In this paper, we present the systems submitted by our team from the Institute of ICT (HEIG-VD / HES-SO) to the Unsupervised MT and Very Low Resource Supervised MT task. We first study the improvements brought to a baseline system by techniques such as back-translation and initialization from a parent model. We find that both techniques are beneficial and suffice to reach performance that compares with more sophisticated systems from the 2020 task. We then present the application of this system to the 2021 task for low-resource supervised Upper Sorbian (HSB) to German translation, in both directions. Finally, we present a contrastive system for HSB-DE in both directions, and for unsupervised German to Lower Sorbian (DSB) translation, which uses multi-task training with various training schedules to improve over the baseline.

In this paper, we present the ForwardQuestions data set, made of human-generated questions related to knowledge triples. This data set results from the conversion and merger of the existing SimpleDBPediaQA and SimpleQuestionsWikidata data sets, including the mapping of predicates from DBPedia to Wikidata, and the selection of ‘forward’ questions as opposed to ‘backward’ ones. The new data set can be used to generate novel questions given an unseen Wikidata triple, by replacing the subjects of existing questions with the new one and then selecting the best candidate questions using semantic and syntactic criteria. Evaluation results indicate that the question generation method using ForwardQuestions improves the quality of questions by about 20% with respect to a baseline not using ranking criteria.

We present a voice-based conversational agent which combines the robustness of chatbots and the utility of question answering (QA) systems. Indeed, while data-driven chatbots are typically user-friendly but not goal-oriented, QA systems tend to perform poorly at chitchat. The proposed chatbot relies on a controller which performs dialogue act classification and feeds user input either to a sequence-to-sequence chatbot or to a QA system. The resulting chatbot is a spoken QA application for the Google Home smart speaker. The system is endowed with general-domain knowledge from Wikipedia articles and uses coreference resolution to detect relatedness between questions. We present our choices of data sets for training and testing the components, and present the experimental results that helped us optimize the parameters of the chatbot. In particular, we discuss the appropriateness of using the SQuAD dataset for evaluating end-to-end QA, in the light of our system’s behavior.