Ce travail présente deux séries d’expériences visant à identifier les flux d’information dans les systèmes de traduction neuronaux. La première série s’appuie sur une comparaison des décisions d’un modèle de langue et d’un modèle de traduction pour mettre en évidence le flux d’information provenant de la source. La seconde série met en évidence l’impact de ces flux sur l’apprentissage du système dans le cas particulier du transfert de l’information de genre.

Multiple studies have shown that existing NMT systems demonstrate some kind of “gender bias”. As a result, MT output appears to err more often for feminine forms and to amplify social gender misrepresentations, which is potentially harmful to users and practioners of these technologies. This paper continues this line of investigations and reports results obtained with a new test set in strictly controlled conditions. This setting allows us to better understand the multiple inner mechanisms that are causing these biases, which include the linguistic expressions of gender, the unbalanced distribution of masculine and feminine forms in the language, the modelling of morphological variation and the training process dynamics. To counterbalance these effects, we formulate several proposals and notably show that modifying the training loss can effectively mitigate such biases.

This paper describes the SPECTRANS submission for the WMT 2022 biomedical shared task. We present the results of our experiments using the training corpora and the JoeyNMT (Kreutzer et al., 2019) and SYSTRAN Pure Neural Server/ Advanced Model Studio toolkits for the language directions English to French and French to English. We compare the pre- dictions of the different toolkits. We also use JoeyNMT to fine-tune the model with a selection of texts from WMT, Khresmoi and UFAL data sets. We report our results and assess the respective merits of the different translated texts.

This paper aims at identifying the information flow in state-of-the-art machine translation systems, taking as example the transfer of gender when translating from French into English. Using a controlled set of examples, we experiment several ways to investigate how gender information circulates in a encoder-decoder architecture considering both probing techniques as well as interventions on the internal representations used in the MT system. Our results show that gender information can be found in all token representations built by the encoder and the decoder and lead us to conclude that there are multiple pathways for gender transfer.

This paper discusses the WMT 2021 terminology shared task from a “meta” perspective. We present the results of our experiments using the terminology dataset and the OpenNMT (Klein et al., 2017) and JoeyNMT (Kreutzer et al., 2019) toolkits for the language direction English to French. Our experiment 1 compares the predictions of the two toolkits. Experiment 2 uses OpenNMT to fine-tune the model. We report our results for the task with the evaluation script but mostly discuss the linguistic properties of the terminology dataset provided for the task. We provide evidence of the importance of text genres across scores, having replicated the evaluation scripts.

Cet article présente les premiers résultats d’une étude en cours sur les biais de genre dans les corpus d’entraînements et dans les systèmes de traduction neuronale. Nous étudions en particulier un corpus minimal et contrôlé pour mesurer l’intensité de ces biais dans les deux directions anglais-français et français-anglais ; ce cadre contrôlé nous permet également d’analyser les représentations internes manipulées par le système pour réaliser ses prédictions lexicales, ainsi que de formuler des hypothèses sur la manière dont ce biais se distribue dans les représentations du système.