Translating Short Segments with NMT: A Case Study in English-to-Hindi

This paper presents a case study in translating short image captions of the Visual Genome dataset from English into Hindi using out-of-domain data sets of varying size. We experiment with three NMT models: the shallow and deep sequence-to-sequence and the Transformer model as implemented in Marian toolkit. Phrase-based Moses serves as the baseline. The results indicate that the Transformer model outperforms others in the large data setting in a number of automatic metrics and manual evaluation, and it also produces the fewest truncated sentences. Transformer training is however very sensitive to the hyperparameters, so it requires more experimenting. The deep sequence-to-sequence model produced more flawless outputs in the small data setting and it was generally more stable, at the cost of more training iterations.This work has been supported by the grants 18-24210S of the Czech Science Foundation, SVV 260 453 and “Progress” Q18+Q48 of Charles University, and using language resources distributed by the LINDAT/CLARIN project of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (projects LM2015071 and OP VVV VI CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16 013/0001781)

Silo NLP's Participation at WAT2022

This paper provides the system description of "Silo NLP's" submission to the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2022). We have participated in the Indic Multimodal tasks (English->Hindi, English->Malayalam, and English->Bengali Multimodal Translation). For text-only translation, we trained Transformers from scratch and fine-tuned mBART-50 models. For multimodal translation, we used the same mBART architecture and extracted object tags from the images to use as visual features concatenated with the text sequence. Our submission tops many tasks including English->Hindi multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Malayalam text-only and multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Bengali multimodal translation (challenge test), and English->Bengali text-only translation (evaluation test).Peer reviewe

Silo NLP's Participation at WAT2022

This paper provides the system description of "Silo NLP's" submission to the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2022). We have participated in the Indic Multimodal tasks (English->Hindi, English->Malayalam, and English->Bengali Multimodal Translation). For text-only translation, we trained Transformers from scratch and fine-tuned mBART-50 models. For multimodal translation, we used the same mBART architecture and extracted object tags from the images to use as visual features concatenated with the text sequence. Our submission tops many tasks including English->Hindi multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Malayalam text-only and multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Bengali multimodal translation (challenge test), and English->Bengali text-only translation (evaluation test).Peer reviewe

HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Language

This paper presents HaVQA, the first multimodal dataset for visual question-answering (VQA) tasks in the Hausa language. The dataset was created by manually translating 6,022 English question-answer pairs, which are associated with 1,555 unique images from the Visual Genome dataset. As a result, the dataset provides 12,044 gold standard English-Hausa parallel sentences that were translated in a fashion that guarantees their semantic match with the corresponding visual information. We conducted several baseline experiments on the dataset, including visual question answering, visual question elicitation, text-only and multimodal machine translation.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023 as a long paper (Findings

Revisiting Low Resource Status of Indian Languages in Machine Translation

Indian language machine translation performance is hampered due to the lack of large scale multi-lingual sentence aligned corpora and robust benchmarks. Through this paper, we provide and analyse an automated framework to obtain such a corpus for Indian language neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Our pipeline consists of a baseline NMT system, a retrieval module, and an alignment module that is used to work with publicly available websites such as press releases by the government. The main contribution towards this effort is to obtain an incremental method that uses the above pipeline to iteratively improve the size of the corpus as well as improve each of the components of our system. Through our work, we also evaluate the design choices such as the choice of pivoting language and the effect of iterative incremental increase in corpus size. Our work in addition to providing an automated framework also results in generating a relatively larger corpus as compared to existing corpora that are available for Indian languages. This corpus helps us obtain substantially improved results on the publicly available WAT evaluation benchmark and other standard evaluation benchmarks.Comment: 10 pages, few figures, Preprint under revie

Overview of the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation

This paper presents the results of the shared tasks from the 6th workshop on Asian translation (WAT2019) including Ja↔En, Ja↔Zh scientific paper translation subtasks, Ja↔En, Ja↔Ko, Ja↔En patent translation subtasks, Hi↔En, My↔En, Km↔En, Ta↔En mixed domain subtasks and Ru↔Ja news commentary translation task. For the WAT2019, 25 teams participated in the shared tasks. We also received 10 research paper submissions out of which 61 were accepted. About 400 translation results were submitted to the automatic evaluation server, and selected submis- sions were manually evaluated

