Chrysoula Zerva


2023

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Counterfactuals of Counterfactuals: a back-translation-inspired approach to analyse counterfactual editors
George Filandrianos | Edmund Dervakos | Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis | Chrysoula Zerva | Giorgos Stamou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

In the wake of responsible AI, interpretability methods, which attempt to provide an explanation for the predictions of neural models have seen rapid progress. In this work, we are concerned with explanations that are applicable to natural language processing (NLP) models and tasks, and we focus specifically on the analysis of counterfactual, contrastive explanations. We note that while there have been several explainers proposed to produce counterfactual explanations, their behaviour can vary significantly and the lack of a universal ground truth for the counterfactual edits imposes an insuperable barrier on their evaluation. We propose a new back translation-inspired evaluation methodology that utilises earlier outputs of the explainer as ground truth proxies to investigate the consistency of explainers. We show that by iteratively feeding the counterfactual to the explainer we can obtain valuable insights into the behaviour of both the predictor and the explainer models, and infer patterns that would be otherwise obscured. Using this methodology, we conduct a thorough analysis and propose a novel metric to evaluate the consistency of counterfactual generation approaches with different characteristics across available performance indicators.

2022

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Findings of the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Quality Estimation
Chrysoula Zerva | Frédéric Blain | Ricardo Rei | Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn | José G. C. de Souza | Steffen Eger | Diptesh Kanojia | Duarte Alves | Constantin Orăsan | Marina Fomicheva | André F. T. Martins | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

We report the results of the WMT 2022 shared task on Quality Estimation, in which the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels, without access to reference translations. This edition introduces a few novel aspects and extensions that aim to enable more fine-grained, and explainable quality estimation approaches. We introduce an updated quality annotation scheme using Multidimensional Quality Metrics to obtain sentence- and word-level quality scores for three language pairs. We also extend the Direct Assessments and post-edit data (MLQE-PE) to new language pairs: we present a novel and large dataset on English-Marathi, as well as a zero-shot test set on English-Yoruba. Further, we include an explainability sub-task for all language pairs and present a new format of a critical error detection task for two new language pairs. Participants from 11 different teams submitted altogether 991 systems to different task variants and language pairs.

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COMET-22: Unbabel-IST 2022 Submission for the Metrics Shared Task
Ricardo Rei | José G. C. de Souza | Duarte Alves | Chrysoula Zerva | Ana C Farinha | Taisiya Glushkova | Alon Lavie | Luisa Coheur | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

In this paper, we present the joint contribution of Unbabel and IST to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. Our primary submission – dubbed COMET-22 – is an ensemble between a COMET estimator model trained with Direct Assessments and a newly proposed multitask model trained to predict sentence-level scores along with OK/BAD word-level tags derived from Multidimensional Quality Metrics error annotations. These models are ensembled together using a hyper-parameter search that weights different features extracted from both evaluation models and combines them into a single score. For the reference-free evaluation, we present CometKiwi. Similarly to our primary submission, CometKiwi is an ensemble between two models. A traditional predictor-estimator model inspired by OpenKiwi and our new multitask model trained on Multidimensional Quality Metrics which can also be used without references. Both our submissions show improved correlations compared to state-of-the-art metrics from last year as well as increased robustness to critical errors.

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CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task
Ricardo Rei | Marcos Treviso | Nuno M. Guerreiro | Chrysoula Zerva | Ana C Farinha | Christine Maroti | José G. C. de Souza | Taisiya Glushkova | Duarte Alves | Luisa Coheur | Alon Lavie | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). Our team participated in all three subtasks: (i) Sentence and Word-level Quality Prediction; (ii) Explainable QE; and (iii) Critical Error Detection. For all tasks we build on top of the COMET framework, connecting it with the predictor-estimator architecture of OpenKiwi, and equipping it with a word-level sequence tagger and an explanation extractor. Our results suggest that incorporating references during pretraining improves performance across several language pairs on downstream tasks, and that jointly training with sentence and word-level objectives yields a further boost. Furthermore, combining attention and gradient information proved to be the top strategy for extracting good explanations of sentence-level QE models. Overall, our submissions achieved the best results for all three tasks for almost all language pairs by a considerable margin.

