1,194 research outputs found
Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations
Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically
equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence
pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be
trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our
semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface
features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for
neural machine translation.Comment: Accepted as a full paper to NAACL 201
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification
Progress in Sentence Simplification has been hindered by the lack of
supervised data, particularly in languages other than English. Previous work
has aligned sentences from original and simplified corpora such as English
Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia, but this limits corpus size, domain,
and language. In this work, we propose using unsupervised mining techniques to
automatically create training corpora for simplification in multiple languages
from raw Common Crawl web data. When coupled with a controllable generation
mechanism that can flexibly adjust attributes such as length and lexical
complexity, these mined paraphrase corpora can be used to train simplification
systems in any language. We further incorporate multilingual unsupervised
pretraining methods to create even stronger models and show that by training on
mined data rather than supervised corpora, we outperform the previous best
results. We evaluate our approach on English, French, and Spanish
simplification benchmarks and reach state-of-the-art performance with a totally
unsupervised approach. We will release our models and code to mine the data in
any language included in Common Crawl
Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages
We present Samanantar, the largest publicly available parallel corpora
collection for Indic languages. The collection contains a total of 49.7 million
sentence pairs between English and 11 Indic languages (from two language
families). Specifically, we compile 12.4 million sentence pairs from existing,
publicly-available parallel corpora, and additionally mine 37.4 million
sentence pairs from the web, resulting in a 4x increase. We mine the parallel
sentences from the web by combining many corpora, tools, and methods: (a)
web-crawled monolingual corpora, (b) document OCR for extracting sentences from
scanned documents, (c) multilingual representation models for aligning
sentences, and (d) approximate nearest neighbor search for searching in a large
collection of sentences. Human evaluation of samples from the newly mined
corpora validate the high quality of the parallel sentences across 11
languages. Further, we extract 83.4 million sentence pairs between all 55 Indic
language pairs from the English-centric parallel corpus using English as the
pivot language. We trained multilingual NMT models spanning all these languages
on Samanantar, which outperform existing models and baselines on publicly
available benchmarks, such as FLORES, establishing the utility of Samanantar.
Our data and models are available publicly at
https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org/samanantar/ and we hope they will help advance
research in NMT and multilingual NLP for Indic languages.Comment: Accepted to the Transactions of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (TACL
SpeechMatrix: A Large-Scale Mined Corpus of Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translations
We present SpeechMatrix, a large-scale multilingual corpus of
speech-to-speech translations mined from real speech of European Parliament
recordings. It contains speech alignments in 136 language pairs with a total of
418 thousand hours of speech. To evaluate the quality of this parallel speech,
we train bilingual speech-to-speech translation models on mined data only and
establish extensive baseline results on EuroParl-ST, VoxPopuli and FLEURS test
sets. Enabled by the multilinguality of SpeechMatrix, we also explore
multilingual speech-to-speech translation, a topic which was addressed by few
other works. We also demonstrate that model pre-training and sparse scaling
using Mixture-of-Experts bring large gains to translation performance. The
mined data and models are freely available.Comment: 18 page
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