NLP in the age of monolithic large language models is approaching its limits in terms of size and information that can be handled. The trend goes to modularization, a necessary step into the direction of designing smaller sub-networks and components with specialized functionality. In this paper, we present the MAMMOTH toolkit: a framework designed for training massively multilingual modular machine translation systems at scale, initially derived from OpenNMT-py and then adapted to ensure efficient training across computation clusters.We showcase its efficiency across clusters of A100 and V100 NVIDIA GPUs, and discuss our design philosophy and plans for future information.The toolkit is publicly available online at https://github.com/Helsinki-NLP/mammoth.

Whether embedding spaces use all their dimensions equally, i.e., whether they are isotropic, has been a recent subject of discussion. Evidence has been accrued both for and against enforcing isotropy in embedding spaces. In the present paper, we stress that isotropy imposes requirements on the embedding space that are not compatible with the presence of clusters—which also negatively impacts linear classification objectives. We demonstrate this fact both empirically and mathematically and use it to shed light on previous results from the literature.

This paper offers an in-depth overview of the team “ODIAGEN’s” translation system submitted to the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2023). Our focus lies in the domain of Indic Multimodal tasks, specifically targeting English to Hindi, English to Malayalam, and English to Bengali translations. The system uses a state-of-the-art Transformer-based architecture, specifically the NLLB-200 model, fine-tuned with language-specific Visual Genome Datasets. With this robust system, we were able to manage both text-to-text and multimodal translations, demonstrating versatility in handling different translation modes. Our results showcase strong performance across the board, with particularly promising results in the Hindi and Bengali translation tasks. A noteworthy achievement of our system lies in its stellar performance across all text-to-text translation tasks. In the categories of English to Hindi, English to Bengali, and English to Malayalam translations, our system claimed the top positions for both the evaluation and challenge sets. This system not only advances our understanding of the challenges and nuances of Indic language translation but also opens avenues for future research to enhance translation accuracy and performance.

There are several ways of implementing multilingual NLP systems but little consensus as to whether different approaches exhibit similar effects. Are the trends that we observe when adding more languages the same as those we observe when sharing more parameters? We focus on encoder representations drawn from modular multilingual machine translation systems in an English-centric scenario, and study their quality from multiple aspects: how adequate they are for machine translation, how independent of the source language they are, and what semantic information they convey. Adding translation directions in English-centric scenarios does not conclusively lead to an increase in translation quality. Shared layers increase performance on zero-shot translation pairs and lead to more language-independent representations, but these improvements do not systematically align with more semantically accurate representations, from a monolingual standpoint.

This paper provides the system description of “Silo NLP’s” submission to the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2022). We have participated in the Indic Multimodal tasks (English->Hindi, English->Malayalam, and English->Bengali, Multimodal Translation). For text-only translation, we used the Transformer and fine-tuned the mBART. For multimodal translation, we used the same architecture and extracted object tags from the images to use as visual features concatenated with the text sequence for input. Our submission tops many tasks including English->Hindi multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Malayalam text-only and multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Bengali multimodal translation (challenge test), and English->Bengali text-only translation (evaluation test).

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.

We describe the enhancement of a multilingual NMT toolkit developed as part of the FoTran project. We devise our modular attention-bridge model, which connects language-specific components through a shared network layer. The system now supports distributed training over many nodes and GPUs in order to substantially scale up the number of languages that can be included in a modern neural translation architecture. The model enables the study of emerging language-agnostic representations and also provides a modular toolkit for efficient machine translation.

This paper describes the joint participation of University of Helsinki and Aalto University to two shared tasks of WMT 2020: the news translation between Inuktitut and English and the low-resource translation between German and Upper Sorbian. For both tasks, our efforts concentrate on efficient use of monolingual and related bilingual corpora with scheduled multi-task learning as well as an optimized subword segmentation with sampling. Our submission obtained the highest score for Upper Sorbian -> German and was ranked second for German -> Upper Sorbian according to BLEU scores. For English–Inuktitut, we reached ranks 8 and 10 out of 11 according to BLEU scores.

Data-driven segmentation of words into subword units has been used in various natural language processing applications such as automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translation for almost 20 years. Recently it has became more widely adopted, as models based on deep neural networks often benefit from subword units even for morphologically simpler languages. In this paper, we discuss and compare training algorithms for a unigram subword model, based on the Expectation Maximization algorithm and lexicon pruning. Using English, Finnish, North Sami, and Turkish data sets, we show that this approach is able to find better solutions to the optimization problem defined by the Morfessor Baseline model than its original recursive training algorithm. The improved optimization also leads to higher morphological segmentation accuracy when compared to a linguistic gold standard. We publish implementations of the new algorithms in the widely-used Morfessor software package.

This article describes the Aalto University entry to the WMT18 News Translation Shared Task. We participate in the multilingual subtrack with a system trained under the constrained condition to translate from English to both Finnish and Estonian. The system is based on the Transformer model. We focus on improving the consistency of morphological segmentation for words that are similar orthographically, semantically, and distributionally; such words include etymological cognates, loan words, and proper names. For this, we introduce Cognate Morfessor, a multilingual variant of the Morfessor method. We show that our approach improves the translation quality particularly for Estonian, which has less resources for training the translation model.

Progress in the quality of machine translation output calls for new automatic evaluation procedures and metrics. In this paper, we extend the Morpheval protocol introduced by Burlot and Yvon (2017) for the English-to-Czech and English-to-Latvian translation directions to three additional language pairs, and report its use to analyze the results of WMT 2018’s participants for these language pairs. Considering additional, typologically varied source and target languages also enables us to draw some generalizations regarding this morphology-oriented evaluation procedure.

This paper describes the MeMAD project entry to the WMT Multimodal Machine Translation Shared Task. We propose adapting the Transformer neural machine translation (NMT) architecture to a multi-modal setting. In this paper, we also describe the preliminary experiments with text-only translation systems leading us up to this choice. We have the top scoring system for both English-to-German and English-to-French, according to the automatic metrics for flickr18. Our experiments show that the effect of the visual features in our system is small. Our largest gains come from the quality of the underlying text-only NMT system. We find that appropriate use of additional data is effective.