Search

Attribute-controlled translation (ACT) is a subtask of machine translation that involves controlling stylistic or linguistic attributes (like formality and gender) of translation outputs. While ACT has garnered attention in recent years due to its usefulness in real-world applications, progress in the task is currently limited by dataset availability, since most prior approaches rely on supervised methods. To address this limitation, we propose Retrieval and Attribute-Marking enhanced Prompting (RAMP), which leverages large multilingual language models to perform ACT in few-shot and zero-shot settings. RAMP improves generation accuracy over the standard prompting approach by (1) incorporating a semantic similarity retrieval component for selecting similar in-context examples, and (2) marking in-context examples with attribute annotations. Our comprehensive experiments show that RAMP is a viable approach in both zero-shot and few-shot settings., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023

Like many other machine learning applications, neural machine translation (NMT) benefits from over-parameterized deep neural models. However, these models have been observed to be brittle: NMT model predictions are sensitive to small input changes and can show significant variation across re-training or incremental model updates. This work studies a frequently used method in NMT, pseudo-label training (PLT), which is common to the related techniques of forward-translation (or self-training) and sequence-level knowledge distillation. While the effect of PLT on quality is well-documented, we highlight a lesser-known effect: PLT can enhance a model's stability to model updates and input perturbations, a set of properties we call model inertia. We study inertia effects under different training settings and we identify distribution simplification as a mechanism behind the observed results., Comment: accepted ICLR 2023

As generic machine translation (MT) quality has improved, the need for targeted benchmarks that explore fine-grained aspects of quality has increased. In particular, gender accuracy in translation can have implications in terms of output fluency, translation accuracy, and ethics. In this paper, we introduce MT-GenEval, a benchmark for evaluating gender accuracy in translation from English into eight widely-spoken languages. MT-GenEval complements existing benchmarks by providing realistic, gender-balanced, counterfactual data in eight language pairs where the gender of individuals is unambiguous in the input segment, including multi-sentence segments requiring inter-sentential gender agreement. Our data and code is publicly available under a CC BY SA 3.0 license., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2022. Data and code: https://github.com/amazon-research/machine-translation-gender-eval

This paper addresses the task of contextual translation using multi-segment models. Specifically we show that increasing model capacity further pushes the limits of this approach and that deeper models are more suited to capture context dependencies. Furthermore, improvements observed with larger models can be transferred to smaller models using knowledge distillation. Our experiments show that this approach achieves competitive performance across several languages and benchmarks, without additional language-specific tuning and task specific architectures.

The machine translation (MT) task is typically formulated as that of returning a single translation for an input segment. However, in many cases, multiple different translations are valid and the appropriate translation may depend on the intended target audience, characteristics of the speaker, or even the relationship between speakers. Specific problems arise when dealing with honorifics, particularly translating from English into languages with formality markers. For example, the sentence "Are you sure?" can be translated in German as "Sind Sie sich sicher?" (formal register) or "Bist du dir sicher?" (informal). Using wrong or inconsistent tone may be perceived as inappropriate or jarring for users of certain cultures and demographics. This work addresses the problem of learning to control target language attributes, in this case formality, from a small amount of labeled contrastive data. We introduce an annotated dataset (CoCoA-MT) and an associated evaluation metric for training and evaluating formality-controlled MT models for six diverse target languages. We show that we can train formality-controlled models by fine-tuning on labeled contrastive data, achieving high accuracy (82% in-domain and 73% out-of-domain) while maintaining overall quality., Comment: NAACL 2022

The training data used in NMT is rarely controlled with respect to specific attributes, such as word casing or gender, which can cause errors in translations. We argue that predicting the target word and attributes simultaneously is an effective way to ensure that translations are more faithful to the training data distribution with respect to these attributes. Experimental results on two tasks, uppercased input translation and gender prediction, show that this strategy helps mirror the training data distribution in testing. It also facilitates data augmentation on the task of uppercased input translation., Comment: Withdrawn from Findings of ACL 2021

Targeted evaluations have found that machine translation systems often output incorrect gender, even when the gender is clear from context. Furthermore, these incorrectly gendered translations have the potential to reflect or amplify social biases. We propose a gender-filtered self-training technique to improve gender translation accuracy on unambiguously gendered inputs. This approach uses a source monolingual corpus and an initial model to generate gender-specific pseudo-parallel corpora which are then added to the training data. We filter the gender-specific corpora on the source and target sides to ensure that sentence pairs contain and correctly translate the specified gender. We evaluate our approach on translation from English into five languages, finding that our models improve gender translation accuracy without any cost to generic translation quality. In addition, we show the viability of our approach on several settings, including re-training from scratch, fine-tuning, controlling the balance of the training data, forward translation, and back-translation.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are sensitive to small perturbations in the input. Robustness to such perturbations is typically measured using translation quality metrics such as BLEU on the noisy input. This paper proposes additional metrics which measure the relative degradation and changes in translation when small perturbations are added to the input. We focus on a class of models employing subword regularization to address robustness and perform extensive evaluations of these models using the robustness measures proposed. Results show that our proposed metrics reveal a clear trend of improved robustness to perturbations when subword regularization methods are used., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2020

A variety of natural language tasks require processing of textual data which contains a mix of natural language and formal languages such as mathematical expressions. In this paper, we take unit conversions as an example and propose a data augmentation technique which leads to models learning both translation and conversion tasks as well as how to adequately switch between them for end-to-end localization.

