Recent years, have seen the rise of large language models (LLMs), where practitioners use task-specific prompts; this was shown to be effective for a variety of tasks. However, when applied to semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI), the effectiveness of LLMs turns out to be limited by low-resource domain accuracy, model overconfidence, and difficulty to capture the disagreements between human judgements. With this in mind, here we try to rethink STS and NLI in the era of LLMs. We first evaluate the performance of STS and NLI in the clinical/biomedical domain, and then we assess LLMs’ predictive confidence and their capability of capturing collective human opinions. We find that these old problems are still to be properly addressed in the era of LLMs.

This paper describes our work on the IWSLT2023 Speech-to-Speech task. Our proposed cascaded system consists of an ensemble of Conformer and S2T-Transformer-based ASR models, a Transformer-based MT model, and a Diffusion-based TTS model. Our primary focus in this competition was to investigate the modeling ability of the Diffusion model for TTS tasks in high-resource scenarios and the role of TTS in the overall S2S task. To this end, we proposed DTS, an end-to-end diffusion-based TTS model that takes raw text as input and generates waveform by iteratively denoising on pure Gaussian noise. Compared to previous TTS models, the speech generated by DTS is more natural and performs better in code-switching scenarios. As the training process is end-to-end, it is relatively straightforward. Our experiments demonstrate that DTS outperforms other TTS models on the GigaS2S benchmark, and also brings positive gains for the entire S2S system.

In this paper, we present our submission to the IWSLT 2023 Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation competition. Our participation involves three language directions: English-German, English-Chinese, and English-Japanese. Our proposed solution is a cascaded incremental decoding system that comprises an ASR model and an MT model. The ASR model is based on the U2++ architecture and can handle both streaming and offline speech scenarios with ease. Meanwhile, the MT model adopts the Deep-Transformer architecture. To improve performance, we explore methods to generate a confident partial target text output that guides the next MT incremental decoding process. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our simultaneous strategies achieve low latency while maintaining a loss of no more than 2 BLEU points when compared to offline systems.

In this paper, we present our submission to the IWSLT 2023 Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation competition. Our participation involves three language directions: English-German, English-Chinese, and English-Japanese. Our solution is a cascaded incremental decoding system, consisting of an ASR model, an MT model, and a TTS model. By adopting the strategies used in the Speech-to-Text track, we have managed to generate a more confident target text for each audio segment input, which can guide the next MT incremental decoding process. Additionally, we have integrated the TTS model to seamlessly reproduce audio files from the translation hypothesis. To enhance the effectiveness of our experiment, we have utilized a range of methods to reduce error conditions in the TTS input text and improve the smoothness of the TTS output audio.

In this paper, we describe the multi strategy system for SemEval-2022 Task 7, This task aims to determine whether a given statement is supported by one or two Clinical Trial reports, and to identify evidence that supports the statement. This is a task that requires high natural language inference capabilities. In Subtask 1, we compare our strategy based on prompt learning and ChatGPT with a baseline constructed using BERT in zero-shot setting, and validate the effectiveness of our strategy. In Subtask 2, we fine-tune DeBERTaV3 for classification without relying on the results from Subtask 1, and we observe that early stopping can effectively prevent model overfitting, which performs well in Subtask 2. In addition, we did not use any ensemble strategies. Ultimately, we achieved the 10th place in Subtask 1 and the 2nd place in Subtask 2.

Computer-aided translation (CAT) aims to enhance human translation efficiency and is still important in scenarios where machine translation cannot meet quality requirements. One fundamental task within this field is Word-Level Auto Completion (WLAC). WLAC predicts a target word given a source sentence, translation context, and a human typed character sequence. Previous works either employ word classification models to exploit contextual information from both sides of the target word or directly disregarded the dependencies from the right-side context. Furthermore, the key information, i.e. human typed sequences, is only used as prefix constraints in the decoding module. In this paper, we propose the INarIG (Iterative Non-autoregressive Instruct Generation) model, which constructs the human typed sequence into Instruction Unit and employs iterative decoding with subwords to fully utilize input information given in the task. Our model is more competent in dealing with low-frequency words (core scenario of this task), and achieves state-of-the-art results on the WMT22 and benchmark datasets, with a maximum increase of over 10% prediction accuracy.

