Sentiment tasks such as hate speech detection and sentiment analysis, especially when performed on languages other than English, are often low-resource. In this study, we exploit the emotional information encoded in emojis to enhance the performance on a variety of sentiment tasks. This is done using a transfer learning approach, where the parameters learned by an emoji-based source task are transferred to a sentiment target task. We analyse the efficacy of the transfer under three conditions, i.e. i) the emoji content and ii) label distribution of the target task as well as iii) the difference between monolingually and multilingually learned source tasks. We find i.a. that the transfer is most beneficial if the target task is balanced with high emoji content. Monolingually learned source tasks have the benefit of taking into account the culturally specific use of emojis and gain up to F1 +0.280 over the baseline.

Hate speech and profanity detection suffer from data sparsity, especially for languages other than English, due to the subjective nature of the tasks and the resulting annotation incompatibility of existing corpora. In this study, we identify profane subspaces in word and sentence representations and explore their generalization capability on a variety of similar and distant target tasks in a zero-shot setting. This is done monolingually (German) and cross-lingually to closely-related (English), distantly-related (French) and non-related (Arabic) tasks. We observe that, on both similar and distant target tasks and across all languages, the subspace-based representations transfer more effectively than standard BERT representations in the zero-shot setting, with improvements between F1 +10.9 and F1 +42.9 over the baselines across all tested monolingual and cross-lingual scenarios.

Massively multilingual machine translation (MT) has shown impressive capabilities and including zero and few-shot translation between low-resource language pairs. However and these models are often evaluated on high-resource languages with the assumption that they generalize to low-resource ones. The difficulty of evaluating MT models on low-resource pairs is often due to lack of standardized evaluation datasets. In this paper and we present MENYO-20k and the first multi-domain parallel corpus with a especially curated orthography for Yoruba–English with standardized train-test splits for benchmarking. We provide several neural MT benchmarks and compare them to the performance of popular pre-trained (massively multilingual) MT models both for the heterogeneous test set and its subdomains. Since these pre-trained models use huge amounts of data with uncertain quality and we also analyze the effect of diacritics and a major characteristic of Yoruba and in the training data. We investigate how and when this training condition affects the final quality of a translation and its understandability.Our models outperform massively multilingual models such as Google (+8.7 BLEU) and Facebook M2M (+9.1) when translating to Yoruba and setting a high quality benchmark for future research.

For most language combinations and parallel data is either scarce or simply unavailable. To address this and unsupervised machine translation (UMT) exploits large amounts of monolingual data by using synthetic data generation techniques such as back-translation and noising and while self-supervised NMT (SSNMT) identifies parallel sentences in smaller comparable data and trains on them. To this date and the inclusion of UMT data generation techniques in SSNMT has not been investigated. We show that including UMT techniques into SSNMT significantly outperforms SSNMT (up to +4.3 BLEU and af2en) as well as statistical (+50.8 BLEU) and hybrid UMT (+51.5 BLEU) baselines on related and distantly-related and unrelated language pairs.

We describe the EdinSaar submission to the shared task of Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for North Germanic Languages at the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT2021). We submit multilingual translation models for translations to/from Icelandic (is), Norwegian-Bokmal (nb), and Swedish (sv). We employ various experimental approaches, including multilingual pre-training, back-translation, fine-tuning, and ensembling. In most translation directions, our models outperform other submitted systems.

Self-supervised neural machine translation (SSNMT) jointly learns to identify and select suitable training data from comparable (rather than parallel) corpora and to translate, in a way that the two tasks support each other in a virtuous circle. In this study, we provide an in-depth analysis of the sampling choices the SSNMT model makes during training. We show how, without it having been told to do so, the model self-selects samples of increasing (i) complexity and (ii) task-relevance in combination with (iii) performing a denoising curriculum. We observe that the dynamics of the mutual-supervision signals of both system internal representation types are vital for the extraction and translation performance. We show that in terms of the Gunning-Fog Readability index, SSNMT starts extracting and learning from Wikipedia data suitable for high school students and quickly moves towards content suitable for first year undergraduate students.

A lot of real-world phenomena are complex and cannot be captured by single task annotations. This causes a need for subsequent annotations, with interdependent questions and answers describing the nature of the subject at hand. Even in the case a phenomenon is easily captured by a single task, the high specialisation of most annotation tools can result in having to switch to another tool if the task only slightly changes. We introduce HUMAN, a novel web-based annotation tool that addresses the above problems by a) covering a variety of annotation tasks on both textual and image data, and b) the usage of an internal deterministic state machine, allowing the researcher to chain different annotation tasks in an interdependent manner. Further, the modular nature of the tool makes it easy to define new annotation tasks and integrate machine learning algorithms e.g., for active learning. HUMAN comes with an easy-to-use graphical user interface that simplifies the annotation task and management.

This paper describes the UdS-DFKI submission to the shared task for unsupervised machine translation (MT) and very low-resource supervised MT between German (de) and Upper Sorbian (hsb) at the Fifth Conference of Machine Translation (WMT20). We submit systems for both the supervised and unsupervised tracks. Apart from various experimental approaches like bitext mining, model pre-training, and iterative back-translation, we employ a factored machine translation approach on a small BPE vocabulary.

Research on hate speech classification has received increased attention. In real-life scenarios, a small amount of labeled hate speech data is available to train a reliable classifier. Semi-supervised learning takes advantage of a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data. In this paper, label propagation-based semi-supervised learning is explored for the task of hate speech classification. The quality of labeling the unlabeled set depends on the input representations. In this work, we show that pre-trained representations are label agnostic, and when used with label propagation yield poor results. Neural network-based fine-tuning can be adopted to learn task-specific representations using a small amount of labeled data. We show that fully fine-tuned representations may not always be the best representations for the label propagation and intermediate representations may perform better in a semi-supervised setup.

We present a simple new method where an emergent NMT system is used for simultaneously selecting training data and learning internal NMT representations. This is done in a self-supervised way without parallel data, in such a way that both tasks enhance each other during training. The method is language independent, introduces no additional hyper-parameters, and achieves BLEU scores of 29.21 (en2fr) and 27.36 (fr2en) on newstest2014 using English and French Wikipedia data for training.

This paper describes the UdS-DFKI submission to the WMT2019 news translation task for Gujarati–English (low-resourced pair) and German–English (document-level evaluation). Our systems rely on the on-line extraction of parallel sentences from comparable corpora for the first scenario and on the inclusion of coreference-related information in the training data in the second one.