This paper proposes a novel method to inject custom terminology into neural machine translation at run time. Previous works have mainly proposed modifications to the decoding algorithm in order to constrain the output to include run-time-provided target terms. While being effective, these constrained decoding methods add, however, significant computational overhead to the inference step, and, as we show in this paper, can be brittle when tested in realistic conditions. In this paper we approach the problem by training a neural MT system to learn how to use custom terminology when provided with the input. Comparative experiments show that our method is not only more effective than a state-of-the-art implementation of constrained decoding, but is also as fast as constraint-free decoding., Comment: Accepted as a short paper at ACL 2019

The state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems are supervised machine learning models that require large amounts of manually annotated data to achieve high accuracy. However, annotating NER data by human is expensive and time-consuming, and can be quite difficult for a new language. In this paper, we present two weakly supervised approaches for cross-lingual NER with no human annotation in a target language. The first approach is to create automatically labeled NER data for a target language via annotation projection on comparable corpora, where we develop a heuristic scheme that effectively selects good-quality projection-labeled data from noisy data. The second approach is to project distributed representations of words (word embeddings) from a target language to a source language, so that the source-language NER system can be applied to the target language without re-training. We also design two co-decoding schemes that effectively combine the outputs of the two projection-based approaches. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches on both in-house and open NER data for several target languages. The results show that the combined systems outperform three other weakly supervised approaches on the CoNLL data., Comment: 11 pages, The 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2017

This paper describes an application of reinforcement learning to the mention detection task. We define a novel action-based formulation for the mention detection task, in which a model can flexibly revise past labeling decisions by grouping together tokens and assigning partial mention labels. We devise a method to create mention-level episodes and we train a model by rewarding correctly labeled complete mentions, irrespective of the inner structure created. The model yields results which are on par with a competitive supervised counterpart while being more flexible in terms of achieving targeted behavior through reward modeling and generating internal mention structure, especially on longer mentions., Comment: Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop, NIPS 2016

One of the key challenges in natural language processing (NLP) is to yield good performance across application domains and languages. In this work, we investigate the robustness of the mention detection systems, one of the fundamental tasks in information extraction, via recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The advantage of RNNs over the traditional approaches is their capacity to capture long ranges of context and implicitly adapt the word embeddings, trained on a large corpus, into a task-specific word representation, but still preserve the original semantic generalization to be helpful across domains. Our systematic evaluation for RNN architectures demonstrates that RNNs not only outperform the best reported systems (up to 9\% relative error reduction) in the general setting but also achieve the state-of-the-art performance in the cross-domain setting for English. Regarding other languages, RNNs are significantly better than the traditional methods on the similar task of named entity recognition for Dutch (up to 22\% relative error reduction)., Comment: 13 pages, 11 tables, 3 figures

As automated image analysis progresses, there is increasing interest in richer linguistic annotation of pictures, with attributes of objects (e.g., furry, brown...) attracting most attention. By building on the recent "zero-shot learning" approach, and paying attention to the linguistic nature of attributes as noun modifiers, and specifically adjectives, we show that it is possible to tag images with attribute-denoting adjectives even when no training data containing the relevant annotation are available. Our approach relies on two key observations. First, objects can be seen as bundles of attributes, typically expressed as adjectival modifiers (a dog is something furry, brown, etc.), and thus a function trained to map visual representations of objects to nominal labels can implicitly learn to map attributes to adjectives. Second, objects and attributes come together in pictures (the same thing is a dog and it is brown). We can thus achieve better attribute (and object) label retrieval by treating images as "visual phrases", and decomposing their linguistic representation into an attribute-denoting adjective and an object-denoting noun. Our approach performs comparably to a method exploiting manual attribute annotation, it outperforms various competitive alternatives in both attribute and object annotation, and it automatically constructs attribute-centric representations that significantly improve performance in supervised object recognition., Comment: accepted at Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 3/2015

The zero-shot paradigm exploits vector-based word representations extracted from text corpora with unsupervised methods to learn general mapping functions from other feature spaces onto word space, where the words associated to the nearest neighbours of the mapped vectors are used as their linguistic labels. We show that the neighbourhoods of the mapped elements are strongly polluted by hubs, vectors that tend to be near a high proportion of items, pushing their correct labels down the neighbour list. After illustrating the problem empirically, we propose a simple method to correct it by taking the proximity distribution of potential neighbours across many mapped vectors into account. We show that this correction leads to consistent improvements in realistic zero-shot experiments in the cross-lingual, image labeling and image retrieval domains.

We present a model for compositional distributional semantics related to the framework of Coecke et al. (2010), and emulating formal semantics by representing functions as tensors and arguments as vectors. We introduce a new learning method for tensors, generalising the approach of Baroni and Zamparelli (2010). We evaluate it on two benchmark data sets, and find it to outperform existing leading methods. We argue in our analysis that the nature of this learning method also renders it suitable for solving more subtle problems compositional distributional models might face., Comment: 10 pages + 1 page references, to be presented at the 10th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013)