5,214 research outputs found
UGENT-LT3 SCATE Submission for WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation
This paper describes the submission of the UGENT-LT3 SCATE system to the WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE), viz. English-German word and sentence-level QE. Based on the observation that the data set is homogeneous (all sentences belong to the IT domain), we performed bilingual terminology extraction and added features derived from the resulting term list to the well-performing features of the word-level QE task of last year. For sentence-level QE, we analyzed the importance of the features and based on those insights extended the feature set of last year. We also experimented with different learning methods and ensembles. We present our observations from the different experiments we conducted and our submissions for both tasks
Temporal Attention-Gated Model for Robust Sequence Classification
Typical techniques for sequence classification are designed for
well-segmented sequences which have been edited to remove noisy or irrelevant
parts. Therefore, such methods cannot be easily applied on noisy sequences
expected in real-world applications. In this paper, we present the Temporal
Attention-Gated Model (TAGM) which integrates ideas from attention models and
gated recurrent networks to better deal with noisy or unsegmented sequences.
Specifically, we extend the concept of attention model to measure the relevance
of each observation (time step) of a sequence. We then use a novel gated
recurrent network to learn the hidden representation for the final prediction.
An important advantage of our approach is interpretability since the temporal
attention weights provide a meaningful value for the salience of each time step
in the sequence. We demonstrate the merits of our TAGM approach, both for
prediction accuracy and interpretability, on three different tasks: spoken
digit recognition, text-based sentiment analysis and visual event recognition.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 201
Language technologies for a multilingual Europe
This volume of the series “Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing” includes most of the papers presented at the Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe”, held at the University of Hamburg on September 27, 2011 in the framework of the conference GSCL 2011 with the topic “Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications”, along with several additional contributions. In addition to an overview article on Machine Translation and two contributions on the European initiatives META-NET and Multilingual Web, the volume includes six full research articles. Our intention with this workshop was to bring together various groups concerned with the umbrella topics of multilingualism and language technology, especially multilingual technologies. This encompassed, on the one hand, representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, and, on the other hand, users from diverse areas such as, among others, industry, administration and funding agencies. The Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe” was co-organised by the two GSCL working groups “Text Technology” and “Machine Translation” (http://gscl.info) as well as by META-NET (http://www.meta-net.eu)
Machine translation and post-editing training as part of a master’s programme
This article presents a description of a machine translation (MT) and post-editing course (PE), along with an MT project management module, that have been introduced in the Localisation Master’s programme at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2009 and in 2017 respectively. It covers the objectives and structure of the modules, as well as the theoretical and practical components. Additionally, it describes the project-based learning approach implemented in one of the modules, which seeks to foster creative and independent thinking, teamwork, and problem solving in unfamiliar situations, with a view to acquiring transferable skills that are likely to be in demand, regardless of the technological advances taking place in the translation industry
An Investigation into Automatic Translation of Prepositions in IT Technical Documentation from English to Chinese
Machine Translation (MT) technology has been widely used in the localisation industry to boost the productivity of professional translators. However, due to the high quality of translation expected, the translation performance of an MT system in isolation is less than satisfactory due to various generated errors. This study focuses on translation of prepositions from English into Chinese within technical documents in an industrial localisation context. The aim of the study is to reveal the salient errors in the translation of prepositions and to explore possible methods to remedy these errors.
This study proposes three new approaches to improve the translation of prepositions. All approaches attempt to make use of the strengths of the two most popular MT architectures at the moment: Rule-Based MT (RBMT) and Statistical MT (SMT). The approaches include: firstly building an automatic preposition dictionary for the RBMT system; secondly exploring and modifing the process of Statistical Post-Editing (SPE) and thirdly pre-processing the source texts to better suit the RBMT system. Overall evaluation results (both human evaluation and automatic evaluation) show the potential of our new approaches in improving the translation of prepositions. In addition, the current study also reveals a new function of automatic metrics in assisting researchers to obtain more valid or purpose-specific human valuation results
On the Domain Adaptation and Generalization of Pretrained Language Models: A Survey
Recent advances in NLP are brought by a range of large-scale pretrained
language models (PLMs). These PLMs have brought significant performance gains
for a range of NLP tasks, circumventing the need to customize complex designs
for specific tasks. However, most current work focus on finetuning PLMs on a
domain-specific datasets, ignoring the fact that the domain gap can lead to
overfitting and even performance drop. Therefore, it is practically important
to find an appropriate method to effectively adapt PLMs to a target domain of
interest. Recently, a range of methods have been proposed to achieve this
purpose. Early surveys on domain adaptation are not suitable for PLMs due to
the sophisticated behavior exhibited by PLMs from traditional models trained
from scratch and that domain adaptation of PLMs need to be redesigned to take
effect. This paper aims to provide a survey on these newly proposed methods and
shed light in how to apply traditional machine learning methods to newly
evolved and future technologies. By examining the issues of deploying PLMs for
downstream tasks, we propose a taxonomy of domain adaptation approaches from a
machine learning system view, covering methods for input augmentation, model
optimization and personalization. We discuss and compare those methods and
suggest promising future research directions
Adapting Sequence to Sequence models for Text Normalization in Social Media
Social media offer an abundant source of valuable raw data, however informal
writing can quickly become a bottleneck for many natural language processing
(NLP) tasks. Off-the-shelf tools are usually trained on formal text and cannot
explicitly handle noise found in short online posts. Moreover, the variety of
frequently occurring linguistic variations presents several challenges, even
for humans who might not be able to comprehend the meaning of such posts,
especially when they contain slang and abbreviations. Text Normalization aims
to transform online user-generated text to a canonical form. Current text
normalization systems rely on string or phonetic similarity and classification
models that work on a local fashion. We argue that processing contextual
information is crucial for this task and introduce a social media text
normalization hybrid word-character attention-based encoder-decoder model that
can serve as a pre-processing step for NLP applications to adapt to noisy text
in social media. Our character-based component is trained on synthetic
adversarial examples that are designed to capture errors commonly found in
online user-generated text. Experiments show that our model surpasses neural
architectures designed for text normalization and achieves comparable
performance with state-of-the-art related work.Comment: Accepted at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social
Media (ICWSM 2019
Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text
Texts like news, encyclopedias, and some social media strive for objectivity.
Yet bias in the form of inappropriate subjectivity - introducing attitudes via
framing, presupposing truth, and casting doubt - remains ubiquitous. This kind
of bias erodes our collective trust and fuels social conflict. To address this
issue, we introduce a novel testbed for natural language generation:
automatically bringing inappropriately subjective text into a neutral point of
view ("neutralizing" biased text). We also offer the first parallel corpus of
biased language. The corpus contains 180,000 sentence pairs and originates from
Wikipedia edits that removed various framings, presuppositions, and attitudes
from biased sentences. Last, we propose two strong encoder-decoder baselines
for the task. A straightforward yet opaque CONCURRENT system uses a BERT
encoder to identify subjective words as part of the generation process. An
interpretable and controllable MODULAR algorithm separates these steps, using
(1) a BERT-based classifier to identify problematic words and (2) a novel join
embedding through which the classifier can edit the hidden states of the
encoder. Large-scale human evaluation across four domains (encyclopedias, news
headlines, books, and political speeches) suggests that these algorithms are a
first step towards the automatic identification and reduction of bias.Comment: To appear at AAAI 202
- …