Hindi Visual Genome 1.1

Data ---- Hindi Visual Genome 1.1 is an updated version of Hindi Visual Genome 1.0. The update concerns primarily the text part of Hindi Visual Genome, fixing translation issues reported during WAT 2019 multimodal task. In the image part, only one segment and thus one image were removed from the dataset. Hindi Visual Genome 1.1 serves in "WAT 2020 Multi-Modal Machine Translation Task". Hindi Visual Genome is a multimodal dataset consisting of text and images suitable for English-to-Hindi multimodal machine translation task and multimodal research. We have selected short English segments (captions) from Visual Genome along with associated images and automatically translated them to Hindi with manual post-editing, taking the associated images into account. The training set contains 29K segments. Further 1K and 1.6K segments are provided in a development and test sets, respectively, which follow the same (random) sampling from the original Hindi Visual Genome. A third test set is called ``challenge test set'' consists of 1.4K segments and it was released for WAT2019 multi-modal task. The challenge test set was created by searching for (particularly) ambiguous English words based on the embedding similarity and manually selecting those where the image helps to resolve the ambiguity. The surrounding words in the sentence however also often include sufficient cues to identify the correct meaning of the ambiguous word. Dataset Formats -------------- The multimodal dataset contains both text and images. The text parts of the dataset (train and test sets) are in simple tab-delimited plain text files. All the text files have seven columns as follows: Column1 - image_id Column2 - X Column3 - Y Column4 - Width Column5 - Height Column6 - English Text Column7 - Hindi Text The image part contains the full images with the corresponding image_id as the file name. The X, Y, Width and Height columns indicate the rectangular region in the image described by the caption. Data Statistics ---------------- The statistics of the current release is given below. Parallel Corpus Statistics --------------------------- Dataset Segments English Words Hindi Words ------- --------- ---------------- ------------- Train 28930 143164 145448 Dev 998 4922 4978 Test 1595 7853 7852 Challenge Test 1400 8186 8639 ------- --------- ---------------- ------------- Total 32923 164125 166917 The word counts are approximate, prior to tokenization. Citation -------- If you use this corpus, please cite the following paper: @article{hindi-visual-genome:2019, title={{Hindi Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multimodal English-to-Hindi Machine Translation}}, author={Parida, Shantipriya and Bojar, Ond{\v{r}}ej and Dash, Satya Ranjan}, journal={Computaci{\'o}n y Sistemas}, volume={23}, number={4}, pages={1499--1505}, year={2019}

Abstract Text Summarization: A Low Resource Challenge

Text summarization is considered as a challenging task in the NLP community. The availability of datasets for the task of multilingual text summarization is rare, and such datasets are difficult to construct. In this work, we build an abstract text summarizer for the German language text using the state-of-the-art “Transformer” model. We propose an iterative data augmentation approach which uses synthetic data along with the real summarization data for the German language. To generate synthetic data, the Common Crawl (German) dataset is exploited, which covers different domains. The synthetic data is effective for the low resource condition and is particularly helpful for our multilingual scenario where availability of summarizing data is still a challenging issue. The data are also useful in deep learning scenarios where the neural models require a large amount of training data for utilization of its capacity. The obtained summarization performance is measured in terms of ROUGE and BLEU score. We achieve an absolute improvement of +1.5 and +16.0 in ROUGE1 F1 (R1 F1) on the development and test sets, respectively, compared to the system which does not rely on data augmentation

Idiap NMT System for WAT 2019 Multimodal Translation Task

This paper describes the Idiap submission to WAT 2019 for the English-Hindi Multi-Modal Translation Task. We have used the state-of-the-art Transformer model and utilized the IITB English-Hindi parallel corpus as an additional data source. Among the different tracks of the multi-modal task, we have participated in the “Text-Only” track for the evaluation and challenge test sets. Our submission tops in its track among the competitors in terms of both automatic and manual evaluation. Based on automatic scores, our text-only submission also outperforms systems that consider visual information in the “multi-modal translation” task