Translation entails more than simply translating words from one language to another. It is vitally essential for effective cross-cultural communication, thus making good translation systems an important requirement. We describe our systems in this paper, which were submitted to the WAT 2022 translation shared tasks. As part of the Multi-modal translation tasks’ text-only translation sub-tasks, we submitted three Neural Machine Translation systems based on Transformer models for English to Malayalam, English to Bengali, and English to Hindi text translation. We found significant results on the leaderboard for English-Indic (en-xx) systems utilizing BLEU and RIBES scores as comparative metrics in our studies. For the respective translations of English to Malayalam, Bengali, and Hindi, we obtained BLEU scores of 19.50, 32.90, and 41.80 for the challenge subset and 30.60, 39.80, and 42.90 on the benchmark evaluation subset data.

This paper presents a summary of the findings that we obtained based on the shared task on machine translation of Dravidian languages. As a part of this shared task, we carried out neural machine translations for the following five language pairs: Kannada to Tamil, Kannada to Telugu, Kannada to Malayalam, Kannada to Sanskrit, and Kannada to Tulu. The datasets for each of the five language pairs were used to train various translation models, including Seq2Seq models such as LSTM, bidirectional LSTM, Conv Seq2Seq, and training state-of-the-art as transformers from scratch, and fine-tuning already pre-trained models. For some models involving monolingual corpora, we implemented backtranslation as well. These models’ accuracy was later tested with a part of the same dataset using BLEU score as an evaluation metric.

This paper aims to perform an emotion analysis of social media comments in Tamil. Emotion analysis is the process of identifying the emotional context of the text. In this paper, we present the findings obtained by Team Optimize_Prime in the ACL 2022 shared task “Emotion Analysis in Tamil.” The task aimed to classify social media comments into categories of emotion like Joy, Anger, Trust, Disgust, etc. The task was further divided into two subtasks, one with 11 broad categories of emotions and the other with 31 specific categories of emotion. We implemented three different approaches to tackle this problem: transformer-based models, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Ensemble models. XLM-RoBERTa performed the best on the first task with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.27, while MuRIL provided the best results on the second task with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.13.

This paper tries to address the problem of abusive comment detection in low-resource indic languages. Abusive comments are statements that are offensive to a person or a group of people. These comments are targeted toward individuals belonging to specific ethnicities, genders, caste, race, sexuality, etc. Abusive Comment Detection is a significant problem, especially with the recent rise in social media users. This paper presents the approach used by our team — Optimize_Prime, in the ACL 2022 shared task “Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil.” This task detects and classifies YouTube comments in Tamil and Tamil-English Codemixed format into multiple categories. We have used three methods to optimize our results: Ensemble models, Recurrent Neural Networks, and Transformers. In the Tamil data, MuRIL and XLM-RoBERTA were our best performing models with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.43. Furthermore, for the Code-mixed data, MuRIL and M-BERT provided sublime results, with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.45.

This paper presents the work of team PICT-NLP for the shared task on unsupervised and very low-resource supervised machine translation, organized by the Workshop on Machine Translation, a workshop in collocation with the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022). The paper delineates the approaches we implemented for supervised and unsupervised translation between the following 6 language pairs: German-Lower Sorbian (de-dsb), Lower Sorbian-German (dsb-de), Lower Sorbian-Upper Sorbian (dsb-hsb), Upper Sorbian-Lower Sorbian (hsb-dsb), German-Upper Sorbian (de-hsb), and Upper Sorbian-German (hsb-de). For supervised learning, we implemented the transformer architecture from scratch using the Fairseq library. Whereas for unsupervised learning, we implemented Facebook’s XLM masked language modeling approach. We discuss the training details for the models we used, and the results obtained from our approaches. We used the BLEU and chrF metrics for evaluating the accuracies of the generated translations on our systems.