Back Translation (BT) is widely used in the field of machine translation, as it has been proved effective for enhancing translation quality. However, BT mainly improves the translation of inputs that share a similar style (to be more specific, translation-liked inputs), since the source side of BT data is machine-translated. For natural inputs, BT brings only slight improvements and sometimes even adverse effects. To address this issue, we propose Text Style Transfer Back Translation (TST BT), which uses a style transfer to modify the source side of BT data. By making the style of source-side text more natural, we aim to improve the translation of natural inputs. Our experiments on various language pairs, including both high-resource and low-resource ones, demonstrate that TST BT significantly improves translation performance against popular BT benchmarks. In addition, TST BT is proved to be effective in domain adaptation so this strategy can be regarded as a generalized data augmentation method. Our training code and text style transfer model are open-sourced.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets contain examples with highly ambiguous labels due to its subjectivity. Several recent efforts have been made to acknowledge and embrace the existence of ambiguity, and explore how to capture the human disagreement distribution. In contrast with directly learning from gold ambiguity labels, relying on special resource, we argue that the model has naturally captured the human ambiguity distribution as long as it’s calibrated, i.e. the predictive probability can reflect the true correctness likelihood. Our experiments show that when model is well-calibrated, either by label smoothing or temperature scaling, it can obtain competitive performance as prior work, on both divergence scores between predictive probability and the true human opinion distribution, and the accuracy. This reveals the overhead of collecting gold ambiguity labels can be cut, by broadly solving how to calibrate the NLI network.

In the paper, we describe a unified system for task 3 of SemEval-2022. The task aims to recognize the semantic structures of sentences by providing two nominal arguments and to evaluate the degree of taxonomic relations. We utilise the strategy that adding language prefix tag in the training set, which is effective for the model. We split the training set to avoid the translation information to be learnt by the model. For the task, we propose a unified model fine-tuned on the multilingual pretrained model, XLM-RoBERTa. The model performs well in subtask 1 (the binary classification subtask). In order to verify whether our model could also perform better in subtask 2 (the regression subtask), the ranking score is transformed into classification labels by an up-sampling strategy. With the ensemble strategy, the performance of our model can be also improved. As a result, the model obtained the second place for subtask 1 and subtask 2 in the competition evaluation.

This paper describes the system for the identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases. This task was set up as an English cloze task, in which clarifications are presented as possible fillers and systems have to score how well each filler plausibly fits in a given context. For this shared task, we propose our own solutions, including supervised proaches, unsupervised approaches with pretrained models, and then we use these models to build an ensemble model. Finally we get the 2nd best result in the subtask1 which is a classification task, and the 3rd best result in the subtask2 which is a regression task.

This paper describes the HW-TSC’s designation of the Offline Speech Translation System submitted for IWSLT 2022 Evaluation. We explored both cascade and end-to-end system on three language tracks (en-de, en-zh and en-ja), and we chose the cascade one as our primary submission. For the automatic speech recognition (ASR) model of cascade system, there are three ASR models including Conformer, S2T-Transformer and U2 trained on the mixture of five datasets. During inference, transcripts are generated with the help of domain controlled generation strategy. Context-aware reranking and ensemble based anti-interference strategy are proposed to produce better ASR outputs. For machine translation part, we pretrained three translation models on WMT21 dataset and fine-tuned them on in-domain corpora. Our cascade system shows competitive performance than the known offline systems in the industry and academia.

This paper presents our work in the participation of IWSLT 2022 simultaneous speech translation evaluation. For the track of text-to-text (T2T), we participate in three language pairs and build wait-k based simultaneous MT (SimulMT) model for the task. The model was pretrained on WMT21 news corpora, and was further improved with in-domain fine-tuning and self-training. For the speech-to-text (S2T) track, we designed both cascade and end-to-end form in three language pairs. The cascade system is composed of a chunking-based streaming ASR model and the SimulMT model used in the T2T track. The end-to-end system is a simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) model based on wait-k strategy, which is directly trained on a synthetic corpus produced by translating all texts of ASR corpora into specific target language with an offline MT model. It also contains a heuristic sentence breaking strategy, preventing it from finishing the translation before the the end of the speech. We evaluate our systems on the MUST-C tst-COMMON dataset and show that the end-to-end system is competitive to the cascade one. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that the SimulMT model can be efficiently optimized by these approaches, resulting in the improvements of 1-2 BLEU points.

The paper presents the HW-TSC’s pipeline and results of Offline Speech to Speech Translation for IWSLT 2022. We design a cascade system consisted of an ASR model, machine translation model and TTS model to convert the speech from one language into another language(en-de). For the ASR part, we find that better performance can be obtained by ensembling multiple heterogeneous ASR models and performing reranking on beam candidates. And we find that the combination of context-aware reranking strategy and MT model fine-tuned on the in-domain dataset is helpful to improve the performance. Because it can mitigate the problem that the inconsistency in transcripts caused by the lack of context. Finally, we use VITS model provided officially to reproduce audio files from the translation hypothesis.

