The goal of the cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is to convert a document in one language (e.g., English) to a summary in another one (e.g., Chinese). The CLS task is essentially the combination of machine translation (MT) and monolingual summarization (MS), and thus there exists the hierarchical relationship between MT&MS and CLS. Existing studies on CLS mainly focus on utilizing pipeline methods or jointly training an end-to-end model through an auxiliary MT or MS objective. However, it is very challenging for the model to directly conduct CLS as it requires both the abilities to translate and summarize. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical model for the CLS task, based on the conditional variational auto-encoder. The hierarchical model contains two kinds of latent variables at the local and global levels, respectively. At the local level, there are two latent variables, one for translation and the other for summarization. As for the global level, there is another latent variable for cross-lingual summarization conditioned on the two local-level variables. Experiments on two language directions (English-Chinese) verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. In addition, we show that our model is able to generate better cross-lingual summaries than comparison models in the few-shot setting.

Multimodal machine translation and textual chat translation have received considerable attention in recent years. Although the conversation in its natural form is usually multimodal, there still lacks work on multimodal machine translation in conversations. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Chat Translation (MCT), aiming to generate more accurate translations with the help of the associated dialogue history and visual context. To this end, we firstly construct a Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (MSCTD) containing 142,871 English-Chinese utterance pairs in 14,762 bilingual dialogues. Each utterance pair, corresponding to the visual context that reflects the current conversational scene, is annotated with a sentiment label. Then, we benchmark the task by establishing multiple baseline systems that incorporate multimodal and sentiment features for MCT. Preliminary experiments on two language directions (English-Chinese) verify the potential of contextual and multimodal information fusion and the positive impact of sentiment on the MCT task. Additionally, we provide a new benchmark on multimodal dialogue sentiment analysis with the constructed MSCTD. Our work can facilitate researches on both multimodal chat translation and multimodal dialogue sentiment analysis.

Neural Chat Translation (NCT) aims to translate conversational text into different languages. Existing methods mainly focus on modeling the bilingual dialogue characteristics (e.g., coherence) to improve chat translation via multi-task learning on small-scale chat translation data. Although the NCT models have achieved impressive success, it is still far from satisfactory due to insufficient chat translation data and simple joint training manners. To address the above issues, we propose a scheduled multi-task learning framework for NCT. Specifically, we devise a three-stage training framework to incorporate the large-scale in-domain chat translation data into training by adding a second pre-training stage between the original pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Further, we investigate where and how to schedule the dialogue-related auxiliary tasks in multiple training stages to effectively enhance the main chat translation task. Extensive experiments on four language directions (English-Chinese and English-German) verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Additionally, we will make the large-scale in-domain paired bilingual dialogue dataset publicly available for the research community.

This paper introduces the joint submission of the Beijing Jiaotong University and WeChat AI to the WMT’22 chat translation task for English-German. Based on the Transformer, we apply several effective variants. In our experiments, we apply the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm. In the first pre-training stage, we employ data filtering and synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, forward-translation, and knowledge distillation). In the second fine-tuning stage, we investigate speaker-aware in-domain data generation, speaker adaptation, prompt-based context modeling, target denoising fine-tuning, and boosted self-COMET-based model ensemble. Our systems achieve 81.0 and 94.6 COMET scores on English-German and German-English, respectively. The COMET scores of English-German and German-English are the highest among all submissions.

Neural Chat Translation (NCT) aims to translate conversational text between speakers of different languages. Despite the promising performance of sentence-level and context-aware neural machine translation models, there still remain limitations in current NCT models because the inherent dialogue characteristics of chat, such as dialogue coherence and speaker personality, are neglected. In this paper, we propose to promote the chat translation by introducing the modeling of dialogue characteristics into the NCT model. To this end, we design four auxiliary tasks including monolingual response generation, cross-lingual response generation, next utterance discrimination, and speaker identification. Together with the main chat translation task, we optimize the enhanced NCT model through the training objectives of all these tasks. By this means, the NCT model can be enhanced by capturing the inherent dialogue characteristics, thus generating more coherent and speaker-relevant translations. Comprehensive experiments on four language directions (English<->German and English<->Chinese) verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) mainly involves three subtasks: aspect term extraction, opinion term extraction, and aspect-level sentiment classification, which are typically handled in a separate or joint manner. However, previous approaches do not well exploit the interactive relations among three subtasks and do not pertinently leverage the easily available document-level labeled domain/sentiment knowledge, which restricts their performances. To address these issues, we propose a novel Iterative Multi-Knowledge Transfer Network (IMKTN) for end-to-end ABSA. For one thing, through the interactive correlations between the ABSA subtasks, our IMKTN transfers the task-specific knowledge from any two of the three subtasks to another one at the token level by utilizing a well-designed routing algorithm, that is, any two of the three subtasks will help the third one. For another, our IMKTN pertinently transfers the document-level knowledge, i.e., domain-specific and sentiment-related knowledge, to the aspect-level subtasks to further enhance the corresponding performance. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.

Neural chat translation aims to translate bilingual conversational text, which has a broad application in international exchanges and cooperation. Despite the impressive performance of sentence-level and context-aware Neural Machine Translation (NMT), there still remain challenges to translate bilingual conversational text due to its inherent characteristics such as role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency. In this paper, we aim to promote the translation quality of conversational text by modeling the above properties. Specifically, we design three latent variational modules to learn the distributions of bilingual conversational characteristics. Through sampling from these learned distributions, the latent variables, tailored for role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency, are incorporated into the NMT model for better translation. We evaluate our approach on the benchmark dataset BConTrasT (English<->German) and a self-collected bilingual dialogue corpus, named BMELD (English<->Chinese). Extensive experiments show that our approach notably boosts the performance over strong baselines by a large margin and significantly surpasses some state-of-the-art context-aware NMT models in terms of BLEU and TER. Additionally, we make the BMELD dataset publicly available for the research community.

Aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify the sentiment polarity towards the given aspect in a sentence, while previous models typically exploit an aspect-independent (weakly associative) encoder for sentence representation generation. In this paper, we propose a novel Aspect-Guided Deep Transition model, named AGDT, which utilizes the given aspect to guide the sentence encoding from scratch with the specially-designed deep transition architecture. Furthermore, an aspect-oriented objective is designed to enforce AGDT to reconstruct the given aspect with the generated sentence representation. In doing so, our AGDT can accurately generate aspect-specific sentence representation, and thus conduct more accurate sentiment predictions. Experimental results on multiple SemEval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which significantly outperforms the best reported results with the same setting.