This overview paper presents the results of the General Machine Translation Task organised as part of the 2024 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT). In the general MT task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 11 language pairs, to be evaluated on test sets consisting of three to five different domains. In addition to participating systems, we collected translations from 8 different large language models (LLMs) and 4 online translation providers. We evaluate system outputs with professional human annotators using a new protocol called Error Span Annotations (ESA).

Following the rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) models, language models are applied to increasingly more complex interactive tasks such as negotiations and conversation moderations. Having human evaluators directly interact with these NLP models is essential for adequately evaluating the performance on such interactive tasks. We develop BotEval, an easily customizable, open-source, evaluation toolkit that focuses on enabling human-bot interactions as part of the evaluation process, as opposed to human evaluators making judgements for a static input. BotEval balances flexibility for customization and user-friendliness by providing templates for common use cases that span various degrees of complexity and built-in compatibility with popular crowdsourcing platforms.We showcase the numerous useful features of BotEval through a study that evaluates the performance of various chatbots on their effectiveness for conversational moderation and discuss how BotEval differs from other annotation tools.

Many machine translation toolkits make use of a data preparation step wherein raw data is transformed into a tensor format that can be used directly by the trainer. This preparation step is increasingly at odds with modern research and development practices because this process produces a static, unchangeable version of the training data, making common training-time needs difficult (e.g., subword sampling), time-consuming (preprocessing with large data can take days), expensive (e.g., disk space), and cumbersome (managing experiment combinatorics). We propose an alternative approach that separates the generation of data from the consumption of that data. In this approach, there is no separate pre-processing step; data generation produces an infinite stream of permutations of the raw training data, which the trainer tensorizes and batches as it is consumed. Additionally, this data stream can be manipulated by a set of user-definable operators that provide on-the-fly modifications, such as data normalization, augmentation or filtering. We release an open-source toolkit, SOTASTREAM, that implements this approach: https://github.com/marian-nmt/sotastream. We show that it cuts training time, adds flexibility, reduces experiment management complexity, and reduces disk space, all without affecting the accuracy of the trained models.

This paper presents the results of the General Machine Translation Task organised as part of the 2023 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT). In the general MT task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 8 language pairs (corresponding to 14 translation directions), to be evaluated on test sets consisting of up to four different domains. We evaluate system outputs with professional human annotators using a combination of source-based Direct Assessment and scalar quality metric (DA+SQM).

Building upon prior WMT shared tasks in document alignment and sentence filtering, we posed the open-ended shared task of finding the best subset of possible training data from a collection of Estonian-Lithuanian web data. Participants could focus on any portion of the end-to-end data curation pipeline, including alignment and filtering. We evaluated results based on downstream machine translation quality. We release processed Common Crawl data, along with various intermediate states from a strong baseline system, which we believe will enable future research on this topic.

This paper describes our submissions to the 2023 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT-23) Metrics shared task. Knowledge distillation is commonly used to create smaller student models that mimic larger teacher model while reducing the model size and hence inference cost in production. In this work, we apply knowledge distillation to machine translation evaluation metrics and distill existing reference-based teacher metrics into reference-free (quality estimation; QE) student metrics. We mainly focus on students of Unbabel’s COMET22 reference-based metric. When evaluating on the official WMT-22 Metrics evaluation task, our distilled Cometoid QE metrics outperform all other QE metrics on that set while matching or out-performing the reference-based teacher metric. Our metrics never see the human ground-truth scores directly – only the teacher metric was trained on human scores by its original creators. We also distill ChrF sentence-level scores into a neural QE metric and find that our reference-free (and fully human-score-free) student metric ChrFoid outperforms its teacher metric by over 7% pairwise accuracy on the same WMT-22 task, rivaling other existing QE metrics.

This paper presents the results of the General Machine Translation Task organised as part of the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2022. In the general MT task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 11 language pairs, to be evaluated on test sets consisting of four different domains. We evaluate system outputs with human annotators using two different techniques: reference-based direct assessment and (DA) and a combination of DA and scalar quality metric (DA+SQM).

While there are more than 7000 languages in the world, most translation research efforts have targeted a few high resource languages. Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer, and do not make these models available for transfer to low resource languages. In this work, we present useful tools for machine translation research: MTData, NLCodec and RTG. We demonstrate their usefulness by creating a multilingual neural machine translation model capable of translating from 500 source languages to English. We make this multilingual model readily downloadable and usable as a service, or as a parent model for transfer-learning to even lower-resource languages.

While traditional corpus-level evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) correlate well with fluency, they struggle to reflect adequacy. Model-based MT metrics trained on segment-level human judgments have emerged as an attractive replacement due to strong correlation results. These models, however, require potentially expensive re-training for new domains and languages. Furthermore, their decisions are inherently non-transparent and appear to reflect unwelcome biases. We explore the simple type-based classifier metric, MacroF1, and study its applicability to MT evaluation. We find that MacroF1 is competitive on direct assessment, and outperforms others in indicating downstream cross-lingual information retrieval task performance. Further, we show that MacroF1 can be used to effectively compare supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation, and reveal significant qualitative differences in the methods’ outputs.

We cast neural machine translation (NMT) as a classification task in an autoregressive setting and analyze the limitations of both classification and autoregression components. Classifiers are known to perform better with balanced class distributions during training. Since the Zipfian nature of languages causes imbalanced classes, we explore its effect on NMT. We analyze the effect of various vocabulary sizes on NMT performance on multiple languages with many data sizes, and reveal an explanation for why certain vocabulary sizes are better than others.

With the increasing democratization of electronic media, vast information resources are available in less-frequently-taught languages such as Swahili or Somali. That information, which may be crucially important and not available elsewhere, can be difficult for monolingual English speakers to effectively access. In this paper we present an end-to-end cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) and summarization system for low-resource languages that 1) enables English speakers to search foreign language repositories of text and audio using English queries, 2) summarizes the retrieved documents in English with respect to a particular information need, and 3) provides complete transcriptions and translations as needed. The SARAL system achieved the top end-to-end performance in the most recent IARPA MATERIAL CLIR+summarization evaluations. Our demonstration system provides end-to-end open query retrieval and summarization capability, and presents the original source text or audio, speech transcription, and machine translation, for two low resource languages.

Entities, which refer to distinct objects in the real world, can be viewed as language universals and used as effective signals to generate less ambiguous semantic representations and align multiple languages. We propose a novel method, CLEW, to generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia. We replace each anchor link in the source language with its corresponding entity title in the target language if it exists, or in the source language otherwise. A cross-lingual joint entity and word embedding learned from this kind of data not only can disambiguate linkable entities but can also effectively represent unlinkable entities. Because this multilingual common space directly relates the semantics of contextual words in the source language to that of entities in the target language, we leverage it for unsupervised cross-lingual entity linking. Experimental results show that CLEW significantly advances the state-of-the-art: up to 3.1% absolute F-score gain for unsupervised cross-lingual entity linking. Moreover, it provides reliable alignment on both the word/entity level and the sentence level, and thus we use it to mine parallel sentences for all (302, 2) language pairs in Wikipedia.