Interactive and Adaptive Neural Machine Translation

In this dissertation, we examine applications of neural machine translation to computer aided translation, with the goal of building tools for human translators. We present a neural approach to interactive translation prediction (a form of "auto-complete" for human translators) and demonstrate its effectiveness through both simulation studies, where it outperforms a phrase-based statistical machine translation approach, and a user study. We find that about half of the translators in the study are faster using neural interactive translation prediction than they are when post-editing output of the same underlying machine translation system, and most translators express positive reactions to the tool. We perform an analysis of some challenges that neural machine translation systems face, particularly with respect to novel words and consistency. We experiment with methods of improving translation quality at a fine-grained level to address those challenges. Finally, we bring these two areas -- interactive and adaptive neural machine translation -- together in a simulation that shows that their combination has a positive impact on novel word translation and other metrics

A Neural, Interactive-predictive System for Multimodal Sequence to Sequence Tasks

We present a demonstration of a neural interactive-predictive system for tackling multimodal sequence to sequence tasks. The system generates text predictions to different sequence to sequence tasks: machine translation, image and video captioning. These predictions are revised by a human agent, who introduces corrections in the form of characters. The system reacts to each correction, providing alternative hypotheses, compelling with the feedback provided by the user. The final objective is to reduce the human effort required during this correction process. This system is implemented following a client-server architecture. For accessing the system, we developed a website, which communicates with the neural model, hosted in a local server. From this website, the different tasks can be tackled following the interactive-predictive framework. We open-source all the code developed for building this system. The demonstration in hosted in http://casmacat.prhlt.upv.es/interactive-seq2seq.Comment: ACL 2019 - System demonstration

Modelling source- and target-language syntactic Information as conditional context in interactive neural machine translation

In interactive machine translation (MT), human translators correct errors in auto- matic translations in collaboration with the MT systems, which is seen as an effective way to improve the productivity gain in translation. In this study, we model source- language syntactic constituency parse and target-language syntactic descriptions in the form of supertags as conditional con- text for interactive prediction in neural MT (NMT). We found that the supertags significantly improve productivity gain in translation in interactive-predictive NMT (INMT), while syntactic parsing somewhat found to be effective in reducing human efforts in translation. Furthermore, when we model this source- and target-language syntactic information together as the con- ditional context, both types complement each other and our fully syntax-informed INMT model shows statistically significant reduction in human efforts for a French– to–English translation task in a reference- simulated setting, achieving 4.30 points absolute (corresponding to 9.18% relative) improvement in terms of word prediction accuracy (WPA) and 4.84 points absolute (corresponding to 9.01% relative) reduc- tion in terms of word stroke ratio (WSR) over the baseline

Segment-based interactive-predictive machine translation

[EN] Machine translation systems require human revision to obtain high-quality translations. Interactive methods provide an efficient human¿computer collaboration, notably increasing productivity. Recently, new interactive protocols have been proposed, seeking for a more effective user interaction with the system. In this work, we present one of these new protocols, which allows the user to validate all correct word sequences in a translation hypothesis. Thus, the left-to-right barrier from most of the existing protocols is broken. We compare this protocol against the classical prefix-based approach, obtaining a significant reduction of the user effort in a simulated environment. Additionally, we experiment with the use of confidence measures to select the word the user should correct at each iteration, reaching the conclusion that the order in which words are corrected does not affect the overall effort.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) under Project CoMUN-HaT (Grant Agreement TIN2015-70924-C2-1-R), and Generalitat Valenciana under Project ALMAMATER (Ggrant Agreement PROMETEOII/2014/030).Domingo-Ballester, M.; Peris-Abril, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2017). Segment-based interactive-predictive machine translation. Machine Translation. 31(4):163-185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-017-9213-3S163185314Alabau V, Bonk R, Buck C, Carl M, Casacuberta F, García-Martínez M, González-Rubio J, Koehn P, Leiva LA, Mesa-Lao B, Ortiz-Martínez D, Saint-Amand H, Sanchis-Trilles G, Tsoukala C (2013) CASMACAT: an open source workbench for advanced computer aided translation. 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Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

Lexically Constrained Decoding for Sequence Generation Using Grid Beam Search

We present Grid Beam Search (GBS), an algorithm which extends beam search to allow the inclusion of pre-specified lexical constraints. The algorithm can be used with any model that generates a sequence $\mathbf{\hat{y}} = \{y_{0}\ldots y_{T}\}$, by maximizing $p(\mathbf{y} | \mathbf{x}) = \prod\limits_{t}p(y_{t} | \mathbf{x}; \{y_{0} \ldots y_{t-1}\})$. Lexical constraints take the form of phrases or words that must be present in the output sequence. This is a very general way to incorporate additional knowledge into a model's output without requiring any modification of the model parameters or training data. We demonstrate the feasibility and flexibility of Lexically Constrained Decoding by conducting experiments on Neural Interactive-Predictive Translation, as well as Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation. Experiments show that GBS can provide large improvements in translation quality in interactive scenarios, and that, even without any user input, GBS can be used to achieve significant gains in performance in domain adaptation scenarios.Comment: Accepted as a long paper at ACL 201