Siyou Liu


2023

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Findings of the WMT 2023 Shared Task on Discourse-Level Literary Translation: A Fresh Orb in the Cosmos of LLMs
Longyue Wang | Zhaopeng Tu | Yan Gu | Siyou Liu | Dian Yu | Qingsong Ma | Chenyang Lyu | Liting Zhou | Chao-Hong Liu | Yufeng Ma | Weiyu Chen | Yvette Graham | Bonnie Webber | Philipp Koehn | Andy Way | Yulin Yuan | Shuming Shi
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

Translating literary works has perennially stood as an elusive dream in machine translation (MT), a journey steeped in intricate challenges. To foster progress in this domain, we hold a new shared task at WMT 2023, the first edition of the Discourse-Level Literary Translation. First, we (Tencent AI Lab and China Literature Ltd.) release a copyrighted and document-level Chinese-English web novel corpus. Furthermore, we put forth an industry-endorsed criteria to guide human evaluation process. This year, we totally received 14 submissions from 7 academia and industry teams. We employ both automatic and human evaluations to measure the performance of the submitted systems. The official ranking of the systems is based on the overall human judgments. In addition, our extensive analysis reveals a series of interesting findings on literary and discourse-aware MT. We release data, system outputs, and leaderboard at http://www2.statmt.org/wmt23/literary-translation-task.html.

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A Survey on Zero Pronoun Translation
Longyue Wang | Siyou Liu | Mingzhou Xu | Linfeng Song | Shuming Shi | Zhaopeng Tu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Zero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages (e.g. Chinese, Hungarian, and Hindi), but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in machine translation (MT), as it poses a significant challenge for MT systems due to the difficulty in determining the correct antecedent for the pronoun. This survey paper highlights the major works that have been undertaken in zero pronoun translation (ZPT) after the neural revolution so that researchers can recognize the current state and future directions of this field. We provide an organization of the literature based on evolution, dataset, method, and evaluation. In addition, we compare and analyze competing models and evaluation metrics on different benchmarks. We uncover a number of insightful findings such as: 1) ZPT is in line with the development trend of large language model; 2) data limitation causes learning bias in languages and domains; 3) performance improvements are often reported on single benchmarks, but advanced methods are still far from real-world use; 4) general-purpose metrics are not reliable on nuances and complexities of ZPT, emphasizing the necessity of targeted metrics; 5) apart from commonly-cited errors, ZPs will cause risks of gender bias.

2020

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Corpora for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Siyou Liu | Xiaojun Zhang
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Instead of translating sentences in isolation, document-level machine translation aims to capture discourse dependencies across sentences by considering a document as a whole. In recent years, there have been more interests in modelling larger context for the state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT). Although various document-level NMT models have shown significant improvements, there nonetheless exist three main problems: 1) compared with sentence-level translation tasks, the data for training robust document-level models are relatively low-resourced; 2) experiments in previous work are conducted on their own datasets which vary in size, domain and language; 3) proposed approaches are implemented on distinct NMT architectures such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and self-attention networks (SANs). In this paper, we aims to alleviate the low-resource and under-universality problems for document-level NMT. First, we collect a large number of existing document-level corpora, which covers 7 language pairs and 6 domains. In order to address resource sparsity, we construct a novel document parallel corpus in Chinese-Portuguese, which is a non-English-centred and low-resourced language pair. Besides, we implement and evaluate the commonly-cited document-level method on top of the advanced Transformer model with universal settings. Finally, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of document-level NMT, but also release the preprocessed data, source code and trained models for comparison and reproducibility.

2018

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Chinese-Portuguese Machine Translation: A Study on Building Parallel Corpora from Comparable Texts
Siyou Liu | Longyue Wang | Chao-Hong Liu
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)