Phrase-level dense retrieval has shown many appealing characteristics in downstream NLP tasks by leveraging the fine-grained information that phrases offer. In our work, we propose a new task formulation of dense retrieval, cross-lingual contextualized phrase retrieval, which aims to augment cross-lingual applications by addressing polysemy using context information. However, the lack of specific training data and models are the primary challenges to achieve our goal. As a result, we extract pairs of cross-lingual phrases using word alignment information automatically induced from parallel sentences. Subsequently, we train our Cross-lingual Contextualized Phrase Retriever (CCPR) using contrastive learning, which encourages the hidden representations of phrases with similar contexts and semantics to align closely. Comprehensive experiments on both the cross-lingual phrase retrieval task and a downstream task, i.e, machine translation, demonstrate the effectiveness of CCPR. On the phrase retrieval task, CCPR surpasses baselines by a significant margin, achieving a top-1 accuracy that is at least 13 points higher. When utilizing CCPR to augment the large-language-model-based translator, it achieves average gains of 0.7 and 1.5 in BERTScore for translations from X=>En and vice versa, respectively, on WMT16 dataset. We will release our code and data.

Interactive neural machine translation (INMT) is able to guarantee high-quality translations by taking human interactions into account. Existing IMT systems relying on lexical constrained decoding (LCD) enable humans to translate in a flexible translation order beyond the left-to-right. However, they typically suffer from two significant limitations in translation efficiency and quality due to the reliance on LCD. In this work, we propose a novel BiTIIMT system, Bilingual Text-Infilling for Interactive Neural Machine Translation. The key idea to BiTIIMT is Bilingual Text-infilling (BiTI) which aims to fill missing segments in a manually revised translation for a given source sentence. We propose a simple yet effective solution by casting this task as a sequence-to-sequence task. In this way, our system performs decoding without explicit constraints and makes full use of revised words for better translation prediction. Experiment results show that BiTiIMT performs significantly better and faster than state-of-the-art LCD-based IMT on three translation tasks.

It is generally believed that a translation memory (TM) should be beneficial for machine translation tasks. Unfortunately, existing wisdom demonstrates the superiority of TM-based neural machine translation (NMT) only on the TM-specialized translation tasks rather than general tasks, with a non-negligible computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate approach to TM-based NMT within the Transformer framework: the model architecture is simple and employs a single bilingual sentence as its TM, leading to efficient training and inference; and its parameters are effectively optimized through a novel training criterion. Extensive experiments on six TM-specialized tasks show that the proposed approach substantially surpasses several strong baselines that use multiple TMs, in terms of BLEU and running time. In particular, the proposed approach also advances the strong baselines on two general tasks (WMT news Zh->En and En->De).

This paper describes our system of the sentence-level and word-level Quality Estimation Shared Task of WMT20. Our system is based on the QE Brain, and we simply enhance it by injecting noise at the target side. And to obtain the deep bi-directional information, we use a masked language model at the target side instead of two single directional decoders. Meanwhile, we try to use the extra QE data from the WMT17 and WMT19 to improve our system’s performance. Finally, we ensemble the features or the results from different models to get our best results. Our system finished fifth in the end at sentence-level on both EN-ZH and EN-DE language pairs.