A Unified Model for Reverse Dictionary and Definition Modelling

We build a dual-way neural dictionary to retrieve words given definitions, and produce definitions for queried words. The model learns the two tasks simultaneously and handles unknown words via embeddings. It casts a word or a definition to the same representation space through a shared layer, then generates the other form in a multi-task fashion. Our method achieves promising automatic scores on previous benchmarks without extra resources. Human annotators prefer the model's outputs in both reference-less and reference-based evaluation, indicating its practicality. Analysis suggests that multiple objectives benefit learning

Edinburgh at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Jointly Fishing for Word Embeddings and Definitions

This paper presents a winning submission to the SemEval 2022 Task 1 on two sub-tasks: reverse dictionary and definition modelling. We leverage a recently proposed unified model with multi-task training. It utilizes data symmetrically and learns to tackle both tracks concurrently. Analysis shows that our system performs consistently on diverse languages, and works the best with sgns embeddings. Yet, char and electra carry intriguing properties. The two tracks' best results are always in differing subsets grouped by linguistic annotations. In this task, the quality of definition generation lags behind, and BLEU scores might be misleading

The Highs and Lows of Simple Lexical Domain Adaptation Approaches for Neural Machine Translation

Machine translation systems are vulnerable to domain mismatch, especially in a low-resource scenario. Out-of-domain translations are often of poor quality and prone to hallucinations, due to exposure bias and the decoder acting as a language model. We adopt two approaches to alleviate this problem: lexical shortlisting restricted by IBM statistical alignments, and hypothesis reranking based on similarity. The methods are computationally cheap and show success on low-resource out-of-domain test sets. However, the methods lose advantage when there is sufficient data or too great domain mismatch. This is due to both the IBM model losing its advantage over the implicitly learned neural alignment, and issues with subword segmentation of unseen words

To Adapt or to Fine-tune: A Case Study on Abstractive Summarization

Recent advances in the field of abstractive summarization leverage pre-trained language models rather than train a model from scratch. However, such models are sluggish to train and accompanied by a massive overhead. Researchers have proposed a few lightweight alternatives such as smaller adapters to mitigate the drawbacks. Nonetheless, it remains uncertain whether using adapters benefits the task of summarization, in terms of improved efficiency without an unpleasant sacrifice in performance. In this work, we carry out multifaceted investigations on fine-tuning and adapters for summarization tasks with varying complexity: language, domain, and task transfer. In our experiments, fine-tuning a pre-trained language model generally attains a better performance than using adapters; the performance gap positively correlates with the amount of training data used. Notably, adapters exceed fine-tuning under extremely low-resource conditions. We further provide insights on multilinguality, model convergence, and robustness, hoping to shed light on the pragmatic choice of fine-tuning or adapters in abstractive summarization

Exploring Data Augmentation for Code Generation Tasks

Advances in natural language processing, such as transfer learning from pre-trained language models, have impacted how models are trained for programming language tasks too. Previous research primarily explored code pre-training and expanded it through multi-modality and multi-tasking, yet the data for downstream tasks remain modest in size. Focusing on data utilization for downstream tasks, we propose and adapt augmentation methods that yield consistent improvements in code translation and summarization by up to 6.9% and 7.5% respectively. Further analysis suggests that our methods work orthogonally and show benefits in output code style and numeric consistency. We also discuss test data imperfections

Approaching Neural Chinese Word Segmentation as a Low-Resource Machine Translation Task

Supervised Chinese word segmentation has entered the deep learning era which reduces the hassle of feature engineering. Recently, some researchers attempted to treat it as character-level translation which further simplified model designing and building, but there is still a performance gap between the translation-based approach and other methods. In this work, we apply the best practices from low-resource neural machine translation to Chinese word segmentation. We build encoder-decoder models with attention, and examine a series of techniques including regularization, data augmentation, objective weighting, transfer learning and ensembling. Our method is generic for word segmentation, without the need for feature engineering or model implementation. In the closed test with constrained data, our method ties with the state of the art on the MSR dataset and is comparable to other methods on the PKU dataset

Towards Effective Disambiguation for Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Resolving semantic ambiguity has long been recognised as a central challenge in the field of Machine Translation. Recent work on benchmarking translation performance on ambiguous sentences has exposed the limitations of conventional Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems, which fail to handle many such cases. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative, demonstrating comparable performance to traditional NMT models while introducing new paradigms for controlling the target outputs. In this paper, we study the capabilities of LLMs to translate "ambiguous sentences" - i.e. those containing highly polysemous words and/or rare word senses. We also propose two ways to improve their disambiguation capabilities, through a) in-context learning and b) fine-tuning on carefully curated ambiguous datasets. Experiments show that our methods can match or outperform state-of-the-art systems such as DeepL and NLLB in four out of five language directions. Our research provides valuable insights into effectively adapting LLMs to become better disambiguators during Machine Translation. We release our curated disambiguation corpora and resources at https://data.statmt.org/ambiguous-europarl.Comment: WMT 202

Towards Effective Disambiguation for Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Resolving semantic ambiguity has long been recognised as a central challenge in the field of Machine Translation. Recent work on benchmarking translation performance on ambiguous sentences has exposed the limitations of conventional Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems, which fail to handle many such cases. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative, demonstrating comparable performance to traditional NMT models while introducing new paradigms for controlling the target outputs. In this paper, we study the capabilities of LLMs to translate ``ambiguous sentences'' - i.e. those containing highly polysemous words and/or rare word senses. We also propose two ways to improve their disambiguation capabilities, through a) in-context learning and b) fine-tuning on carefully curated ambiguous datasets. Experiments show that our methods can match or outperform state-of-the-art systems such as DeepL and NLLB in four out of five language directions. Our research provides valuable insights into effectively adapting LLMs to become better disambiguators during Machine Translation. We release our curated disambiguation corpora and resources at https://data.statmt.org/ambiguous-europarl

Character Mapping and Ad-hoc Adaptation: Edinburgh's IWSLT 2020 Open Domain Translation System

This paper describes the University of Edinburgh’s neural machine translation systems submitted to the IWSLT 2020 open domain Japanese Chinese translation task. On top of commonplace techniques like tokenisation and corpus cleaning, we explore character mapping and unsupervised decoding-time adaptation. Our techniques focus on leveraging the provided data, and we show the positive impact of each technique through the gradual improvement of BLEU