While large pre-trained visual-language models have shown promising results on traditional visual question answering benchmarks, it is still challenging for them to answer complex VQA problems which requires diverse world knowledge. Motivated by the research of retrieval-augmented generation in the field of natural language processing, we use Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) to retrieve related knowledge to help the model answer questions. However, DPR conduct retrieving in natural language space, which may not ensure comprehensive acquisition of image information. Thus, the retrieved knowledge is not truly conducive to helping answer the question, affecting the performance of the overall system. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages the visual-language model to select the key knowledge retrieved by DPR and answer questions. The framework consists of two modules: Selector and Answerer, where both are initialized by the MLLM and parameter-efficiently finetuned by self-bootstrapping: find key knowledge in the retrieved knowledge documents using the Selector, and then use them to finetune the Answerer to predict answers; obtain the pseudo-labels of key knowledge documents based on the predictions of the Answerer and weak supervision labels, and then finetune the Selector to select key knowledge; repeat. Our framework significantly enhances the performance of the baseline on the challenging open-domain Knowledge-based VQA benchmark, OK-VQA, achieving a state-of-the-art accuracy of 62.83%.

Deploying large-scale pre-trained models in the prompt-tuning paradigm has demonstrated promising performance in few-shot learning. Particularly, vision-language pre-training models (VL-PTMs) have been intensively explored in various few-shot downstream tasks. However, most existing works only apply VL-PTMs to visual tasks like image classification, with few attempts being made on language tasks like text classification. In few-shot text classification, a feasible paradigm for deploying VL-PTMs is to align the input samples and their category names via the text encoders. However, it leads to the waste of visual information learned by the image encoders of VL-PTMs. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel method named Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT). To our best knowledge, this method is the first attempt to deploy VL-PTM in few-shot text classification task. The main idea is to generate the image embeddings w.r.t. category names as visual prompt and then add them to the aligning process. Extensive experiments show that our VPT can achieve significant improvements under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Importantly, our VPT even outperforms the most recent prompt-tuning methods on five public text classification datasets.

This article describes a large-scale evaluation of the use of Statistical Machine Translation for professional subtitling. The work was carried out within the FP7 EU-funded project SUMAT and involved two rounds of evaluation: a quality evaluation and a measure of productivity gain/loss. We present the SMT systems built for the project and the corpora they were trained on, which combine professionally created and crowd-sourced data. Evaluation goals, methodology and results are presented for the eleven translation pairs that were evaluated by professional subtitlers. Overall, a majority of the machine translated subtitles received good quality ratings. The results were also positive in terms of productivity, with a global gain approaching 40%. We also evaluated the impact of applying quality estimation and filtering of poor MT output, which resulted in higher productivity gains for filtered files as opposed to fully machine-translated files. Finally, we present and discuss feedback from the subtitlers who participated in the evaluation, a key aspect for any eventual adoption of machine translation technology in professional subtitling.

The paper presents a novel technique for speech translation using hierarchical phrased-based statistical machine translation (HPB-SMT). The system is based on translation of speech from phone sequences as opposed to conventional approach of speech translation from word sequences. The technique facilitates speech translation by allowing a machine translation (MT) system to access to phonetic information. This enables the MT system to act as both a word recognition and a translation component. This results in better performance than conventional speech translation approaches by recovering from recognition error with help of a source language model, translation model and target language model. For this purpose, the MT translation models are adopted to work on source language phones using a grapheme-to-phoneme component. The source-side phonetic confusions are handled using a confusion network. The result on IWLST'10 English- Chinese translation task shows a significant improvement in translation quality. In this paper, results for HPB-SMT are compared with previously published results of phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT) system (Baseline). The HPB-SMT system outperforms PB-SMT in this regard.

This paper presents a case-study of work done by Applied Language Solutions (ALS) for a large social networking provider who claim to have built the world’s first multi-language social network, where Internet users from all over the world can communicate in languages that are available in the system. In an initial phase, the social networking provider contracted ALS to build Machine Translation (MT) engines for twelve language-pairs: Russian⇔English, Russian⇔Turkish, Russian⇔Arabic, Turkish⇔English, Turkish⇔Arabic and Arabic⇔English. All of the input data is user-generated content, so we faced a number of problems in building large-scale, robust, high-quality engines. Primarily, much of the source-language data is of ‘poor’ or at least ‘non-standard’ quality. This comes in many forms: (i) content produced by non-native speakers, (ii) content produced by native speakers containing non-deliberate typos, or (iii) content produced by native speakers which deliberately departs from spelling norms to bring about some linguistic effect. Accordingly, in addition to the ‘regular’ pre-processing techniques used in the building of our statistical MT systems, we needed to develop routines to deal with all these scenarios. In this paper, we describe how we handle shortforms, acronyms, typos, punctuation errors, non-dictionary slang, wordplay, censor avoidance and emoticons. We demonstrate automatic evaluation scores on the social network data, together with insights from the the social networking provider regarding some of the typical errors made by the MT engines, and how we managed to correct these in the engines.

Content localisation via machine translation (MT) is a sine qua non, especially for international online business. While most applications utilise rule-based solutions due to the lack of suitable in-domain parallel corpora for statistical MT (SMT) training, in this paper we investigate the possibility of applying SMT where huge amounts of monolingual content only are available. We describe a case study where an analysis of a very large amount of monolingual online trading data from eBay is conducted by ALS with a view to reducing this corpus to the most representative sample in order to ensure the widest possible coverage of the total data set. Furthermore, minimal yet optimal sets of sentences/words/terms are selected for generation of initial translation units for future SMT system-building.

In this paper, we provide a description of the Dublin City University’s (DCU) submissions in the IWSLT 2011 evaluationcampaign.1 WeparticipatedintheArabic-Englishand Chinese-English Machine Translation(MT) track translation tasks. We use phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) models to create the baseline system. Due to the open-domain nature of the data to be translated, we use domain adaptation techniques to improve the quality of translation. Furthermore, we explore target-side syntactic augmentation for an Hierarchical Phrase-Based (HPB) SMT model. Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is used to extract labels for target-side phrases and non-terminals in the HPB system. Combining the domain adapted language models with the CCG-augmented HPB system gave us the best translations for both language pairs providing statistically significant improvements of 6.09 absolute BLEU points (25.94% relative) and 1.69 absolute BLEU points (15.89% relative) over the unadapted PBSMT baselines for the Arabic-English and Chinese-English language pairs, respectively.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate source-side syntactic reordering patterns into phrase-based SMT. The main contribution of this work is to use the lattice scoring approach to exploit and utilize reordering information that is favoured by the baseline PBSMT system. By referring to the parse trees of the training corpus, we represent the observed reorderings with source-side syntactic patterns. The extracted patterns are then used to convert the parsed inputs into word lattices, which contain both the original source sentences and their potential reorderings. Weights of the word lattices are estimated from the observations of the syntactic reordering patterns in the training corpus. Finally, the PBSMT system is tuned and tested on the generated word lattices to show the benefits of adding potential source-side reorderings in the inputs. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method on a medium-sized corpus for Chinese-English machine translation task. Our method outperformed the baseline system by 1.67% relative on a randomly selected testset and 8.56% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score.