Multilingual translation supports multiple translation directions by projecting all languages in a shared space, but the translation quality is undermined by the difference between languages in the text-only modality, especially when the number of languages is large. To bridge this gap, we introduce visual context as the universal language-independent representation to facilitate multilingual translation. In this paper, we propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (m3P), which aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation. We construct a multilingual multimodal instruction dataset (InstrMulti102) to support 102 languages Our method aims to minimize the representation distance of different languages by regarding the image as a central language. Experimental results show that m3P outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. Furthermore, the probing experiments validate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing translation under the low-resource and massively multilingual scenario.

Multimodal manga analysis focuses on enhancing manga understanding with visual and textual features, which has attracted considerable attention from both natural language processing and computer vision communities. Currently, most comics are hand-drawn and prone to problems such as missing pages, text contamination, and text aging, resulting in missing comic text content and seriously hindering human comprehension. In other words, the Multimodal Manga Complement (M2C) task has not been investigated, which aims to handle the aforementioned issues by providing a shared semantic space for vision and language understanding. To this end, we first propose the Multimodal Manga Complement task by establishing a new M2C benchmark dataset covering two languages. First, we design a manga argumentation method called MCoT to mine event knowledge in comics with large language models. Then, an effective baseline FVP-M² using fine-grained visual prompts is proposed to support manga complement. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of FVP-M² method for Multimodal Mange Complement.

Named entity recognition (NER) suffers from the scarcity of annotated training data, especially for low-resource languages without labeled data. Cross-lingual NER has been proposed to alleviate this issue by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages via aligned cross-lingual representations or machine translation results. However, the performance of cross-lingual NER methods is severely affected by the unsatisfactory quality of translation or label projection. To address these problems, we propose a Cross-lingual Entity Projection framework (CROP) to enable zero-shot cross-lingual NER with the help of a multilingual labeled sequence translation model. Specifically, the target sequence is first translated into the source language and then tagged by a source NER model. We further adopt a labeled sequence translation model to project the tagged sequence back to the target language and label the target raw sentence. Ultimately, the whole pipeline is integrated into an end-to-end model by the way of self-training. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms the previous strong baseline by a large margin of +3 7 F1 scores and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) focuses on enhancing text-only translation with visual features, which has attracted considerable attention from both natural language processing and computer vision communities. Recent advances still struggle to train a separate model for each language pair, which is costly and unaffordable when the number of languages increases in the real world. In other words, the multilingual multimodal machine translation (Multilingual MMT) task has not been investigated, which aims to handle the aforementioned issues by providing a shared semantic space for multiple languages. Besides, the image modality has no language boundaries, which is superior to bridging the semantic gap between languages. To this end,we first propose the Multilingual MMT task by establishing two new Multilingual MMT benchmark datasets covering seven languages.Then, an effective baseline LVP-M3 using visual prompts is proposed to support translations between different languages,which includes three stages (token encoding, language-aware visual prompt generation, and language translation). Extensive experimental results on our constructed benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of LVP-M3 method for Multilingual MMT.