Detecting Machine-Translated Text using Back Translation

Machine-translated text plays a crucial role in the communication of people using different languages. However, adversaries can use such text for malicious purposes such as plagiarism and fake review. The existing methods detected a machine-translated text only using the text's intrinsic content, but they are unsuitable for classifying the machine-translated and human-written texts with the same meanings. We have proposed a method to extract features used to distinguish machine/human text based on the similarity between the intrinsic text and its back-translation. The evaluation of detecting translated sentences with French shows that our method achieves 75.0% of both accuracy and F-score. It outperforms the existing methods whose the best accuracy is 62.8% and the F-score is 62.7%. The proposed method even detects more efficiently the back-translated text with 83.4% of accuracy, which is higher than 66.7% of the best previous accuracy. We also achieve similar results not only with F-score but also with similar experiments related to Japanese. Moreover, we prove that our detector can recognize both machine-translated and machine-back-translated texts without the language information which is used to generate these machine texts. It demonstrates the persistence of our method in various applications in both low- and rich-resource languages.Comment: INLG 2019, 9 page

Towards the Classification of the Finnish Internet Parsebank: Detecting Translations and Informality

Abstract This paper presents the first results on detecting informality, machine and human translations in the Finnish Internet Parsebank, a project developing a large-scale, web-based corpus with full morphological and syntactic analyses. The paper aims at classifying the Parsebank according to these criteria, as well as studying the linguistic characteristics of the classes. The features used include both lexical and morpho-syntactic properties, such as syntactic n-grams. The results are practically applicable, with an AUC range of 85-85% for the human, ∼ 98% for the machine translated texts and 73% for the informal texts. While word-based classification performs well for the indomain experiments, delexicalized methods with morpho-syntactic features prove to be more tolerant to variation caused by genre or source language. In addition, the results show that the features used in the classification provide interesting pointers for further, more detailed studies on the linguistic characteristics of these texts

Human or Neural Translation

Deep neural models tremendously improved machine translation. In this context, we investigate whether distinguishing machine from human translations is still feasible. We trained and applied 18 classifiers under two settings: a monolingual task, in which the classifier only looks at the translation; and a bilingual task, in which the source text is also taken into consideration. We report on extensive experiments involving 4 neural MT systems (Google Translate, DeepL, as well as two systems we trained) and varying the domain of texts. We show that the bilingual task is the easiest one and that transfer-based deep-learning classifiers perform best, with mean accuracies around 85% in-domain and 75% out-of-domain

The Roles of Language Models and Hierarchical Models in Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Prediction

With the advent of deep learning, research in many areas of machine learning is converging towards the same set of methods and models. For example, long short-term memory networks are not only popular for various tasks in natural language processing (NLP) such as speech recognition, machine translation, handwriting recognition, syntactic parsing, etc., but they are also applicable to seemingly unrelated fields such as robot control, time series prediction, and bioinformatics. Recent advances in contextual word embeddings like BERT boast with achieving state-of-the-art results on 11 NLP tasks with the same model. Before deep learning, a speech recognizer and a syntactic parser used to have little in common as systems were much more tailored towards the task at hand. At the core of this development is the tendency to view each task as yet another data mapping problem, neglecting the particular characteristics and (soft) requirements tasks often have in practice. This often goes along with a sharp break of deep learning methods with previous research in the specific area. This work can be understood as an antithesis to this paradigm. We show how traditional symbolic statistical machine translation models can still improve neural machine translation (NMT) while reducing the risk for common pathologies of NMT such as hallucinations and neologisms. Other external symbolic models such as spell checkers and morphology databases help neural grammatical error correction. We also focus on language models that often do not play a role in vanilla end-to-end approaches and apply them in different ways to word reordering, grammatical error correction, low-resource NMT, and document-level NMT. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of hierarchical models in sequence-to-sequence prediction. Hand-engineered covering grammars are effective in preventing catastrophic errors in neural text normalization systems. Our operation sequence model for interpretable NMT represents translation as a series of actions that modify the translation state, and can also be seen as derivation in a formal grammar.EPSRC grant EP/L027623/1 EPSRC Tier-2 capital grant EP/P020259/