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DeepSPIN: Deep Structured Prediction for Natural Language Processing
André F. T. Martins | Ben Peters | Chrysoula Zerva | Chunchuan Lyu | Gonçalo Correia | Marcos Treviso | Pedro Martins | Tsvetomila Mihaylova
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

DeepSPIN is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) whose goal is to develop new neural structured prediction methods, models, and algorithms for improving the quality, interpretability, and data-efficiency of natural language processing (NLP) systems, with special emphasis on machine translation and quality estimation. We describe in this paper the latest findings from this project.

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MLQE-PE: A Multilingual Quality Estimation and Post-Editing Dataset
Marina Fomicheva | Shuo Sun | Erick Fonseca | Chrysoula Zerva | Frédéric Blain | Vishrav Chaudhary | Francisco Guzmán | Nina Lopatina | Lucia Specia | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present MLQE-PE, a new dataset for Machine Translation (MT) Quality Estimation (QE) and Automatic Post-Editing (APE). The dataset contains annotations for eleven language pairs, including both high- and low-resource languages. Specifically, it is annotated for translation quality with human labels for up to 10,000 translations per language pair in the following formats: sentence-level direct assessments and post-editing effort, and word-level binary good/bad labels. Apart from the quality-related scores, each source-translation sentence pair is accompanied by the corresponding post-edited sentence, as well as titles of the articles where the sentences were extracted from, and information on the neural MT models used to translate the text. We provide a thorough description of the data collection and annotation process as well as an analysis of the annotation distribution for each language pair. We also report the performance of baseline systems trained on the MLQE-PE dataset. The dataset is freely available and has already been used for several WMT shared tasks.

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Learning Disentangled Representations of Negation and Uncertainty
Jake Vasilakes | Chrysoula Zerva | Makoto Miwa | Sophia Ananiadou
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Negation and uncertainty modeling are long-standing tasks in natural language processing. Linguistic theory postulates that expressions of negation and uncertainty are semantically independent from each other and the content they modify. However, previous works on representation learning do not explicitly model this independence. We therefore attempt to disentangle the representations of negation, uncertainty, and content using a Variational Autoencoder. We find that simply supervising the latent representations results in good disentanglement, but auxiliary objectives based on adversarial learning and mutual information minimization can provide additional disentanglement gains.

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Disentangling Uncertainty in Machine Translation Evaluation
Chrysoula Zerva | Taisiya Glushkova | Ricardo Rei | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Trainable evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) exhibit strong correlation with human judgements, but they are often hard to interpret and might produce unreliable scores under noisy or out-of-domain data. Recent work has attempted to mitigate this with simple uncertainty quantification techniques (Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles), however these techniques (as we show) are limited in several ways – for example, they are unable to distinguish between different kinds of uncertainty, and they are time and memory consuming. In this paper, we propose more powerful and efficient uncertainty predictors for MT evaluation, and we assess their ability to target different sources of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. To this end, we develop and compare training objectives for the COMET metric to enhance it with an uncertainty prediction output, including heteroscedastic regression, divergence minimization, and direct uncertainty prediction.Our experiments show improved results on uncertainty prediction for the WMT metrics task datasets, with a substantial reduction in computational costs. Moreover, they demonstrate the ability of these predictors to address specific uncertainty causes in MT evaluation, such as low quality references and out-of-domain data.

