Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) systems utilize additional information from other modalities beyond text to improve the quality of machine translation (MT). The additional modality is typically in the form of images. Despite proven advantages, it is indeed difficult to develop an MMT system for various languages primarily due to the lack of a suitable multimodal dataset. In this work, we develop an MMT for English-> Bengali using a recently published Bengali Visual Genome (BVG) dataset that contains images with associated bilingual textual descriptions. Through a comparative study of the developed MMT system vis-a-vis a Text-to-text translation, we demonstrate that the use of multimodal data not only improves the translation performance improvement in BLEU score of +1.3 on the development set, +3.9 on the evaluation test, and +0.9 on the challenge test set but also helps to resolve ambiguities in the pure text description. As per best of our knowledge, our English-Bengali MMT system is the first attempt in this direction, and thus, can act as a baseline for the subsequent research in MMT for low resource languages.

This paper describes the team (“Tamalli”)’s submission to AmericasNLP2021 shared task on Open Machine Translation for low resource South American languages. Our goal was to evaluate different Machine Translation (MT) techniques, statistical and neural-based, under several configuration settings. We obtained the second-best results for the language pairs “Spanish-Bribri”, “Spanish-Asháninka”, and “Spanish-Rarámuri” in the category “Development set not used for training”. Our performed experiments will serve as a point of reference for researchers working on MT with low-resource languages.

This paper provides the description of shared tasks to the WAT 2021 by our team “NLPHut”. We have participated in the English→Hindi Multimodal translation task, English→Malayalam Multimodal translation task, and Indic Multi-lingual translation task. We have used the state-of-the-art Transformer model with language tags in different settings for the translation task and proposed a novel “region-specific” caption generation approach using a combination of image CNN and LSTM for the Hindi and Malayalam image captioning. Our submission tops in English→Malayalam Multimodal translation task (text-only translation, and Malayalam caption), and ranks second-best in English→Hindi Multimodal translation task (text-only translation, and Hindi caption). Our submissions have also performed well in the Indic Multilingual translation tasks.

Identifying the author of a given text can be useful in historical literature, plagiarism detection, or police investigations. Authorship Attribution (AA) has been well studied and mostly relies on a large feature engineering work. More recently, deep learning-based approaches have been explored for Authorship Attribution (AA). In this paper, we introduce BertAA, a fine-tuning of a pre-trained BERT language model with an additional dense layer and a softmax activation to perform authorship classification. This approach reaches competitive performances on Enron Email, Blog Authorship, and IMDb (and IMDb62) datasets, up to 5.3% (relative) above current state-of-the-art approaches. We performed an exhaustive analysis allowing to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed method. In addition, we evaluate the impact of including additional features (e.g. stylometric and hybrid features) in an ensemble approach, improving the macro-averaged F1-Score by 2.7% (relative) on average.

Language detection is considered a difficult task especially for similar languages, varieties, and dialects. With the growing number of online content in different languages, the need for reliable and robust language detection tools also increased. In this work, we use supervised autoencoders with a bayesian optimizer for language detection and highlights its efficiency in detecting similar languages with dialect variance in comparison to other state-of-the-art techniques. We evaluated our approach on multiple datasets (Ling10, Discriminating between Similar Language (DSL), and Indo-Aryan Language Identification (ILI)). Obtained results demonstrate that SAE are higly effective in detecting languages, up to a 100% accuracy in the Ling10. Similarly, we obtain a competitive performance in identifying similar languages, and dialects, 92% and 85% for DSL ans ILI datasets respectively.

This paper describes the ODIANLP submission to WAT 2020. We have participated in the English-Hindi Multimodal task and Indic task. We have used the state-of-the-art Transformer model for the translation task and InceptionResNetV2 for the Hindi Image Captioning task. Our submission tops in English->Hindi Multimodal task in its track and Odia<->English translation tasks. Also, our submissions performed well in the Indic Multilingual tasks.

