Translating between languages with drastically different grammatical conventions poses significant challenges, not just for human interpreters but also for machine translation systems. In this work, we specifically target the translation challenges posed by attributive nouns in Chinese, which frequently cause ambiguities in English translation. By manually inserting the omitted particle ‘DE’ in news article titles from the Penn Chinese Discourse Treebank, we developed a targeted dataset to fine-tune Hugging Face Chinese to English translation models, specifically improving how this critical function word is handled. This focused approach not only complements the broader strategies suggested by previous studies but also offers a practical enhancement by specifically addressing a common error type in Chinese-English translation.

Recent years have seen a marked increase in research that aims to identify or predict risk, intention or ideation of suicide. The majority of new tasks, datasets, language models and other resources focus on English and on suicide in the context of Western culture. However, suicide is global issue and reducing suicide rate by 2030 is one of the key goals of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Previous work has used English dictionaries related to suicide to translate into different target languages due to lack of other available resources. Naturally, this leads to a variety of ethical tensions (e.g.: linguistic misrepresentation), where discourse around suicide is not present in a particular culture or country. In this work, we introduce the ‘Lexicography Saves Lives Project’ to address this issue and make three distinct contributions. First, we outline ethical consideration and provide overview guidelines to mitigate harm in developing suicide-related resources. Next, we translate an existing dictionary related to suicidal ideation into 200 different languages and conduct human evaluations on a subset of translated dictionaries. Finally, we introduce a public website to make our resources available and enable community participation.

This article describes the QUESPA team speech translation (ST) submissions for the Quechua to Spanish (QUE-SPA) track featured in the Evaluation Campaign of IWSLT 2025: dialectal and low-resource speech translation. This year, there is one main submission type supported in the campaign: unconstrained. This is our third year submitting our ST systems to the IWSLT shared task and we feel that we have achieved novel performance, surpassing last year’s submission. This year we submit three total unconstrained-only systems of which our best (contrastive 2) system uses last year’s best performing pre-trained language (PLM) model for ST (without cascading) and the inclusion of additional Quechua–Collao speech transcriptions found online. Fine-tuning of Microsoft’s SpeechT5 model in a ST setting along with the addition of new data and a data augmentation technique allowed us to achieve 26.7 BLEU. In this article, we present the three submissions along with a detailed description of the updated machine translation system where a comparison is done between synthetic, unconstrained, and other data for fine-tuning.

Suicidal ideation is a serious health problem affecting millions of people worldwide. Social networks provide information about these mental health problems through users’ emotional expressions. We propose a multilingual model leveraging transformer architectures like mBERT, XML-R, and mT5 to detect suicidal text across posts in six languages - Spanish, English, German, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian. A Spanish suicide ideation tweet dataset was translated into five other languages using SeamlessM4T. Each model was fine-tuned on this multilingual data and evaluated across classification metrics. Results showed mT5 achieving the best performance overall with F1 scores above 85%, highlighting capabilities for cross-lingual transfer learning. The English and Spanish translations also displayed high quality based on perplexity. Our exploration underscores the importance of considering linguistic diversity in developing automated multilingual tools to identify suicidal risk. Limitations exist around semantic fidelity in translations and ethical implications which provide guidance for future human-in-the-loop evaluations.

This article describes the QUESPA team speech translation (ST) submissions for the Quechua to Spanish (QUE–SPA) track featured in the Evaluation Campaign of IWSLT 2024: dialectal and low-resource speech translation. Two main submission types were supported in the campaign: constrained and unconstrained. This is our second year submitting our ST systems to the IWSLT shared task and we feel that we have achieved novel performance, surpassing last year’s submissions. Again, we were able to submit six total systems of which our best (primary) constrained system consisted of an ST model based on the Fairseq S2T framework where the audio representations were created using log mel-scale filter banks as features and the translations were performed using a transformer. The system was similar to last year’s submission with slight configuration changes, allowing us to achieve slightly higher performance (2 BLEU). Contrastingly, we were able to achieve much better performance than last year on the unconstrained task using a larger pre-trained language (PLM) model for ST (without cascading) and the inclusion of parallel QUE–SPA data found on the internet. The fine-tuning of Microsoft’s SpeechT5 model in a ST setting along with the addition of new data and a data augmentation technique allowed us to achieve 19.7 BLEU. Additionally, we present the other four submissions (2 constrained and 2 unconstrained) which are part of additional efforts of hyper-parameter and configuration tuning on existent models and the inclusion of Whisper for speech recognition

The application of self-supervision to speech representation learning has garnered significant interest in recent years, due to its scalability to large amounts of unlabeled data. However, much progress, both in terms of pre-training and downstream evaluation, has remained concentrated in monolingual models that only consider English. Few models consider other languages, and even fewer consider indigenous ones. In this work, benchmark the efficacy of large SSL models on 6 indigenous America languages: Quechua, Guarani , Bribri, Kotiria, Wa’ikhana, and Totonac on low-resource ASR. Our results show surprisingly strong performance by state-of-the-art SSL models, showing the potential generalizability of large-scale models to real-world data.

In modern times, generational artificial intelligence is used in several industries and by many people. One use case that can be considered important but somewhat redundant is the act of searching for related work and other references to cite. As an avenue to better ascertain the value of citations and their corresponding locations, we focus on the common “related work” section as a focus of experimentation with the overall objective to generate the section. In this article, we present a corpus with 400k annotations of that distinguish related work from the rest of the references. Additionally, we show that for the papers in our experiments, the related work section represents the paper just as good, and in many cases, better than the rest of the references. We show that this is the case for more than 74% of the articles when using cosine similarity to measure the distance between two common graph neural network algorithms: Prone and Specter.