The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the crucial current challenges in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and becomes even more challenging in the multilingual setting. Since the majority of the community’s benchmarks exist only in English, test sets are now being machine translated at scale into dozens of languages. This work explores the feasibility of that approach, comparing a Finnish machine translation (MT) of ARC-Challenge with a new human translated version. Our findings suggest that since absolute scores are fairly close and model size rankings are preserved, machine translation is adequate in this case. Surprisingly, however, the datasets reverse the order of base models compared to their chat-finetuned counterparts.
In our submission to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morpheme Segmentation, we study whether an unsupervised morphological segmentation method, Morfessor, can help in a supervised setting. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of the approach in semisupervised settings with small amounts of labeled data. The current tasks vary in data size: the amount of word-level annotated training data is much larger, but the amount of sentencelevel annotated training data remains small. Our approach is to pre-segment the input data for a neural sequence-to-sequence model with the unsupervised method. As the unsupervised method can be trained with raw text data, we use Wikipedia to increase the amount of training data. In addition, we train multilingual models for the sentence-level task. The results for the Morfessor-enriched features are mixed, showing benefit for all three sentencelevel tasks but only some of the word-level tasks. The multilingual training yields considerable improvements over the monolingual sentence-level models, but it negates the effect of the enriched features.
For children, the system trained on a large corpus of adult speakers performed worse than a system trained on a much smaller corpus of children’s speech. This is due to the acoustic mismatch between training and testing data. To capture more acoustic variability we trained a shared system with mixed data from adults and children. The shared system yields the best EER for children with no degradation for adults. Thus, the single system trained with mixed data is applicable for speaker verification for both adults and children.
This paper describes the MeMAD project entry to the IWSLT Speech Translation Shared Task, addressing the translation of English audio into German text. Between the pipeline and end-to-end model tracks, we participated only in the former, with three contrastive systems. We tried also the latter, but were not able to finish our end-to-end model in time. All of our systems start by transcribing the audio into text through an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model trained on the TED-LIUM English Speech Recognition Corpus (TED-LIUM). Afterwards, we feed the transcripts into English-German text-based neural machine translation (NMT) models. Our systems employ three different translation models trained on separate training sets compiled from the English-German part of the TED Speech Translation Corpus (TED-TRANS) and the OPENSUBTITLES2018 section of the OPUS collection. In this paper, we also describe the experiments leading up to our final systems. Our experiments indicate that using OPENSUBTITLES2018 in training significantly improves translation performance. We also experimented with various preand postprocessing routines for the NMT module, but we did not have much success with these. Our best-scoring system attains a BLEU score of 16.45 on the test set for this year’s task.