The preparation of parallel corpora is a challenging task, particularly for languages that suffer from under-representation in the digital world. In a multi-lingual country like India, the need for such parallel corpora is stringent for several low-resource languages. In this work, we provide an extended English-Odia parallel corpus, OdiEnCorp 2.0, aiming particularly at Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems which will help translate English↔Odia. OdiEnCorp 2.0 includes existing English-Odia corpora and we extended the collection by several other methods of data acquisition: parallel data scraping from many websites, including Odia Wikipedia, but also optical character recognition (OCR) to extract parallel data from scanned images. Our OCR-based data extraction approach for building a parallel corpus is suitable for other low resource languages that lack in online content. The resulting OdiEnCorp 2.0 contains 98,302 sentences and 1.69 million English and 1.47 million Odia tokens. To the best of our knowledge, OdiEnCorp 2.0 is the largest Odia-English parallel corpus covering different domains and available freely for non-commercial and research purposes.

Text summarization is considered as a challenging task in the NLP community. The availability of datasets for the task of multilingual text summarization is rare, and such datasets are difficult to construct. In this work, we build an abstract text summarizer for the German language text using the state-of-the-art “Transformer” model. We propose an iterative data augmentation approach which uses synthetic data along with the real summarization data for the German language. To generate synthetic data, the Common Crawl (German) dataset is exploited, which covers different domains. The synthetic data is effective for the low resource condition and is particularly helpful for our multilingual scenario where availability of summarizing data is still a challenging issue. The data are also useful in deep learning scenarios where the neural models require a large amount of training data for utilization of its capacity. The obtained summarization performance is measured in terms of ROUGE and BLEU score. We achieve an absolute improvement of +1.5 and +16.0 in ROUGE1 F1 (R1_F1) on the development and test sets, respectively, compared to the system which does not rely on data augmentation.

This paper describes the Idiap submission to WAT 2019 for the English-Hindi Multi-Modal Translation Task. We have used the state-of-the-art Transformer model and utilized the IITB English-Hindi parallel corpus as an additional data source. Among the different tracks of the multi-modal task, we have participated in the “Text-Only” track for the evaluation and challenge test sets. Our submission tops in its track among the competitors in terms of both automatic and manual evaluation. Based on automatic scores, our text-only submission also outperforms systems that consider visual information in the “multi-modal translation” task.

The multi-level adaptive networks (MLAN) technique is a cross-lingual adaptation framework where a bottleneck (BN) layer in a deep neural network (DNN) trained in a source language is used for producing BN features to be exploited in a second DNN in a target language. We investigate how the correlation (in the sense of phonetic similarity) of the source and target languages and the amount of data of the source language affect the efficiency of the MLAN schemes. We experiment with three different scenarios using, i) French, as a source language uncorrelated to the target language, ii) Ukrainian, as a source language correlated to the target one and finally iii) English as a source language uncorrelated to the target language using a relatively large amount of data in respect to the other two scenarios. In all cases Russian is used as target language. GLOBALPHONE data is used, except for English, where a mixture of LIBRISPEECH, TEDLIUM and AMIDA is available. The results have shown that both of these two factors are important for the MLAN schemes. Specifically, on the one hand, when a modest amount of data from the source language is used, the correlation of the source and target languages is very important. On the other hand, the correlation of the two languages seems to be less important when a relatively large amount of data, from the source language, is used. The best performance in word error rate (WER), was achieved when the English language was used as the source one in the multi-task MLAN scheme, achieving a relative improvement of 9.4% in respect to the baseline DNN model.

This paper describes the data collection and annotation carried out within the DBOX project ( Eureka project, number E! 7152). This project aims to develop interactive games based on spoken natural language human-computer dialogues, in 3 European languages: English, German and French. We collect the DBOX data continuously. We first start with human-human Wizard of Oz experiments to collect human-human data in order to model natural human dialogue behaviour, for better understanding of phenomena of human interactions and predicting interlocutors actions, and then replace the human Wizard by an increasingly advanced dialogue system, using evaluation data for system improvement. The designed dialogue system relies on a Question-Answering (QA) approach, but showing truly interactive gaming behaviour, e.g., by providing feedback, managing turns and contact, producing social signals and acts, e.g., encouraging vs. downplaying, polite vs. rude, positive vs. negative attitude towards players or their actions, etc. The DBOX dialogue corpus has required substantial investment. We expect it to have a great impact on the rest of the project. The DBOX project consortium will continue to maintain the corpus and to take an interest in its growth, e.g., expand to other languages. The resulting corpus will be publicly released.