2021

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Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation
Taisiya Glushkova | Chrysoula Zerva | Ricardo Rei | André F. T. Martins
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Several neural-based metrics have been recently proposed to evaluate machine translation quality. However, all of them resort to point estimates, which provide limited information at segment level. This is made worse as they are trained on noisy, biased and scarce human judgements, often resulting in unreliable quality predictions. In this paper, we introduce uncertainty-aware MT evaluation and analyze the trustworthiness of the predicted quality. We combine the COMET framework with two uncertainty estimation methods, Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles, to obtain quality scores along with confidence intervals. We compare the performance of our uncertainty-aware MT evaluation methods across multiple language pairs from the QT21 dataset and the WMT20 metrics task, augmented with MQM annotations. We experiment with varying numbers of references and further discuss the usefulness of uncertainty-aware quality estimation (without references) to flag possibly critical translation mistakes.

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Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation
Lucia Specia | Frédéric Blain | Marina Fomicheva | Chrysoula Zerva | Zhenhao Li | Vishrav Chaudhary | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

We report the results of the WMT 2021 shared task on Quality Estimation, where the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels. This edition focused on two main novel additions: (i) prediction for unseen languages, i.e. zero-shot settings, and (ii) prediction of sentences with catastrophic errors. In addition, new data was released for a number of languages, especially post-edited data. Participating teams from 19 institutions submitted altogether 1263 systems to different task variants and language pairs.

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IST-Unbabel 2021 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task
Chrysoula Zerva | Daan van Stigt | Ricardo Rei | Ana C Farinha | Pedro Ramos | José G. C. de Souza | Taisiya Glushkova | Miguel Vera | Fabio Kepler | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation. Our team participated on two tasks: Direct Assessment and Post-Editing Effort, encompassing a total of 35 submissions. For all submissions, our efforts focused on training multilingual models on top of OpenKiwi predictor-estimator architecture, using pre-trained multilingual encoders combined with adapters. We further experiment with and uncertainty-related objectives and features as well as training on out-of-domain direct assessment data.

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Are References Really Needed? Unbabel-IST 2021 Submission for the Metrics Shared Task
Ricardo Rei | Ana C Farinha | Chrysoula Zerva | Daan van Stigt | Craig Stewart | Pedro Ramos | Taisiya Glushkova | André F. T. Martins | Alon Lavie
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

In this paper, we present the joint contribution of Unbabel and IST to the WMT 2021 Metrics Shared Task. With this year’s focus on Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) as the ground-truth human assessment, our aim was to steer COMET towards higher correlations with MQM. We do so by first pre-training on Direct Assessments and then fine-tuning on z-normalized MQM scores. In our experiments we also show that reference-free COMET models are becoming competitive with reference-based models, even outperforming the best COMET model from 2020 on this year’s development data. Additionally, we present COMETinho, a lightweight COMET model that is 19x faster on CPU than the original model, while also achieving state-of-the-art correlations with MQM. Finally, in the “QE as a metric” track, we also participated with a QE model trained using the OpenKiwi framework leveraging MQM scores and word-level annotations.

2018

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Paths for uncertainty: Exploring the intricacies of uncertainty identification for news
Chrysoula Zerva | Sophia Ananiadou
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Semantics beyond Events and Roles

Currently, news articles are produced, shared and consumed at an extremely rapid rate. Although their quantity is increasing, at the same time, their quality and trustworthiness is becoming fuzzier. Hence, it is important not only to automate information extraction but also to quantify the certainty of this information. Automated identification of certainty has been studied both in the scientific and newswire domains, but performance is considerably higher in tasks focusing on scientific text. We compare the differences in the definition and expression of uncertainty between a scientific domain, i.e., biomedicine, and newswire. We delve into the different aspects that affect the certainty of an extracted event in a news article and examine whether they can be easily identified by techniques already validated in the biomedical domain. Finally, we present a comparison of the syntactic and lexical differences between the the expression of certainty in the biomedical and newswire domains, using two annotated corpora.

2015

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Event Extraction in pieces:Tackling the partial event identification problem on unseen corpora
Chrysoula Zerva | Sophia Ananiadou
Proceedings of BioNLP 15