This paper presents our submissions to the IWSLT 2022 Isometric Spoken Language Translation task. We participate in all three language pairs (English-German, English-French, English-Spanish) under the constrained setting, and submit an English-German result under the unconstrained setting. We use the standard Transformer model as the baseline and obtain the best performance via one of its variants that shares the decoder input and output embedding. We perform detailed pre-processing and filtering on the provided bilingual data. Several strategies are used to train our models, such as Multilingual Translation, Back Translation, Forward Translation, R-Drop, Average Checkpoint, and Ensemble. We investigate three methods for biasing the output length: i) conditioning the output to a given target-source length-ratio class; ii) enriching the transformer positional embedding with length information and iii) length control decoding for non-autoregressive translation etc. Our submissions achieve 30.7, 41.6 and 36.7 BLEU respectively on the tst-COMMON test sets for English-German, English-French, English-Spanish tasks and 100% comply with the length requirements.

Autoregressive (AR) and Non-autoregressive (NAR) models have their own superiority on the performance and latency, combining them into one model may take advantage of both. Current combination frameworks focus more on the integration of multiple decoding paradigms with a unified generative model, e.g. Masked Language Model. However, the generalization can be harmful on the performance due to the gap between training objective and inference. In this paper, we aim to close the gap by preserving the original objective of AR and NAR under a unified framework. Specifically, we propose the Directional Transformer (Diformer) by jointly modelling AR and NAR into three generation directions (left-to-right, right-to-left and straight) with a newly introduced direction variable, which works by controlling the prediction of each token to have specific dependencies under that direction. The unification achieved by direction successfully preserves the original dependency assumption used in AR and NAR, retaining both generalization and performance. Experiments on 4 WMT benchmarks demonstrate that Diformer outperforms current united-modelling works with more than 1.5 BLEU points for both AR and NAR decoding, and is also competitive to the state-of-the-art independent AR and NAR models.

In this paper, we present the contribution of HW-TSC to WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. We propose one reference-based metric, HWTSC-EE-BERTScore*, and four referencefree metrics including HWTSC-Teacher-Sim, HWTSC-TLM, KG-BERTScore and CROSSQE. Among these metrics, HWTSC-Teacher-Sim and CROSS-QE are supervised, whereas HWTSC-EE-BERTScore*, HWTSC-TLM and KG-BERTScore are unsupervised. We use these metrics in the segment-level and systemlevel tracks. Overall, our systems achieve strong results for all language pairs on previous test sets and a new state-of-the-art in many sys-level case sets.

Quality estimation (QE) is a crucial method to investigate automatic methods for estimating the quality of machine translation results without reference translations. This paper presents Huawei Translation Services Center’s (HW-TSC’s) work called CrossQE in WMT 2022 QE shared tasks 1 and 2, namely sentence- and word- level quality prediction and explainable QE.CrossQE employes the framework of predictor-estimator for task 1, concretely with a pre-trained cross-lingual XLM-RoBERTa large as predictor and task-specific classifier or regressor as estimator. An extensive set of experimental results show that after adding bottleneck adapter layer, mean teacher loss, masked language modeling task loss and MC dropout methods in CrossQE, the performance has improved to a certain extent. For task 2, CrossQE calculated the cosine similarity between each word feature in the target and each word feature in the source by task 1 sentence-level QE system’s predictor, and used the inverse value of maximum similarity between each word in the target and the source as the word translation error risk value. Moreover, CrossQE has outstanding performance on QE test sets of WMT 2022.

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translate Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT 2021 News Translation Shared Task. We participate in 7 language pairs, including Zh/En, De/En, Ja/En, Ha/En, Is/En, Hi/Bn, and Xh/Zu in both directions under the constrained condition. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via multiple variants with larger parameter sizes. We perform detailed pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual and monolingual datasets. Several commonly used strategies are used to train our models, such as Back Translation, Forward Translation, Multilingual Translation, Ensemble Knowledge Distillation, etc. Our submission obtains competitive results in the final evaluation.

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2021 Triangular MT Shared Task. We participate in the Russian-to-Chinese task under the constrained condition. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via a variant with larger parameter sizes. We perform detailed data pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual data. Several strategies are used to train our models, such as Multilingual Translation, Back Translation, Forward Translation, Data Denoising, Average Checkpoint, Ensemble, Fine-tuning, etc. Our system obtains 32.5 BLEU on the dev set and 27.7 BLEU on the test set, the highest score among all submissions.

