Masked Language Models (MLMs) pre-trained by predicting masked tokens on large corpora have been used successfully in natural language processing tasks for a variety of languages. Unfortunately, it was reported that MLMs also learn discriminative biases regarding attributes such as gender and race. Because most studies have focused on MLMs in English, the bias of MLMs in other languages has rarely been investigated. Manual annotation of evaluation data for languages other than English has been challenging due to the cost and difficulty in recruiting annotators. Moreover, the existing bias evaluation methods require the stereotypical sentence pairs consisting of the same context with attribute words (e.g. He/She is a nurse).We propose Multilingual Bias Evaluation (MBE) score, to evaluate bias in various languages using only English attribute word lists and parallel corpora between the target language and English without requiring manually annotated data. We evaluated MLMs in eight languages using the MBE and confirmed that gender-related biases are encoded in MLMs for all those languages. We manually created datasets for gender bias in Japanese and Russian to evaluate the validity of the MBE.The results show that the bias scores reported by the MBE significantly correlates with that computed from the above manually created datasets and the existing English datasets for gender bias.

The lack of publicly available evaluation data for low-resource languages limits progress in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). As key tasks like intent classification and slot filling require abundant training data, it is desirable to reuse existing data in high-resource languages to develop models for low-resource scenarios. We introduce xSID, a new benchmark for cross-lingual (x) Slot and Intent Detection in 13 languages from 6 language families, including a very low-resource dialect. To tackle the challenge, we propose a joint learning approach, with English SLU training data and non-English auxiliary tasks from raw text, syntax and translation for transfer. We study two setups which differ by type and language coverage of the pre-trained embeddings. Our results show that jointly learning the main tasks with masked language modeling is effective for slots, while machine translation transfer works best for intent classification.

In a real-time simultaneous translation setting and neural machine translation (NMT) models start generating target language tokens from incomplete source language sentences and making them harder to translate and leading to poor translation quality. Previous research has shown that document-level NMT and comprising of sentence and context encoders and a decoder and leverages context from neighboring sentences and helps improve translation quality. In simultaneous translation settings and the context from previous sentences should be even more critical. To this end and in this paper and we propose wait-k simultaneous document-level NMT where we keep the context encoder as it is and replace the source sentence encoder and target language decoder with their wait-k equivalents. We experiment with low and high resource settings using the ALT and OpenSubtitles2018 corpora and where we observe minor improvements in translation quality. We then perform an analysis of the translations obtained using our models by focusing on sentences that should benefit from the context where we found out that the model does and in fact and benefit from context but is unable to effectively leverage it and especially in a low-resource setting. This shows that there is a need for further innovation in the way useful context is identified and leveraged.

We introduce our TMU system that is submitted to The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT2020) to English-to-Japanese (En→Ja) track on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE) shared task. In most cases machine translation systems generate a single output from the input sentence, however, in order to assist language learners in their journey with better and more diverse feedback, it is helpful to create a machine translation system that is able to produce diverse translations of each input sentence. However, creating such systems would require complex modifications in a model to ensure the diversity of outputs. In this paper, we investigated if it is possible to create such systems in a simple way and whether it can produce desired diverse outputs. In particular, we combined the outputs from forward and backward neural translation models (NMT). Our system achieved third place in En→Ja track, despite adopting only a simple approach.

Simultaneous translation involves translating a sentence before the speaker’s utterance is completed in order to realize real-time understanding in multiple languages. This task is significantly more challenging than the general full sentence translation because of the shortage of input information during decoding. To alleviate this shortage, we propose multimodal simultaneous neural machine translation (MSNMT), which leverages visual information as an additional modality. Our experiments with the Multi30k dataset showed that MSNMT significantly outperforms its text-only counterpart in more timely translation situations with low latency. Furthermore, we verified the importance of visual information during decoding by performing an adversarial evaluation of MSNMT, where we studied how models behaved with incongruent input modality and analyzed the effect of different word order between source and target languages.

In recent years, named entity recognition (NER) tasks in the Indonesian language have undergone extensive development. There are only a few corpora for Indonesian NER; hence, recent Indonesian NER studies have used diverse datasets. Although an open dataset is available, it includes only approximately 2,000 sentences and contains inconsistent annotations, thereby preventing accurate training of NER models without reliance on pre-trained models. Therefore, we re-annotated the dataset and compared the two annotations’ performance using the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory and Conditional Random Field (BiLSTM-CRF) approach. Fixing the annotation yielded a more consistent result for the organization tag and improved the prediction score by a large margin. Moreover, to take full advantage of pre-trained models, we compared different feature embeddings to determine their impact on the NER task for the Indonesian language.

In this study, we explore cross-lingual transfer learning in grammatical error correction (GEC) tasks. Many languages lack the resources required to train GEC models. Cross-lingual transfer learning from high-resource languages (the source models) is effective for training models of low-resource languages (the target models) for various tasks. However, in GEC tasks, the possibility of transferring grammatical knowledge (e.g., grammatical functions) across languages is not evident. Therefore, we investigate cross-lingual transfer learning methods for GEC. Our results demonstrate that transfer learning from other languages can improve the accuracy of GEC. We also demonstrate that proximity to source languages has a significant impact on the accuracy of correcting certain types of errors.

We introduce our system that is submitted to the News Commentary task (Japanese<->Russian) of the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation. The goal of this shared task is to study extremely low resource situations for distant language pairs. It is known that using parallel corpora of different language pair as training data is effective for multilingual neural machine translation model in extremely low resource scenarios. Therefore, to improve the translation quality of Japanese<->Russian language pair, our method leverages other in-domain Japanese-English and English-Russian parallel corpora as additional training data for our multilingual NMT model.

Large-scale parallel corpora are indispensable to train highly accurate machine translators. However, manually constructed large-scale parallel corpora are not freely available in many language pairs. In previous studies, training data have been expanded using a pseudo-parallel corpus obtained using machine translation of the monolingual corpus in the target language. However, in low-resource language pairs in which only low-accuracy machine translation systems can be used, translation quality is reduces when a pseudo-parallel corpus is used naively. To improve machine translation performance with low-resource language pairs, we propose a method to expand the training data effectively via filtering the pseudo-parallel corpus using a quality estimation based on back-translation. As a result of experiments with three language pairs using small, medium, and large parallel corpora, language pairs with fewer training data filtered out more sentence pairs and improved BLEU scores more significantly.