No Arabic abstract
Although proper handling of discourse phenomena significantly contributes to the quality of machine translation (MT), common translation quality metrics do not adequately capture them. Recent works in context-aware MT attempt to target a small set of these phenomena during evaluation. In this paper, we propose a new metric, P-CXMI, which allows us to identify translations that require context systematically and confirm the difficulty of previously studied phenomena as well as uncover new ones that have not been addressed in previous work. We then develop the Multilingual Discourse-Aware (MuDA) benchmark, a series of taggers for these phenomena in 14 different language pairs, which we use to evaluate context-aware MT. We find that state-of-the-art context-aware MT models find marginal improvements over context-agnostic models on our benchmark, which suggests current models do not handle these ambiguities effectively. We release code and data to invite the MT research community to increase efforts on context-aware translation on discourse phenomena and languages that are currently overlooked.
We release a multilingual neural machine translation model, which can be used to translate text in the biomedical domain. The model can translate from 5 languages (French, German, Italian, Korean and Spanish) into English. It is trained with large amounts of generic and biomedical data, using domain tags. Our benchmarks show that it performs near state-of-the-art both on news (generic domain) and biomedical test sets, and that it outperforms the existing publicly released models. We believe that this release will help the large-scale multilingual analysis of the digital content of the COVID-19 crisis and of its effects on society, economy, and healthcare policies. We also release a test set of biomedical text for Korean-English. It consists of 758 sentences from official guidelines and recent papers, all about COVID-19.
Despite the reported success of unsupervised machine translation (MT), the field has yet to examine the conditions under which these methods succeed, and where they fail. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of unsupervised MT using dissimilar language pairs, dissimilar domains, diverse datasets, and authentic low-resource languages. We find that performance rapidly deteriorates when source and target corpora are from different domains, and that random word embedding initialization can dramatically affect downstream translation performance. We additionally find that unsupervised MT performance declines when source and target languages use different scripts, and observe very poor performance on authentic low-resource language pairs. We advocate for extensive empirical evaluation of unsupervised MT systems to highlight failure points and encourage continued research on the most promising paradigms.
The development of neural networks and pretraining techniques has spawned many sentence-level tagging systems that achieved superior performance on typical benchmarks. However, a relatively less discussed topic is what if more context information is introduced into current top-scoring tagging systems. Although several existing works have attempted to shift tagging systems from sentence-level to document-level, there is still no consensus conclusion about when and why it works, which limits the applicability of the larger-context approach in tagging tasks. In this paper, instead of pursuing a state-of-the-art tagging system by architectural exploration, we focus on investigating when and why the larger-context training, as a general strategy, can work. To this end, we conduct a thorough comparative study on four proposed aggregators for context information collecting and present an attribute-aided evaluation method to interpret the improvement brought by larger-context training. Experimentally, we set up a testbed based on four tagging tasks and thirteen datasets. Hopefully, our preliminary observations can deepen the understanding of larger-context training and enlighten more follow-up works on the use of contextual information.
Over the last few years two promising research directions in low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) have emerged. The first focuses on utilizing high-resource languages to improve the quality of low-resource languages via multilingual NMT. The second direction employs monolingual data with self-supervision to pre-train translation models, followed by fine-tuning on small amounts of supervised data. In this work, we join these two lines of research and demonstrate the efficacy of monolingual data with self-supervision in multilingual NMT. We offer three major results: (i) Using monolingual data significantly boosts the translation quality of low-resource languages in multilingual models. (ii) Self-supervision improves zero-shot translation quality in multilingual models. (iii) Leveraging monolingual data with self-supervision provides a viable path towards adding new languages to multilingual models, getting up to 33 BLEU on ro-en translation without any parallel data or back-translation.
Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousands of language directions with supervised data, created through large-scale mining. Then, we explore how to effectively increase model capacity through a combination of dense scaling and language-specific sparse parameters to create high quality models. Our focus on non-English-Centric models brings gains of more than 10 BLEU when directly translating between non-English directions while performing competitively to the best single systems of WMT. We open-source our scripts so that others may reproduce the data, evaluation, and final M2M-100 model.