Annette Rios Gonzales

Also published as: Annette Rios


2021

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Manuel Mager | Arturo Oncevay | Annette Rios | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Alexis Palmer | Graham Neubig | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

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Findings of the AmericasNLP 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Manuel Mager | Arturo Oncevay | Abteen Ebrahimi | John Ortega | Annette Rios | Angela Fan | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Luis Chiruzzo | Gustavo Giménez-Lugo | Ricardo Ramos | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Rolando Coto-Solano | Alexis Palmer | Elisabeth Mager-Hois | Vishrav Chaudhary | Graham Neubig | Ngoc Thang Vu | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This paper presents the results of the 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas. The shared task featured two independent tracks, and participants submitted machine translation systems for up to 10 indigenous languages. Overall, 8 teams participated with a total of 214 submissions. We provided training sets consisting of data collected from various sources, as well as manually translated sentences for the development and test sets. An official baseline trained on this data was also provided. Team submissions featured a variety of architectures, including both statistical and neural models, and for the majority of languages, many teams were able to considerably improve over the baseline. The best performing systems achieved 12.97 ChrF higher than baseline, when averaged across languages.

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Exploring German Multi-Level Text Simplification
Nicolas Spring | Annette Rios | Sarah Ebling
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

We report on experiments in automatic text simplification (ATS) for German with multiple simplification levels along the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), simplifying standard German into levels A1, A2 and B1. For that purpose, we investigate the use of source labels and pretraining on standard German, allowing us to simplify standard language to a specific CEFR level. We show that these approaches are especially effective in low-resource scenarios, where we are able to outperform a standard transformer baseline. Moreover, we introduce copy labels, which we show can help the model make a distinction between sentences that require further modifications and sentences that can be copied as-is.

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On Biasing Transformer Attention Towards Monotonicity
Annette Rios | Chantal Amrhein | Noëmi Aepli | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized attention functions or pretraining. In this work, we introduce a monotonicity loss function that is compatible with standard attention mechanisms and test it on several sequence-to-sequence tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, morphological inflection, transliteration, and dialect normalization. Experiments show that we can achieve largely monotonic behavior. Performance is mixed, with larger gains on top of RNN baselines. General monotonicity does not benefit transformer multihead attention, however, we see isolated improvements when only a subset of heads is biased towards monotonic behavior.

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A New Dataset and Efficient Baselines for Document-level Text Simplification in German
Annette Rios | Nicolas Spring | Tannon Kew | Marek Kostrzewa | Andreas Säuberli | Mathias Müller | Sarah Ebling
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

The task of document-level text simplification is very similar to summarization with the additional difficulty of reducing complexity. We introduce a newly collected data set of German texts, collected from the Swiss news magazine 20 Minuten (‘20 Minutes’) that consists of full articles paired with simplified summaries. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic text simplification with the pretrained multilingual mBART and a modified version thereof that is more memory-friendly, using both our new data set and existing simplification corpora. Our modifications of mBART let us train at a lower memory cost without much loss in performance, in fact, the smaller mBART even improves over the standard model in a setting with multiple simplification levels.

2020

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Domain Robustness in Neural Machine Translation
Mathias Müller | Annette Rios | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)

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Subword Segmentation and a Single Bridge Language Affect Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation
Annette Rios | Mathias Müller | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

Zero-shot neural machine translation is an attractive goal because of the high cost of obtaining data and building translation systems for new translation directions. However, previous papers have reported mixed success in zero-shot translation. It is hard to predict in which settings it will be effective, and what limits performance compared to a fully supervised system. In this paper, we investigate zero-shot performance of a multilingual EN<->FR,CS,DE,FI system trained on WMT data. We find that zero-shot performance is highly unstable and can vary by more than 6 BLEU between training runs, making it difficult to reliably track improvements. We observe a bias towards copying the source in zero-shot translation, and investigate how the choice of subword segmentation affects this bias. We find that language-specific subword segmentation results in less subword copying at training time, and leads to better zero-shot performance compared to jointly trained segmentation. A recent trend in multilingual models is to not train on parallel data between all language pairs, but have a single bridge language, e.g. English. We find that this negatively affects zero-shot translation and leads to a failure mode where the model ignores the language tag and instead produces English output in zero-shot directions. We show that this bias towards English can be effectively reduced with even a small amount of parallel data in some of the non-English pairs.

