Recently, one popular alternative in Multilingual NMT (MNMT) is modularized MNMT that has both language-specific encoders and decoders. However, due to the absence of layer-sharing, the modularized MNMT failed to produce satisfactory language-independent (Interlingua) features, leading to performance degradation in zero-shot translation. To address this issue, a solution was proposed to share the top of language-specific encoder layers, enabling the successful generation of interlingua features. Nonetheless, it should be noted that this sharing structure does not guarantee the explicit propagation of language-specific features to their respective language-specific decoders. Consequently, to overcome this challenge, we present our modularized MNMT approach, where a modularized encoder is divided into three distinct encoder modules based on different sharing criteria: (1) source language-specific (Enc_s); (2) universal (Enc_all); (3) target language-specific (Enc_t). By employing these sharing strategies, Enc_all propagates the interlingua features, after which Enc_t propagates the target language-specific features to the language-specific decoders. Additionally, we suggest the Denoising Bi-path Autoencoder (DBAE) to fortify the Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) by leveraging Enc_t. For experimental purposes, our training corpus comprises both En-to-Any and Any-to-En directions. We adjust the size of our corpus to simulate both balanced and unbalanced settings. Our method demonstrates an improved average BLEU score by "+2.90” in En-to-Any directions and by "+3.06” in zero-shot compared to other MNMT baselines.

The state-of-the-art adaptive policies for Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation (SNMT) use monotonic attention to perform read/write decisions based on the partial source and target sequences. The lack of sufficient information might cause the monotonic attention to take poor read/write decisions, which in turn negatively affects the performance of the SNMT model. On the other hand, human translators make better read/write decisions since they can anticipate the immediate future words using linguistic information and domain knowledge. In this work, we propose a framework to aid monotonic attention with an external language model to improve its decisions. Experiments on MuST-C English-German and English-French speech-to-text translation tasks show the future information from the language model improves the state-of-the-art monotonic multi-head attention model further.

Despite the wide use of inline formatting, not much has been studied on translating sentences with inline formatted tags. The detag-and-project approach using word alignments is one solution to translating a tagged sentence. However, the method has a limitation: tag reinsertion is not considered in the translation process. Another solution is to use an end-to-end model which takes text with inline tags as inputs and translates them into a tagged sentence. This approach can alleviate the problems of the aforementioned method, but there is no sufficient parallel corpus dedicated to such a task. To solve this problem, an automatic data augmentation method by tag injection is suggested, but it is computationally expensive and augmentation is limited since the model is based on isolated translation for all fragments. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective tag augmentation method based on word alignment. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms the detag-and-project methods. We also introduce a metric to evaluate the placement of tags and show that the suggested metric is reasonable for our task. We further analyze the effectiveness of each implementation detail.

This paper describes the Samsung Research’s Translation system (SRT) submitted to the WMT22 biomedical translation task in two language directions: English to Spanish and Spanish to English. To improve the overall quality, we adopt the deep transformer architecture and employ the back-translation strategy for monolingual corpus. One of the issues in the domain translation is to translate domain-specific terminologies well. To address this issue, we apply the soft-constrained terminology translation based on biomedical terminology dictionaries. In this paper, we provide the performance of our system with WMT20 and WMT21 biomedical testsets. Compared to the best model in WMT20 and WMT21, our system shows equal or better performance. According to the official evaluation results in terms of BLEU scores, our systems get the highest scores in both directions.

Recent work in simultaneous machine translation is often trained with conventional full sentence translation corpora, leading to either excessive latency or necessity to anticipate as-yet-unarrived words, when dealing with a language pair whose word orders significantly differ. This is unlike human simultaneous interpreters who produce largely monotonic translations at the expense of the grammaticality of a sentence being translated. In this paper, we thus propose an algorithm to reorder and refine the target side of a full sentence translation corpus, so that the words/phrases between the source and target sentences are aligned largely monotonically, using word alignment and non-autoregressive neural machine translation. We then train a widely used wait-k simultaneous translation model on this reordered-and-refined corpus. The proposed approach improves BLEU scores and resulting translations exhibit enhanced monotonicity with source sentences.

This paper describes our submission to the WMT20 news translation shared task in English to Japanese direction. Our main approach is based on transferring knowledge of domain and linguistic characteristics by pre-training the encoder-decoder model with large amount of in-domain monolingual data through unsupervised and supervised prediction task. We then fine-tune the model with parallel data and in-domain synthetic data, generated with iterative back-translation. For additional gain, we generate final results with an ensemble model and re-rank them with averaged models and language models. Through these methods, we achieve +5.42 BLEU score compare to the baseline model.

In this paper, we describe end-to-end simultaneous speech-to-text and text-to-text translation systems submitted to IWSLT2020 online translation challenge. The systems are built by adding wait-k and meta-learning approaches to the Transformer architecture. The systems are evaluated on different latency regimes. The simultaneous text-to-text translation achieved a BLEU score of 26.38 compared to the competition baseline score of 14.17 on the low latency regime (Average latency ≤ 3). The simultaneous speech-to-text system improves the BLEU score by 7.7 points over the competition baseline for the low latency regime (Average Latency ≤ 1000).

In this paper, we describe the system submitted to the IWSLT 2020 Offline Speech Translation Task. We adopt the Transformer architecture coupled with the meta-learning approach to build our end-to-end Speech-to-Text Translation (ST) system. Our meta-learning approach tackles the data scarcity of the ST task by leveraging the data available from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT) tasks. The meta-learning approach combined with synthetic data augmentation techniques improves the model performance significantly and achieves BLEU scores of 24.58, 27.51, and 27.61 on IWSLT test 2015, MuST-C test, and Europarl-ST test sets respectively.

The deployment of widely used Transformer architecture is challenging because of heavy computation load and memory overhead during inference, especially when the target device is limited in computational resources such as mobile or edge devices. Quantization is an effective technique to address such challenges. Our analysis shows that for a given number of quantization bits, each block of Transformer contributes to translation quality and inference computations in different manners. Moreover, even inside an embedding block, each word presents vastly different contributions. Correspondingly, we propose a mixed precision quantization strategy to represent Transformer weights by an extremely low number of bits (e.g., under 3 bits). For example, for each word in an embedding block, we assign different quantization bits based on statistical property. Our quantized Transformer model achieves 11.8× smaller model size than the baseline model, with less than -0.5 BLEU. We achieve 8.3× reduction in run-time memory footprints and 3.5× speed up (Galaxy N10+) such that our proposed compression strategy enables efficient implementation for on-device NMT.

Soft-attention based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have achieved promising results on several translation tasks. These models attend all the words in the source sequence for each target token, which makes them ineffective for long sequence translation. In this work, we propose a hard-attention based NMT model which selects a subset of source tokens for each target token to effectively handle long sequence translation. Due to the discrete nature of the hard-attention mechanism, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm coupled with reward shaping strategy to efficiently train it. Experimental results show that the proposed model performs better on long sequences and thereby achieves significant BLEU score improvement on English-German (EN-DE) and English-French (ENFR) translation tasks compared to the soft attention based NMT.