Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of evaluating machine translation output in the absence of reference translation.Conventional approaches to QE involve training separate models at different levels of granularity viz., word-level, sentence-level, and document-level, which sometimes lead to inconsistent predictions for the same input. To overcome this limitation, we focus on jointly training a single model for sentence-level and word-level QE tasks in a multi-task learning framework. Using two multi-task learning-based QE approaches, we show that multi-task learning improves the performance of both tasks. We evaluate these approaches by performing experiments in different settings, viz., single-pair, multi-pair, and zero-shot. We compare the multi-task learning-based approach with baseline QE models trained on single tasks and observe an improvement of up to 4.28% in Pearson’s correlation (r) at sentence-level and 8.46% in F1-score at word-level, in the single-pair setting. In the multi-pair setting, we observe improvements of up to 3.04% at sentence-level and 13.74% at word-level; while in the zero-shot setting, we also observe improvements of up to 5.26% and 3.05%, respectively. We make the models proposed in this paper publically available.

This paper describes IIT Bombay’s submission to the WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) shared task for the English-Marathi (En-Mr) language pair. We follow the curriculum training strategy to train our APE system. First, we train an encoder-decoder model to perform translation from English to Marathi. Next, we add another encoder to the model and train the resulting dual-encoder single-decoder model for the APE task. This involves training the model using the synthetic APE data in multiple training stages and then fine-tuning it using the real APE data. We use the LaBSE technique to ensure the quality of the synthetic APE data. For data augmentation, along with using candidates obtained from an external machine translation (MT) system, we also use the phrase-level APE triplets generated using phrase table injection. As APE systems are prone to the problem of ‘over-correction’, we use a sentence-level quality estimation (QE) system to select the final output between an original translation and the corresponding output generated by the APE model. Our approach improves the TER and BLEU scores on the development set by -3.92 and +4.36 points, respectively. Also, the final results on the test set show that our APE system outperforms the baseline system by -3.49 TER points and +5.37 BLEU points.