This study sheds light on the effects of COVID-19 in the particular field of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing within Artificial Intelligence. We provide an inter-sectional study on gender, contribution, and experience that considers one school year (from August 2019 to August 2020) as a pandemic year. August is included twice for the purpose of an inter-annual comparison. While the trend in publications increased with the crisis, the results show that the ratio between female and male publications decreased. This only helps to reduce the importance of the female role in the scientific contributions of computational linguistics (it is now far below its peak of 0.24). The pandemic has a particularly negative effect on the production of female senior researchers in the first position of authors (maximum work), followed by the female junior researchers in the last position of authors (supervision or collaborative work).

This paper describes the submission to the WMT 2021 news translation shared task by the UPC Machine Translation group. The goal of the task is to translate German to French (De-Fr) and French to German (Fr-De). Our submission focuses on fine-tuning a pre-trained model to take advantage of monolingual data. We fine-tune mBART50 using the filtered data, and additionally, we train a Transformer model on the same data from scratch. In the experiments, we show that fine-tuning mBART50 results in 31.69 BLEU for De-Fr and 23.63 BLEU for Fr-De, which increases 2.71 and 1.90 BLEU accordingly, as compared to the model we train from scratch. Our final submission is an ensemble of these two models, further increasing 0.3 BLEU for Fr-De.

Gender bias negatively impacts many natural language processing applications, including machine translation (MT). The motivation behind this work is to study whether recent proposed MT techniques are significantly contributing to attenuate biases in document-level and gender-balanced data. For the study, we consider approaches of adding the previous sentence and the speaker information, implemented in a decoder-based neural MT system. We show improvements both in translation quality (+1 BLEU point) as well as in gender bias mitigation on WinoMT (+5% accuracy).

Gender bias is highly impacting natural language processing applications. Word embeddings have clearly been proven both to keep and amplify gender biases that are present in current data sources. Recently, contextualized word embeddings have enhanced previous word embedding techniques by computing word vector representations dependent on the sentence they appear in. In this paper, we study the impact of this conceptual change in the word embedding computation in relation with gender bias. Our analysis includes different measures previously applied in the literature to standard word embeddings. Our findings suggest that contextualized word embeddings are less biased than standard ones even when the latter are debiased.

In this article, we describe the TALP-UPC research group participation in the WMT19 news translation shared task for Kazakh-English. Given the low amount of parallel training data, we resort to using Russian as pivot language, training subword-based statistical translation systems for Russian-Kazakh and Russian-English that were then used to create two synthetic pseudo-parallel corpora for Kazakh-English and English-Kazakh respectively. Finally, a self-attention model based on the decoder part of the Transformer architecture was trained on the two pseudo-parallel corpora.