Data-Driven Approach for Formality-Sensitive Machine Translation: Language-Specific Handling and Synthetic Data Generation

In this paper, we introduce a data-driven approach for Formality-Sensitive Machine Translation (FSMT) that caters to the unique linguistic properties of four target languages. Our methodology centers on two core strategies: 1) language-specific data handling, and 2) synthetic data generation using large-scale language models and empirical prompt engineering. This approach demonstrates a considerable improvement over the baseline, highlighting the effectiveness of data-centric techniques. Our prompt engineering strategy further improves performance by producing superior synthetic translation examples.Comment: Accepted for Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR) Workshop at ICML 202

A Self-Supervised Automatic Post-Editing Data Generation Tool

Data building for automatic post-editing (APE) requires extensive and expert-level human effort, as it contains an elaborate process that involves identifying errors in sentences and providing suitable revisions. Hence, we develop a self-supervised data generation tool, deployable as a web application, that minimizes human supervision and constructs personalized APE data from a parallel corpus for several language pairs with English as the target language. Data-centric APE research can be conducted using this tool, involving many language pairs that have not been studied thus far owing to the lack of suitable data.Comment: Accepted for DataPerf workshop at ICML 202

QUAK: A Synthetic Quality Estimation Dataset for Korean-English Neural Machine Translation

With the recent advance in neural machine translation demonstrating its importance, research on quality estimation (QE) has been steadily progressing. QE aims to automatically predict the quality of machine translation (MT) output without reference sentences. Despite its high utility in the real world, there remain several limitations concerning manual QE data creation: inevitably incurred non-trivial costs due to the need for translation experts, and issues with data scaling and language expansion. To tackle these limitations, we present QUAK, a Korean-English synthetic QE dataset generated in a fully automatic manner. This consists of three sub-QUAK datasets QUAK-M, QUAK-P, and QUAK-H, produced through three strategies that are relatively free from language constraints. Since each strategy requires no human effort, which facilitates scalability, we scale our data up to 1.58M for QUAK-P, H and 6.58M for QUAK-M. As an experiment, we quantitatively analyze word-level QE results in various ways while performing statistical analysis. Moreover, we show that datasets scaled in an efficient way also contribute to performance improvements by observing meaningful performance gains in QUAK-M, P when adding data up to 1.58M

Decoding Strategies for Improving Low-Resource Machine Translation

Pre-processing and post-processing are significant aspects of natural language processing (NLP) application software. Pre-processing in neural machine translation (NMT) includes subword tokenization to alleviate the problem of unknown words, parallel corpus filtering that only filters data suitable for training, and data augmentation to ensure that the corpus contains sufficient content. Post-processing includes automatic post editing and the application of various strategies during decoding in the translation process. Most recent NLP researches are based on the Pretrain-Finetuning Approach (PFA). However, when small and medium-sized organizations with insufficient hardware attempt to provide NLP services, throughput and memory problems often occur. These difficulties increase when utilizing PFA to process low-resource languages, as PFA requires large amounts of data, and the data for low-resource languages are often insufficient. Utilizing the current research premise that NMT model performance can be enhanced through various pre-processing and post-processing strategies without changing the model, we applied various decoding strategies to Korean–English NMT, which relies on a low-resource language pair. Through comparative experiments, we proved that translation performance could be enhanced without changes to the model. We experimentally examined how performance changed in response to beam size changes and n-gram blocking, and whether performance was enhanced when a length penalty was applied. The results showed that various decoding strategies enhance the performance and compare well with previous Korean–English NMT approaches. Therefore, the proposed methodology can improve the performance of NMT models, without the use of PFA; this presents a new perspective for improving machine translation performance

Who Speaks Like a Style of Vitamin:Towards Syntax-Aware Dialogue Summarization Using Multi-Task Learning

Abstractive dialogue summarization is a challenging task for several reasons. First, most of the important pieces of information in a conversation are scattered across utterances through multi-party interactions with different textual styles. Second, dialogues are often informal structures, wherein different individuals express personal perspectives, unlike text summarization, tasks that usually target formal documents such as news articles. To address these issues, we focused on the association between utterances from individual speakers and unique syntactic structures. Speakers have unique textual styles that can contain linguistic information, such as voiceprint. Therefore, we constructed a syntax-aware model by leveraging linguistic information (i.e., POS tagging), which alleviates the above issues by inherently distinguishing sentences uttered from individual speakers. We employed multi-task learning of both syntax-aware information and dialogue summarization. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first method to apply multi-task learning to the dialogue summarization task. Experiments on a SAMSum corpus (a large-scale dialogue summarization corpus) demonstrated that our method improved upon the vanilla model. We further analyze the costs and benefits of our approach relative to baseline models.Comment: This work has been accepted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Static Sound Event Localization and Detection Using Bipartite Matching Loss for Emergency Monitoring

