The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT21

This paper describes NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT 2021 news translation tasks. We made submissions to 9 language directions, including English2Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Icelandic and English2Hausa tasks. Our primary systems are built on several effective variants of Transformer, e.g., Transformer-DLCL, ODE-Transformer. We also utilize back-translation, knowledge distillation, post-ensemble, and iterative fine-tuning techniques to enhance the model performance further.

The Mininglamp Machine Translation System for WMT21

This paper describes Mininglamp neural machine translation systems of the WMT2021 news translation tasks. We have participated in eight directions translation tasks for news text including Chinese to/from English, Hausa to/from English, German to/from English and French to/from German. Our fundamental system was based on Transformer architecture, with wider or smaller construction for different news translation tasks. We mainly utilized the method of back-translation, knowledge distillation and fine-tuning to boost single model, while the ensemble was used to combine single models. Our final submission has ranked first for the English to/from Hausa task.

Efficient Machine Translation with Model Pruning and Quantization

We participated in all tracks of the WMT 2021 efficient machine translation task: single-core CPU, multi-core CPU, and GPU hardware with throughput and latency conditions. Our submissions combine several efficiency strategies: knowledge distillation, a simpler simple recurrent unit (SSRU) decoder with one or two layers, lexical shortlists, smaller numerical formats, and pruning. For the CPU track, we used quantized 8-bit models. For the GPU track, we experimented with FP16 and 8-bit integers in tensorcores. Some of our submissions optimize for size via 4-bit log quantization and omitting a lexical shortlist. We have extended pruning to more parts of the network, emphasizing component- and block-level pruning that actually improves speed unlike coefficient-wise pruning.

Just Ask! Evaluating Machine Translation by Asking and Answering Questions

In this paper, we show that automatically-generated questions and answers can be used to evaluate the quality of Machine Translation (MT) systems. Building on recent work on the evaluation of abstractive text summarization, we propose a new metric for system-level MT evaluation, compare it with other state-of-the-art solutions, and show its robustness by conducting experiments for various MT directions.

Tencent AI Lab Machine Translation Systems for the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task

This paper describes the Tencent AI Lab submission of the WMT2021 shared task on biomedical translation in eight language directions: English-German, English-French, English-Spanish and English-Russian. We utilized different Transformer architectures, pretraining and back-translation strategies to improve translation quality. Concretely, we explore mBART (Liu et al., 2020) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pretraining strategy. Our submissions (Tencent AI Lab Machine Translation, TMT) in German/French/Spanish⇒English are ranked 1st respectively according to the official evaluation results in terms of BLEU scores.

Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) from the Perspective of Translation Trainees: Implications for Translation Pedagogy

This paper introduces data on translation trainees' perceptions of the MTPE process and implications on training in this field. This study aims to analyse trainees' performance of three MTPE tasks the English-Polish language pair and post-tasks interviews to determine the need to promote machine translation post-editing skills in educating translation students. Since very little information concerning MTPE training is available, this study may be found advantageous.

Multi-Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation Through Multidimensional Tagging

Production NMT systems typically need to serve niche domains that are not covered by adequately large and readily available parallel corpora. As a result, practitioners often fine-tune general purpose models to each of the domains their organisation caters to. The number of domains however can often become large, which in combination with the number of languages that need serving can lead to an unscalable fleet of models to be developed and maintained. We propose Multi Dimensional Tagging, a method for fine-tuning a single NMT model on several domains simultaneously, thus drastically reducing development and maintenance costs. We run experiments where a single MDT model compares favourably to a set of SOTA specialist models, even when evaluated on the domain those baselines have been fine-tuned on. Besides BLEU, we report human evaluation results. MDT models are now live at Booking.com, powering an MT engine that serves millions of translations a day in over 40 different languages.

Improving Evidence Retrieval for Automated Explainable Fact-Checking

Automated fact-checking on a large-scale is a challenging task that has not been studied systematically until recently. Large noisy document collections like the web or news articles make the task more difficult. We describe a three-stage automated fact-checking system, named Quin+, using evidence retrieval and selection methods. We demonstrate that using dense passage representations leads to much higher evidence recall in a noisy setting. We also propose two sentence selection approaches, an embedding-based selection using a dense retrieval model, and a sequence labeling approach for context-aware selection. Quin+ is able to verify open-domain claims using results from web search engines.

Generative Imagination Elevates Machine Translation

There are common semantics shared across text and images. Given a sentence in a source language, whether depicting the visual scene helps translation into a target language? Existing multimodal neural machine translation methods (MNMT) require triplets of bilingual sentence - image for training and tuples of source sentence - image for inference. In this paper, we propose ImagiT, a novel machine translation method via visual imagination. ImagiT first learns to generate visual representation from the source sentence, and then utilizes both source sentence and the imagined representation'' to produce a target translation. Unlike previous methods, it only needs the source sentence at the inference time. Experiments demonstrate that ImagiT benefits from visual imagination and significantly outperforms the text-only neural machine translation baselines. Further analysis reveals that the imagination process in ImagiT helps fill in missing information when performing the degradation strategy.

A Baseline Document Planning Method for Automated Journalism

In this work, we present a method for content selection and document planning for automated news and report generation from structured statistical data such as that offered by the European Union's statistical agency, EuroStat. The method is driven by the data and is highly topic-independent within the statistical dataset domain. As our approach is not based on machine learning, it is suitable for introducing news automation to the wide variety of domains where no training data is available. As such, it is suitable as a low-cost (in terms of implementation effort) baseline for document structuring prior to introduction of domain-specific knowledge.