Recognizing the language of ambiguous texts has become a main challenge in language identification (LID). When using multilingual applications, users have their own language preferences, which can be regarded as external knowledge for LID. Nevertheless, current studies do not consider the inter-personal variations due to the lack of user annotated training data. To fill this gap, we introduce preference-aware LID and propose a novel unsupervised learning strategy. Concretely, we construct pseudo training set for each user by extracting training samples from a standard LID corpus according to his/her historical language distribution. Besides, we contribute the first user labeled LID test set called “U-LID”. Experimental results reveal that our model can incarnate user traits and significantly outperforms existing LID systems on handling ambiguous texts. Our code and benchmark have been released.

This paper describes the Alibaba Machine Translation Group submissions to the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering. While evaluating the quality of the parallel corpus, the three characteristics of the corpus are investigated, i.e. 1) the bilingual/translation quality, 2) the monolingual quality and 3) the corpus diversity. Both rule-based and model-based methods are adapted to score the parallel sentence pairs. The final parallel corpus filtering system is reliable, easy to build and adapt to other language pairs.