Construction de corpus généraux et spécialisés à partir du Web

At the beginning of the first chapter the interdisciplinary setting between linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics is introduced. Then, the notion of corpus is put into focus. Existing corpus and text definitions are discussed. Several milestones of corpus design are presented, from pre-digital corpora at the end of the 1950s to web corpora in the 2000s and 2010s. The continuities and changes between the linguistic tradition and web native corpora are exposed.In the second chapter, methodological insights on automated text scrutiny in computer science, computational linguistics and natural language processing are presented. The state of the art on text quality assessment and web text filtering exemplifies current interdisciplinary research trends on web texts. Readability studies and automated text classification are used as a paragon of methods to find salient features in order to grasp text characteristics. Text visualization exemplifies corpus processing in the digital humanities framework. As a conclusion, guiding principles for research practice are listed, and reasons are given to find a balance between quantitative analysis and corpus linguistics, in an environment which is spanned by technological innovation and artificial intelligence techniques.Third, current research on web corpora is summarized. I distinguish two main approaches to web document retrieval: restricted retrieval and web crawling. The notion of web corpus preprocessing is introduced and salient steps are discussed. The impact of the preprocessing phase on research results is assessed. I explain why the importance of preprocessing should not be underestimated and why it is an important task for linguists to learn new skills in order to confront the whole data gathering and preprocessing phase.I present my work on web corpus construction in the fourth chapter. My analyses concern two main aspects, first the question of corpus sources (or prequalification), and secondly the problem of including valid, desirable documents in a corpus (or document qualification). Last, I present work on corpus visualization consisting of extracting certain corpus characteristics in order to give indications on corpus contents and quality.Le premier chapitre s'ouvre par un description du contexte interdisciplinaire. Ensuite, le concept de corpus est présenté en tenant compte de l'état de l'art. Le besoin de disposer de preuves certes de nature linguistique mais embrassant différentes disciplines est illustré par plusieurs scénarios de recherche. Plusieurs étapes clés de la construction de corpus sont retracées, des corpus précédant l'ère digitale à la fin des années 1950 aux corpus web des années 2000 et 2010. Les continuités et changements entre la tradition en linguistique et les corpus tirés du web sont exposés.Le second chapitre rassemble des considérations méthodologiques. L'état de l'art concernant l'estimation de la qualité de textes est décrit. Ensuite, les méthodes utilisées par les études de lisibilité ainsi que par la classification automatique de textes sont résumées. Des dénominateurs communs sont isolés. Enfin, la visualisation de textes démontre l'intérêt de l'analyse de corpus pour les humanités numériques. Les raisons de trouver un équilibre entre analyse quantitative et linguistique de corpus sont abordées.Le troisième chapitre résume l'apport de la thèse en ce qui concerne la recherche sur les corpus tirés d'internet. La question de la collection des données est examinée avec une attention particulière, tout spécialement le cas des URLs sources. La notion de prétraitement des corpus web est introduite, ses étapes majeures sont brossées. L'impact des prétraitements sur le résultat est évalué. La question de la simplicité et de la reproducibilité de la construction de corpus est mise en avant.La quatrième partie décrit l'apport de la thèse du point de vue de la construction de corpus proprement dite, à travers la question des sources et le problèmes des documents invalides ou indésirables. Une approche utilisant un éclaireur léger pour préparer le parcours du web est présentée. Ensuite, les travaux concernant la sélection de documents juste avant l'inclusion dans un corpus sont résumés : il est possible d'utiliser les apports des études de lisibilité ainsi que des techniques d'apprentissage artificiel au cours de la construction du corpus. Un ensemble de caractéristiques textuelles testées sur des échantillons annotés évalue l'efficacité du procédé. Enfin, les travaux sur la visualisation de corpus sont abordés : extraction de caractéristiques à l'échelle d'un corpus afin de donner des indications sur sa composition et sa qualité