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT 2021 Large-Scale Multilingual Translation Task. We participate in Samll Track #2, including 6 languages: Javanese (Jv), Indonesian (Id), Malay (Ms), Tagalog (Tl), Tamil (Ta) and English (En) with 30 directions under the constrained condition. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via multiple variants with larger parameter sizes. We train a single multilingual model to translate all the 30 directions. We perform detailed pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual and monolingual datasets. Several commonly used strategies are used to train our models, such as Back Translation, Forward Translation, Ensemble Knowledge Distillation, Adapter Fine-tuning. Our model obtains competitive results in the end.

This paper describes the submission of Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC) to WMT21 biomedical translation task in two language pairs: Chinese↔English and German↔English (Our registered team name is HuaweiTSC). Technical details are introduced in this paper, including model framework, data pre-processing method and model enhancement strategies. In addition, using the wmt20 OK-aligned biomedical test set, we compare and analyze system performances under different strategies. On WMT21 biomedical translation task, Our systems in English→Chinese and English→German directions get the highest BLEU scores among all submissions according to the official evaluation results.

Based on large-scale pretrained networks and the liability to be easily overfitting with limited labelled training data of multimodal translation (MMT) is a critical issue in MMT. To this end and we propose a transfer learning solution. Specifically and 1) A vanilla Transformer is pre-trained on massive bilingual text-only corpus to obtain prior knowledge; 2) A multimodal Transformer named VLTransformer is proposed with several components incorporated visual contexts; and 3) The parameters of VLTransformer are initialized with the pre-trained vanilla Transformer and then being fine-tuned on MMT tasks with a newly proposed method named cross-modal masking which forces the model to learn from both modalities. We evaluated on the Multi30k en-de and en-fr dataset and improving up to 8% BLEU score compared with the SOTA performance. The experimental result demonstrates that performing transfer learning with monomodal pre-trained NMT model on multimodal NMT tasks can obtain considerable boosts.

Mask-predict CMLM (Ghazvininejad et al.,2019) has achieved stunning performance among non-autoregressive NMT models, but we find that the mechanism of predicting all of the target words only depending on the hidden state of [MASK] is not effective and efficient in initial iterations of refinement, resulting in ungrammatical repetitions and slow convergence. In this work, we mitigate this problem by combining copied source with embeddings of [MASK] in decoder. Notably. it’s not a straightforward copying that is shown to be useless, but a novel heuristic hybrid strategy — fence-mask. Experimental results show that it gains consistent boosts on both WMT14 En<->De and WMT16 En<->Ro corpus by 0.5 BLEU on average, and 1 BLEU for less-informative short sentences. This reveals that incorporating additional information by proper strategies is beneficial to improve CMLM, particularly translation quality of short texts and speeding up early-stage convergence.

Length prediction is a special task in a series of NAT models where target length has to be determined before generation. However, the performance of length prediction and its influence on translation quality has seldom been discussed. In this paper, we present comprehensive analyses on length prediction task of NAT, aiming to find the factors that influence performance, as well as how it associates with translation quality. We mainly perform experiments based on Conditional Masked Language Model (CMLM) (Ghazvininejad et al., 2019), a representative NAT model, and evaluate it on two language pairs, En-De and En-Ro. We draw two conclusions: 1) The performance of length prediction is mainly influenced by properties of language pairs such as alignment pattern, word order or intrinsic length ratio, and is also affected by the usage of knowledge distilled data. 2) There is a positive correlation between the performance of the length prediction and the BLEU score.

This paper describes our work in the WAT 2020 Indic Multilingual Translation Task. We participated in all 7 language pairs (En<->Bn/Hi/Gu/Ml/Mr/Ta/Te) in both directions under the constrained condition—using only the officially provided data. Using transformer as a baseline, our Multi->En and En->Multi translation systems achieve the best performances. Detailed data filtering and data domain selection are the keys to performance enhancement in our experiment, with an average improvement of 2.6 BLEU scores for each language pair in the En->Multi system and an average improvement of 4.6 BLEU scores regarding the Multi->En. In addition, we employed language independent adapter to further improve the system performances. Our submission obtains competitive results in the final evaluation.