2018

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Why Self-Attention? A Targeted Evaluation of Neural Machine Translation Architectures
Gongbo Tang | Mathias Müller | Annette Rios | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recently, non-recurrent architectures (convolutional, self-attentional) have outperformed RNNs in neural machine translation. CNNs and self-attentional networks can connect distant words via shorter network paths than RNNs, and it has been speculated that this improves their ability to model long-range dependencies. However, this theoretical argument has not been tested empirically, nor have alternative explanations for their strong performance been explored in-depth. We hypothesize that the strong performance of CNNs and self-attentional networks could also be due to their ability to extract semantic features from the source text, and we evaluate RNNs, CNNs and self-attention networks on two tasks: subject-verb agreement (where capturing long-range dependencies is required) and word sense disambiguation (where semantic feature extraction is required). Our experimental results show that: 1) self-attentional networks and CNNs do not outperform RNNs in modeling subject-verb agreement over long distances; 2) self-attentional networks perform distinctly better than RNNs and CNNs on word sense disambiguation.

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A Large-Scale Test Set for the Evaluation of Context-Aware Pronoun Translation in Neural Machine Translation
Mathias Müller | Annette Rios | Elena Voita | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers

The translation of pronouns presents a special challenge to machine translation to this day, since it often requires context outside the current sentence. Recent work on models that have access to information across sentence boundaries has seen only moderate improvements in terms of automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU. However, metrics that quantify the overall translation quality are ill-equipped to measure gains from additional context. We argue that a different kind of evaluation is needed to assess how well models translate inter-sentential phenomena such as pronouns. This paper therefore presents a test suite of contrastive translations focused specifically on the translation of pronouns. Furthermore, we perform experiments with several context-aware models. We show that, while gains in BLEU are moderate for those systems, they outperform baselines by a large margin in terms of accuracy on our contrastive test set. Our experiments also show the effectiveness of parameter tying for multi-encoder architectures.

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The Word Sense Disambiguation Test Suite at WMT18
Annette Rios | Mathias Müller | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

We present a task to measure an MT system’s capability to translate ambiguous words with their correct sense according to the given context. The task is based on the German–English Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) test set ContraWSD (Rios Gonzales et al., 2017), but it has been filtered to reduce noise, and the evaluation has been adapted to assess MT output directly rather than scoring existing translations. We evaluate all German–English submissions to the WMT’18 shared translation task, plus a number of submissions from previous years, and find that performance on the task has markedly improved compared to the 2016 WMT submissions (81%→93% accuracy on the WSD task). We also find that the unsupervised submissions to the task have a low WSD capability, and predominantly translate ambiguous source words with the same sense.

2017

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Improving Word Sense Disambiguation in Neural Machine Translation with Sense Embeddings
Annette Rios Gonzales | Laura Mascarell | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Machine Translation of Spanish Personal and Possessive Pronouns Using Anaphora Probabilities
Ngoc Quang Luong | Andrei Popescu-Belis | Annette Rios Gonzales | Don Tuggener
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

We implement a fully probabilistic model to combine the hypotheses of a Spanish anaphora resolution system with those of a Spanish-English machine translation system. The probabilities over antecedents are converted into probabilities for the features of translated pronouns, and are integrated with phrase-based MT using an additional translation model for pronouns. The system improves the translation of several Spanish personal and possessive pronouns into English, by solving translation divergencies such as ‘ella’ vs. ‘she’/‘it’ or ‘su’ vs. ‘his’/‘her’/‘its’/‘their’. On a test set with 2,286 pronouns, a baseline system correctly translates 1,055 of them, while ours improves this by 41. Moreover, with oracle antecedents, possessives are translated with an accuracy of 83%.

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Co-reference Resolution of Elided Subjects and Possessive Pronouns in Spanish-English Statistical Machine Translation
Annette Rios Gonzales | Don Tuggener
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

This paper presents a straightforward method to integrate co-reference information into phrase-based machine translation to address the problems of i) elided subjects and ii) morphological underspecification of pronouns when translating from pro-drop languages. We evaluate the method for the language pair Spanish-English and find that translation quality improves with the addition of co-reference information.

2014

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Morphological Disambiguation and Text Normalization for Southern Quechua Varieties
Annette Rios Gonzales | Richard Alexander Castro Mamani
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Applying NLP Tools to Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

2013

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Machine Learning Disambiguation of Quechua Verb Morphology
Annette Rios Gonzales | Anne Göhring
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation

2012

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A tree is a Baum is an árbol is a sach’a: Creating a trilingual treebank
Annette Rios | Anne Göhring
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

This paper describes the process of constructing a trilingual parallel treebank. While for two of the involved languages, Spanish and German, there are already corpora with well-established annotation schemes available, this is not the case with the third language: Cuzco Quechua (ISO 639-3:quz), a low-resourced, non-standardized language for which we had to define a linguistically plausible annotation scheme first.