eSCAPE: a Large-scale Synthetic Corpus for Automatic Post-Editing

Training models for the automatic correction of machine-translated text usually relies on data consisting of (source, MT, human post- edit) triplets providing, for each source sentence, examples of translation errors with the corresponding corrections made by a human post-editor. Ideally, a large amount of data of this kind should allow the model to learn reliable correction patterns and effectively apply them at test stage on unseen (source, MT) pairs. In practice, however, their limited availability calls for solutions that also integrate in the training process other sources of knowledge. Along this direction, state-of-the-art results have been recently achieved by systems that, in addition to a limited amount of available training data, exploit artificial corpora that approximate elements of the "gold" training instances with automatic translations. Following this idea, we present eSCAPE, the largest freely-available Synthetic Corpus for Automatic Post-Editing released so far. eSCAPE consists of millions of entries in which the MT element of the training triplets has been obtained by translating the source side of publicly-available parallel corpora, and using the target side as an artificial human post-edit. Translations are obtained both with phrase-based and neural models. For each MT paradigm, eSCAPE contains 7.2 million triplets for English-German and 3.3 millions for English-Italian, resulting in a total of 14,4 and 6,6 million instances respectively. The usefulness of eSCAPE is proved through experiments in a general-domain scenario, the most challenging one for automatic post-editing. For both language directions, the models trained on our artificial data always improve MT quality with statistically significant gains. The current version of eSCAPE can be freely downloaded from: http://hltshare.fbk.eu/QT21/eSCAPE.html.Comment: Accepted at LREC 201

online automatic post editing for mt in a multi domain translation environment

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eSCAPE: a Large-scale Synthetic Corpus for Automatic Post-Editing

Training models for the automatic correction of machine-translated text usually relies on data consisting of (source, MT, human_post-edit) triplets providing, for each source sentence, examples of translation errors with the corresponding corrections made by a human post-editor. Ideally, a large amount of data of this kind should allow the model to learn reliable correction patterns and effectively apply them at test stage on unseen (source,MT) pairs. In practice, however, their limited availability calls for solutions that also integrate in the training process other sources of knowledge. Along this direction, state-of-the-art results have been recently achieved by systems that, in addition to a limited amount of available training data, exploit artificial corpora that approximate elements of the “gold” training instances with automatic translations. Following this idea, we present eSCAPE, the largest freely-available Synthetic Corpus for AutomaticPost-Editing released so far. eSCAPE consists of millions of entries in which the MT element of the training triplets has been obtained by translating the sourceside of publicly-available parallel corpora, and using the target side as an artificial human post-edit.Translations are obtained both with phrase-based and neural models. For each MT paradigm, eSCAPE contains 7.2 million triplets forEnglish–German and 3.3 millions for English–Italian, resulting in a total of 14,4 and 6,6 million instances respectively. The usefulness of eSCAPE is proved through experiments in a general-domain scenario, the most challenging one for automatic post-editing. For both language directions, the models trained on our artificial data always improve MT quality with statistically significant gains. The current version of eSCAPE can be freely downloaded from: http://hltshare.fbk.eu/QT21/eSCAPE.htm

Findings of the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Automatic Post-Editing

We present the results from the fourth round of the WMT shared task on MTAutomatic Post-Editing. The task consists in automatically correcting the output of a “black-box” machine translation system by learning from human corrections. Keeping the same general evaluation setting of the three previous rounds, this year we focused on one language pair (English-German) and on domain-specific data (Information Technology), with MT outputs produced by two different paradigms: phrase-based (PBSMT) and neural (NMT). Five teams submitted respectively 11 runs for the PBSMT subtask and 10 runs for the NMT sub-task. In the former subtask, characterized by original translations of lower quality, top results achieved impressive improvements, up to -6.24 TER and +9.53 BLEU points over the baseline “do-nothing” system. The NMT subtask proved to be more challenging due to the higher quality of the original translations and the availability of less training data. In this case, top results show smaller improvements up to-0.38 TER and +0.8 BLEU points

Instance Selection forOnline Automatic Post-Editing in a multi-domain scenario.

