Miriam Exel


2023

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Analyzing Challenges in Neural Machine Translation for Software Localization
Sai Koneru | Matthias Huck | Miriam Exel | Jan Niehues
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Advancements in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) greatly benefit the software localization industry by decreasing the post-editing time of human annotators. Although the volume of the software being localized is growing significantly, techniques for improving NMT for user interface (UI) texts are lacking. These UI texts have different properties than other collections of texts, presenting unique challenges for NMT. For example, they are often very short, causing them to be ambiguous and needing additional context (button, title text, a table item, etc.) for disambiguation. However, no such UI data sets are readily available with contextual information for NMT models to exploit. This work aims to provide a first step in improving UI translations and highlight its challenges. To achieve this, we provide a novel multilingual UI corpus collection (∼ 1.3M for English German) with a targeted test set and analyze the limitations of state-of-the-art methods on this challenging task. Specifically, we present a targeted test set for disambiguation from English to German to evaluate reliably and emphasize UI translation challenges. Furthermore, we evaluate several state-of-the-art NMT techniques from domain adaptation and document-level NMT on this challenging task. All the scripts to replicate the experiments and data sets are available here.ˆ,

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Enhancing Supervised Learning with Contrastive Markings in Neural Machine Translation Training
Nathaniel Berger | Miriam Exel | Matthias Huck | Stefan Riezler
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

Supervised learning in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) standardly follows a teacher forcing paradigm where the conditioning context in the model’s prediction is constituted by reference tokens, instead of its own previous predictions. In order to alleviate this lack of exploration in the space of translations, we present a simple extension of standard maximum likelihood estimation by a contrastive marking objective. The additional training signals are extracted automatically from reference translations by comparing the system hypothesis against the reference, and used for up/down-weighting correct/incorrect tokens. The proposed new training procedure requires one additional translation pass over the training set, and does not alter the standard inference setup. We show that training with contrastive markings yields improvements on top of supervised learning, and is especially useful when learning from postedits where contrastive markings indicate human error corrections to the original hypotheses.

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A Study on the Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Translation with Markup
Raj Dabre | Bianka Buschbeck | Miriam Exel | Hideki Tanaka
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIX, Vol. 1: Research Track

In this paper we evaluate the utility of large language models (LLMs) for translation of text with markup in which the most important and challenging aspect is to correctly transfer markup tags while ensuring that the content, both, inside and outside tags is correctly translated. While LLMs have been shown to be effective for plain text translation, their effectiveness for structured document translation is not well understood. To this end, we experiment with BLOOM and BLOOMZ, which are open-source multilingual LLMs, using zero, one and few-shot prompting, and compare with a domain-specific in-house NMT system using a detag-and-project approach for markup tags. We observe that LLMs with in-context learning exhibit poorer translation quality compared to the domain-specific NMT system, however, they are effective in transferring markup tags, especially the large BLOOM model (176 billion parameters). This is further confirmed by our human evaluation which also reveals the types of errors of the different tag transfer techniques. While LLM-based approaches come with the risk of losing, hallucinating and corrupting tags, they excel at placing them correctly in the translation.

2022

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A Multilingual Multiway Evaluation Data Set for Structured Document Translation of Asian Languages
Bianka Buschbeck | Raj Dabre | Miriam Exel | Matthias Huck | Patrick Huy | Raphael Rubino | Hideki Tanaka
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022

Translation of structured content is an important application of machine translation, but the scarcity of evaluation data sets, especially for Asian languages, limits progress. In this paper we present a novel multilingual multiway evaluation data set for the translation of structured documents of the Asian languages Japanese, Korean and Chinese. We describe the data set, its creation process and important characteristics, followed by establishing and evaluating baselines using the direct translation as well as detag-project approaches. Our data set is well suited for multilingual evaluation, and it contains richer annotation tag sets than existing data sets. Our results show that massively multilingual translation models like M2M-100 and mBART-50 perform surprisingly well despite not being explicitly trained to handle structured content. The data set described in this paper and used in our experiments is released publicly.

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“Hi, how can I help you?” Improving Machine Translation of Conversational Content in a Business Context
Bianka Buschbeck | Jennifer Mell | Miriam Exel | Matthias Huck
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

This paper addresses the automatic translation of conversational content in a business context, for example support chat dialogues. While such use cases share characteristics with other informal machine translation scenarios, translation requirements with respect to technical and business-related expressions are high. To succeed in such scenarios, we experimented with curating dedicated training and test data, injecting noise to improve robustness, and applying sentence weighting schemes to carefully manage the influence of the different corpora. We show that our approach improves the performance of our models on conversational content for all 18 investigated language pairs while preserving translation quality on other domains - an indispensable requirement to integrate these developments into our MT engines at SAP.

2020

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Incorporating External Annotation to improve Named Entity Translation in NMT
Maciej Modrzejewski | Miriam Exel | Bianka Buschbeck | Thanh-Le Ha | Alexander Waibel
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

The correct translation of named entities (NEs) still poses a challenge for conventional neural machine translation (NMT) systems. This study explores methods incorporating named entity recognition (NER) into NMT with the aim to improve named entity translation. It proposes an annotation method that integrates named entities and inside–outside–beginning (IOB) tagging into the neural network input with the use of source factors. Our experiments on English→German and English→ Chinese show that just by including different NE classes and IOB tagging, we can increase the BLEU score by around 1 point using the standard test set from WMT2019 and achieve up to 12% increase in NE translation rates over a strong baseline.

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Terminology-Constrained Neural Machine Translation at SAP
Miriam Exel | Bianka Buschbeck | Lauritz Brandt | Simona Doneva
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

This paper examines approaches to bias a neural machine translation model to adhere to terminology constraints in an industrial setup. In particular, we investigate variations of the approach by Dinu et al. (2019), which uses inline annotation of the target terms in the source segment plus source factor embeddings during training and inference, and compare them to constrained decoding. We describe the challenges with respect to terminology in our usage scenario at SAP and show how far the investigated methods can help to overcome them. We extend the original study to a new language pair and provide an in-depth evaluation including an error classification and a human evaluation.

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A Parallel Evaluation Data Set of Software Documentation with Document Structure Annotation
Bianka Buschbeck | Miriam Exel
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Asian Translation

This paper accompanies the software documentation data set for machine translation, a parallel evaluation data set of data originating from the SAP Help Portal, that we released to the machine translation community for research purposes. It offers the possibility to tune and evaluate machine translation systems in the domain of corporate software documentation and contributes to the availability of a wider range of evaluation scenarios. The data set comprises of the language pairs English to Hindi, Indonesian, Malay and Thai, and thus also increases the test coverage for the many low-resource language pairs. Unlike most evaluation data sets that consist of plain parallel text, the segments in this data set come with additional metadata that describes structural information of the document context. We provide insights into the origin and creation, the particularities and characteristics of the data set as well as machine translation results.