This paper presents our work in the WMT 2020 News Translation Shared Task. We participate in 3 language pairs including Zh/En, Km/En, and Ps/En and in both directions under the constrained condition. We use the standard Transformer-Big model as the baseline and obtain the best performance via two variants with larger parameter sizes. We perform detailed pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual and monolingual dataset. Several commonly used strategies are used to train our models such as Back Translation, Ensemble Knowledge Distillation, etc. We also conduct experiment with similar language augmentation, which lead to positive results, although not used in our submission. Our submission obtains remarkable results in the final evaluation.

The paper presents the submission by HW-TSC in the WMT 2020 Automatic Post Editing Shared Task. We participate in the English-German and English-Chinese language pairs. Our system is built based on the Transformer pre-trained on WMT 2019 and WMT 2020 News Translation corpora, and fine-tuned on the APE corpus. Bottleneck Adapter Layers are integrated into the model to prevent over-fitting. We further collect external translations as the augmented MT candidates to improve the performance. The experiment demonstrates that pre-trained NMT models are effective when fine-tuning with the APE corpus of a limited size, and the performance can be further improved with external MT augmentation. Our system achieves competitive results on both directions in the final evaluation.

This paper describes Huawei’s submissions to the WMT20 biomedical translation shared task. Apart from experimenting with finetuning on domain-specific bitexts, we explore effects of in-domain dictionaries on enhancing cross-domain neural machine translation performance. We utilize a transfer learning strategy through pre-trained machine translation models and extensive scope of engineering endeavors. Four of our ten submissions achieve state-of-the-art performance according to the official automatic evaluation results, namely translation directions on English<->French, English->German and English->Italian.

This paper presents our work in the WMT 2020 Word and Sentence-Level Post-Editing Quality Estimation (QE) Shared Task. Our system follows standard Predictor-Estimator architecture, with a pre-trained Transformer as the Predictor, and specific classifiers and regressors as Estimators. We integrate Bottleneck Adapter Layers in the Predictor to improve the transfer learning efficiency and prevent from over-fitting. At the same time, we jointly train the word- and sentence-level tasks with a unified model with multitask learning. Pseudo-PE assisted QE (PEAQE) is proposed, resulting in significant improvements on the performance. Our submissions achieve competitive result in word/sentence-level sub-tasks for both of En-De/Zh language pairs.

The Predictor-Estimator framework for quality estimation (QE) is commonly used for its strong performance. Where the predictor and estimator works on feature extraction and quality evaluation, respectively. However, training the predictor from scratch is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient transfer learning framework to transfer knowledge from NMT dataset into QE models. A Predictor-Estimator alike model named BAL-QE is also proposed, aiming to extract high quality features with pre-trained NMT model, and make classification with a fine-tuned Bottleneck Adapter Layer (BAL). The experiment shows that BAL-QE achieves 97% of the SOTA performance in WMT19 En-De and En-Ru QE tasks by only training 3% of parameters within 4 hours on 4 Titan XP GPUs. Compared with the commonly used NuQE baseline, BAL-QE achieves 47% (En-Ru) and 75% (En-De) of performance promotions.

We propose a unified multilingual model for humor detection which can be trained under a transfer learning framework. 1) The model is built based on pre-trained multilingual BERT, thereby is able to make predictions on Chinese, Russian and Spanish corpora. 2) We step out from single sentence classification and propose sequence-pair prediction which considers the inter-sentence relationship. 3) We propose the Sentence Discrepancy Prediction (SDP) loss, aiming to measure the semantic discrepancy of the sequence-pair, which often appears in the setup and punchline of a joke. Our method achieves two SoTA and a second-place on three humor detection corpora in three languages (Russian, Spanish and Chinese), and also improves F1-score by 4%-6%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of it in humor detection tasks.

The paper presents details of our system in the IWSLT Video Speech Translation evaluation. The system works in a cascade form, which contains three modules: 1) A proprietary ASR system. 2) A disfluency correction system aims to remove interregnums or other disfluent expressions with a fine-tuned BERT and a series of rule-based algorithms. 3) An NMT System based on the Transformer and trained with massive publicly available corpus.

This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2019 Task 12 on toponym resolution over scientific articles. We train separate NER models for toponym detection over text extracted from tables vs. text from the body of the paper, and train another auxiliary model to eliminate misdetected toponyms. For toponym disambiguation, we use an SVM classifier with hand-engineered features. The best setting achieved a strict micro-F1 score of 80.92% and overlap micro-F1 score of 86.88% in the toponym detection subtask, ranking 2nd out of 8 teams on F1 score. For toponym disambiguation and end-to-end resolution, we officially ranked 2nd and 3rd, respectively.