In recent years, several end-to-end online translation systems have been proposed to success-fully incorporate human post-editing feedback in the translation workflow. The performance of these systems in a multi-domain translation environment (involving different text genres, post-editing styles, machine translation systems) within the automatic post-editing (APE) task has not been thoroughly investigated yet. In this work, we show that when used in the APE framework the existing online systems are not robust towards domain changes in the incoming data stream. In particular, these systems lack in the capability to learn and use domain-specific post-editing rules from a pool of multi-domain data sets. To cope with this problem, we propose an online learning framework that generates more reliable translations with significantly better quality as compared with the existing online and batch systems. Our framework includes: i) an instance selection technique based on information retrieval that helps to build domain-specificAPE systems, and ii)an optimization procedure to tune the feature weights of the log-linear model that allows the decoder to improve the post-editing quality

Multi-source transformer with combined losses for automatic post editing

Recent approaches to the Automatic Post-editing (APE) of Machine Translation (MT) have shown that best results are obtained by neural multi-source models that correct the raw MT output by also considering information from the corresponding source sentence. To this aim, we present for the first time a neural multi-source APE model based on theTransformer architecture. Moreover, we employ sequence-level loss functions in order to avoid exposure bias during training and to be consistent with the automatic evaluation metrics used for the task. These are the main features of our submissions to the WMT 2018APE shared task (Chatterjee et al., 2018), where we participated both in the PBSMT sub-task (i.e. the correction of MT outputs from a phrase-based system) and in the NMT sub-task (i.e. the correction of neural outputs).In the first subtask, our system improves over the baseline up to -5.3 TER and +8.23 BLEU points ranking second out of 11 submitted runs. In the second one, characterized by the higher quality of the initial translations, we report lower but statistically significant gains (up to -0.38 TER and +0.8 BLEU), ranking first out of 10 submissions

Guiding neural machine translation decoding with external knowledge

© 2017 The Authors. Published by Association for Computational Linguistics. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-4716Chatterjee, R., Negri, M., Turchi, M., Federico, M. et al. (2017) Guiding neural machine translation decoding with external knowledge. In, Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation, Volume 1: Research Papers, Bojar, O., Buck, C., Chatterjee, R., Federmann, C. et al. (eds.) Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 157-168.This work has been partially supported by the ECfunded H2020 projects QT21 (grant agreement no. 645452) and ModernMT (grant agreement no. 645487)

Guiding Neural Machine Translation Decoding with External Knowledge

Differentlyfromthephrase-based paradigm,neural machine translation(NMT) operates on word and sentence representations in a continuous space.This makes the decoding process not only more difficult to interpret, but also harder to influence with external knowledge. For the latter problem, effective solutions like the XML-markup used by phrase-based models to inject fixed translation options as constraints at decoding time are not yet available. We propose a “guide”mechanism that enhances an existingNMT decoder with the ability to prioritize and adequately handle translation options presented in the form of XML annotations of source words. Positive results obtained in two different translation tasks indicate the effectiveness of our approach

FBK’s Neural Machine Translation Systems for IWSLT 2016

In this paper, we describe FBK’s neural machine translation (NMT) systems submitted at the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2016. The systems are based on the state-of-the-art NMT architecture that is equipped with a bi-directional encoder and an attention mechanism in the decoder. They leverage linguistic information such as lemmas and part-of-speech tags of the source words in the form of additional factors along with the words. We compare performances of word and subword NMT systems along with different optimizers. Further, we explore different ensemble techniques to leverage multiple models within the same and across different networks. Several reranking methods are also explored. Our submissions cover all directions of the MSLT task, as well as en-{de, fr} and {de, fr}-en directions of TED. Compared to previously published best results on the TED 2014 test set, our models achieve comparable results on en-de and surpass them on en-fr (+2 BLEU) and fr-en (+7.7 BLEU) language pairs