Chengqi Zhao


2022

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Rethinking Document-level Neural Machine Translation
Zewei Sun | Mingxuan Wang | Hao Zhou | Chengqi Zhao | Shujian Huang | Jiajun Chen | Lei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

This paper does not aim at introducing a novel model for document-level neural machine translation. Instead, we head back to the original Transformer model and hope to answer the following question: Is the capacity of current models strong enough for document-level translation? Interestingly, we observe that the original Transformer with appropriate training techniques can achieve strong results for document translation, even with a length of 2000 words. We evaluate this model and several recent approaches on nine document-level datasets and two sentence-level datasets across six languages. Experiments show that document-level Transformer models outperforms sentence-level ones and many previous methods in a comprehensive set of metrics, including BLEU, four lexical indices, three newly proposed assistant linguistic indicators, and human evaluation.

2021

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The Volctrans Neural Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2021
Chengqi Zhao | Zhicheng Liu | Jian Tong | Tao Wang | Mingxuan Wang | Rong Ye | Qianqian Dong | Jun Cao | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

This paper describes the systems submitted to IWSLT 2021 by the Volctrans team. We participate in the offline speech translation and text-to-text simultaneous translation tracks. For offline speech translation, our best end-to-end model achieves 7.9 BLEU improvements over the benchmark on the MuST-C test set and is even approaching the results of a strong cascade solution. For text-to-text simultaneous translation, we explore the best practice to optimize the wait-k model. As a result, our final submitted systems exceed the benchmark at around 7 BLEU on the same latency regime. We release our code and model to facilitate both future research works and industrial applications.

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Counter-Interference Adapter for Multilingual Machine Translation
Yaoming Zhu | Jiangtao Feng | Chengqi Zhao | Mingxuan Wang | Lei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Developing a unified multilingual model has been a long pursuing goal for machine translation. However, existing approaches suffer from performance degradation - a single multilingual model is inferior to separately trained bilingual ones on rich-resource languages. We conjecture that such a phenomenon is due to interference brought by joint training with multiple languages. To accommodate the issue, we propose CIAT, an adapted Transformer model with a small parameter overhead for multilingual machine translation. We evaluate CIAT on multiple benchmark datasets, including IWSLT, OPUS-100, and WMT. Experiments show that the CIAT consistently outperforms strong multilingual baselines on 64 of total 66 language directions, 42 of which have above 0.5 BLEU improvement.

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Secoco: Self-Correcting Encoding for Neural Machine Translation
Tao Wang | Chengqi Zhao | Mingxuan Wang | Lei Li | Hang Li | Deyi Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

This paper presents Self-correcting Encoding (Secoco), a framework that effectively deals with noisy input for robust neural machine translation by introducing self-correcting predictors. Different from previous robust approaches, Secoco enables NMT to explicitly correct noisy inputs and delete specific errors simultaneously with the translation decoding process. Secoco is able to achieve significant improvements over strong baselines on two real-world test sets and a benchmark WMT dataset with good interpretability. We will make our code and dataset publicly available soon.

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NeurST: Neural Speech Translation Toolkit
Chengqi Zhao | Mingxuan Wang | Qianqian Dong | Rong Ye | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

NeurST is an open-source toolkit for neural speech translation. The toolkit mainly focuses on end-to-end speech translation, which is easy to use, modify, and extend to advanced speech translation research and products. NeurST aims at facilitating the speech translation research for NLP researchers and building reliable benchmarks for this field. It provides step-by-step recipes for feature extraction, data preprocessing, distributed training, and evaluation. In this paper, we will introduce the framework design of NeurST and show experimental results for different benchmark datasets, which can be regarded as reliable baselines for future research. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/bytedance/neurst and we will continuously update the performance of with other counterparts and studies at https://st-benchmark.github.io/.

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Autocorrect in the Process of Translation — Multi-task Learning Improves Dialogue Machine Translation
Tao Wang | Chengqi Zhao | Mingxuan Wang | Lei Li | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers

Automatic translation of dialogue texts is a much needed demand in many real life scenarios. However, the currently existing neural machine translation delivers unsatisfying results. In this paper, we conduct a deep analysis of a dialogue corpus and summarize three major issues on dialogue translation, including pronoun dropping (), punctuation dropping (), and typos (). In response to these challenges, we propose a joint learning method to identify omission and typo, and utilize context to translate dialogue utterances. To properly evaluate the performance, we propose a manually annotated dataset with 1,931 Chinese-English parallel utterances from 300 dialogues as a benchmark testbed for dialogue translation. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves translation quality by 3.2 BLEU over the baselines. It also elevates the recovery rate of omitted pronouns from 26.09% to 47.16%. We will publish the code and dataset publicly at https://xxx.xx.