that the method is more efficient and is also capable of producing compact, state-of-the-art models.

In this paper we investigate the impact of the integration of context into dialogue translation. We present a new contextual parallel corpus of television subtitles and show how taking into account speaker gender can significantly improve machine translation quality in terms of B LEU and M ETEOR scores. We perform a manual analysis, which suggests that these improvements are not necessary related to the morphological consequences of speaker gender, but to more general linguistic divergences.

This article presents the methods, results, and precision of the syntactic annotation process of the Rhapsodie Treebank of spoken French. The Rhapsodie Treebank is an 33,000 word corpus annotated for prosody and syntax, licensed in its entirety under Creative Commons. The syntactic annotation contains two levels: a macro-syntactic level, containing a segmentation into illocutionary units (including discourse markers, parentheses …) and a micro-syntactic level including dependency relations and various paradigmatic structures, called pile constructions, the latter being particularly frequent and diverse in spoken language. The micro-syntactic annotation process, presented in this paper, includes a semi-automatic preparation of the transcription, the application of a syntactic dependency parser, transcoding of the parsing results to the Rhapsodie annotation scheme, manual correction by multiple annotators followed by a validation process, and finally the application of coherence rules that check common errors. The good inter-annotator agreement scores are presented and analyzed in greater detail. The article also includes the list of functions used in the dependency annotation and for the distinction of various pile constructions and presents the ideas underlying these choices.