Michele Boggia


2023

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Dozens of Translation Directions or Millions of Shared Parameters? Comparing Two Types of Multilinguality in Modular Machine Translation
Michele Boggia | Stig-Arne Grönroos | Niki Loppi | Timothee Mickus | Alessandro Raganato | Jörg Tiedemann | Raúl Vázquez
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

There are several ways of implementing multilingual NLP systems but little consensus as to whether different approaches exhibit similar effects. Are the trends that we observe when adding more languages the same as those we observe when sharing more parameters? We focus on encoder representations drawn from modular multilingual machine translation systems in an English-centric scenario, and study their quality from multiple aspects: how adequate they are for machine translation, how independent of the source language they are, and what semantic information they convey. Adding translation directions in English-centric scenarios does not conclusively lead to an increase in translation quality. Shared layers increase performance on zero-shot translation pairs and lead to more language-independent representations, but these improvements do not systematically align with more semantically accurate representations, from a monolingual standpoint.

2022

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Latest Development in the FoTran Project – Scaling Up Language Coverage in Neural Machine Translation Using Distributed Training with Language-Specific Components
Raúl Vázquez | Michele Boggia | Alessandro Raganato | Niki A. Loppi | Stig-Arne Grönroos | Jörg Tiedemann
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

We describe the enhancement of a multilingual NMT toolkit developed as part of the FoTran project. We devise our modular attention-bridge model, which connects language-specific components through a shared network layer. The system now supports distributed training over many nodes and GPUs in order to substantially scale up the number of languages that can be included in a modern neural translation architecture. The model enables the study of emerging language-agnostic representations and also provides a modular toolkit for efficient machine translation.

2021

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Proceedings of the EACL Hackashop on News Media Content Analysis and Automated Report Generation
Hannu Toivonen | Michele Boggia
Proceedings of the EACL Hackashop on News Media Content Analysis and Automated Report Generation

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EMBEDDIA Tools, Datasets and Challenges: Resources and Hackathon Contributions
Senja Pollak | Marko Robnik-Šikonja | Matthew Purver | Michele Boggia | Ravi Shekhar | Marko Pranjić | Salla Salmela | Ivar Krustok | Tarmo Paju | Carl-Gustav Linden | Leo Leppänen | Elaine Zosa | Matej Ulčar | Linda Freienthal | Silver Traat | Luis Adrián Cabrera-Diego | Matej Martinc | Nada Lavrač | Blaž Škrlj | Martin Žnidaršič | Andraž Pelicon | Boshko Koloski | Vid Podpečan | Janez Kranjc | Shane Sheehan | Emanuela Boros | Jose G. Moreno | Antoine Doucet | Hannu Toivonen
Proceedings of the EACL Hackashop on News Media Content Analysis and Automated Report Generation

This paper presents tools and data sources collected and released by the EMBEDDIA project, supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The collected resources were offered to participants of a hackathon organized as part of the EACL Hackashop on News Media Content Analysis and Automated Report Generation in February 2021. The hackathon had six participating teams who addressed different challenges, either from the list of proposed challenges or their own news-industry-related tasks. This paper goes beyond the scope of the hackathon, as it brings together in a coherent and compact form most of the resources developed, collected and released by the EMBEDDIA project. Moreover, it constitutes a handy source for news media industry and researchers in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Social Science.