In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the classes and directions of static audio objects using stereo microphones in a drone environment. Drones are being increasingly used across various fields, with the integration of sensors such as cameras and microphones, broadening their scope of application. Therefore, we suggest a method that attaches stereo microphones to drones for the detection and direction estimation of specific emergency monitoring. Specifically, the proposed neural network is configured to estimate fixed-size audio predictions and employs bipartite matching loss for comparison with actual audio objects. To train the proposed network structure, we built an audio dataset related to speech and drones in an outdoor environment. The proposed technique for identifying and localizing sound events, based on the bipartite matching loss we proposed, works better than those of the other teams in our group

The ASR Post-Processor Performance Challenges of BackTranScription (BTS): Data-Centric and Model-Centric Approaches

Training an automatic speech recognition (ASR) post-processor based on sequence-to-sequence (S2S) requires a parallel pair (e.g., speech recognition result and human post-edited sentence) to construct the dataset, which demands a great amount of human labor. BackTransScription (BTS) proposes a data-building method to mitigate the limitations of the existing S2S based ASR post-processors, which can automatically generate vast amounts of training datasets, reducing time and cost in data construction. Despite the emergence of this novel approach, the BTS-based ASR post-processor still has research challenges and is mostly untested in diverse approaches. In this study, we highlight these challenges through detailed experiments by analyzing the data-centric approach (i.e., controlling the amount of data without model alteration) and the model-centric approach (i.e., model modification). In other words, we attempt to point out problems with the current trend of research pursuing a model-centric approach and alert against ignoring the importance of the data. Our experiment results show that the data-centric approach outperformed the model-centric approach by +11.69, +17.64, and +19.02 in the F1-score, BLEU, and GLEU tests

AI Student: A Machine Reading Comprehension System for the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test

Machine reading comprehension is a question answering mechanism in which a machine reads, understands, and answers questions from a given text. These reasoning skills can be sufficiently grafted into the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) to bring about new scientific and educational advances. In this paper, we propose a novel Korean CSAT Question and Answering (KCQA) model and effectively utilize four easy data augmentation strategies with round trip translation to augment the insufficient data in the training dataset. To evaluate the effectiveness of KCQA, 30 students appeared for the test under conditions identical to the proposed model. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis along with experimental results revealed that KCQA achieved better performance than humans with a higher F1 score of 3.86

BERTOEIC: Solving TOEIC Problems Using Simple and Efficient Data Augmentation Techniques with Pretrained Transformer Encoders

Recent studies have attempted to understand natural language and infer answers. Machine reading comprehension is one of the representatives, and several related datasets have been opened. However, there are few official open datasets for the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), which is widely used for evaluating people’s English proficiency, and research for further advancement is not being actively conducted. We consider that the reason why deep learning research for TOEIC is difficult is due to the data scarcity problem, so we therefore propose two data augmentation methods to improve the model in a low resource environment. Considering the attributes of the semantic and grammar problem type in TOEIC, the proposed methods can augment the data similar to the real TOEIC problem by using POS-tagging and Lemmatizing. In addition, we confirmed the importance of understanding semantics and grammar in TOEIC through experiments on each proposed methodology and experiments according to the amount of data. The proposed methods address the data shortage problem of TOEIC and enable an acceptable human-level performance

Comparative Analysis of Current Approaches to Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation

Quality estimation (QE) has recently gained increasing interest as it can predict the quality of machine translation results without a reference translation. QE is an annual shared task at the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), and most recent studies have applied the multilingual pretrained language model (mPLM) to address this task. Recent studies have focused on the performance improvement of this task using data augmentation with finetuning based on a large-scale mPLM. In this study, we eliminate the effects of data augmentation and conduct a pure performance comparison between various mPLMs. Separate from the recent performance-driven QE research involved in competitions addressing a shared task, we utilize the comparison for sub-tasks from WMT20 and identify an optimal mPLM. Moreover, we demonstrate QE using the multilingual BART model, which has not yet been utilized, and conduct comparative experiments and analyses with cross-lingual language models (XLMs), multilingual BERT, and XLM-RoBERTa