Text image machine translation (TIMT) is a task that translates source texts embedded in the image to target translations. The existing TIMT task mainly focuses on text-line-level images. In this paper, we extend the current TIMT task and propose a novel task, **D**ocument **I**mage **M**achine **T**ranslation to **Markdown** (**DIMT2Markdown**), which aims to translate a source document image with long context and complex layout structure to markdown-formatted target translation.We also introduce a novel framework, **D**ocument **I**mage **M**achine **T**ranslation with **D**ynamic multi-pre-trained models **A**ssembling (**DIMTDA**).A dynamic model assembler is used to integrate multiple pre-trained models to enhance the model’s understanding of layout and translation capabilities.Moreover, we build a novel large-scale **Do**cument image machine **T**ranslation dataset of **A**rXiv articles in markdown format (**DoTA**), containing 126K image-translation pairs.Extensive experiments demonstrate the feasibility of end-to-end translation of rich-text document images and the effectiveness of DIMTDA.

In Multimodal Language Models (MLMs), the cost of manually annotating high-quality image-text pair data for fine-tuning and alignment is extremely high. While existing multimodal data augmentation frameworks propose ways to augment image-text pairs, they either suffer from semantic inconsistency between texts and images, or generate unrealistic images, causing knowledge gap with real world examples. To address these issues, we propose Attribute-based Multimodal Data Augmentation (ARMADA), a novel multimodal data augmentation method via knowledge-guided manipulation of visual attributes of the mentioned entities. Specifically, we extract entities and their visual attributes from the original text data, then search for alternative values for the visual attributes under the guidance of knowledge bases (KBs) and large language models (LLMs). We then utilize an image-editing model to edit the images with the extracted attributes. ARMADA is a novel multimodal data generation framework that: (i) extracts knowledge-grounded attributes from symbolic KBs for semantically consistent yet distinctive image-text pair generation, (ii) generates visually similar images of disparate categories using neighboring entities in the KB hierarchy, and (iii) uses the commonsense knowledge of LLMs to modulate auxiliary visual attributes such as backgrounds for more robust representation of original entities. Our empirical results over four downstream tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our framework to produce high-quality data and enhance the model performance. This also highlights the need to leverage external knowledge proxies for enhanced interpretability and real-world grounding.

Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) generates target outputs while receiving stream source inputs and requires a read/write policy to decide whether to wait for the next source token or generate a new target token, whose decisions form a decision path. Existing SiMT methods, which learn the policy by exploring various decision paths in training, face inherent limitations. These methods not only fail to precisely optimize the policy due to the inability to accurately assess the individual impact of each decision on SiMT performance, but also cannot sufficiently explore all potential paths because of their vast number. Besides, building decision paths requires unidirectional encoders to simulate streaming source inputs, which impairs the translation quality of SiMT models. To solve these issues, we propose Self-Modifying State Modeling (SM²), a novel training paradigm for SiMT task. Without building decision paths, SM² individually optimizes decisions at each state during training. To precisely optimize the policy, SM² introduces Self-Modifying process to independently assess and adjust decisions at each state. For sufficient exploration, SM² proposes Prefix Sampling to efficiently traverse all potential states. Moreover, SM² ensures compatibility with bidirectional encoders, thus achieving higher translation quality. Experiments show that SM² outperforms strong baselines. Furthermore, SM² allows offline machine translation models to acquire SiMT ability with fine-tuning.

Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims at translating source language texts in images into another target language, which has been proven successful by bridging text image recognition encoder and text translation decoder. However, it is still an open question of how to incorporate fine-grained knowledge supervision to make it consistent between recognition and translation modules. In this paper, we propose a novel TIMT method named as BabyNet, which is optimized with hierarchical parental supervision to improve translation performance. Inspired by genetic recombination and variation in the field of genetics, the proposed BabyNet is inherited from the recognition and translation parent models with a variation module of which parameters can be updated when training on the TIMT task. Meanwhile, hierarchical and multi-granularity supervision from parent models is introduced to bridge the gap between inherited modules in BabyNet. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world TIMT tests show that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods. Further analyses of various parent model combinations show the good generalization of our method.

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating “branching”. In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

Multimodal summarization usually suffers from the problem that the contribution of the visual modality is unclear. Existing multimodal summarization approaches focus on designing the fusion methods of different modalities, while ignoring the adaptive conditions under which visual modalities are useful. Therefore, we propose a novel Coarse-to-Fine contribution network for multimodal Summarization (CFSum) to consider different contributions of images for summarization. First, to eliminate the interference of useless images, we propose a pre-filter module to abandon useless images. Second, to make accurate use of useful images, we propose two levels of visual complement modules, word level and phrase level. Specifically, image contributions are calculated and are adopted to guide the attention of both textual and visual modalities. Experimental results have shown that CFSum significantly outperforms multiple strong baselines on the standard benchmark. Furthermore, the analysis verifies that useful images can even help generate non-visual words which are implicitly represented in the image.

Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links with multilingual knowledge graphs. However, existing approaches suffer from two main drawbacks: (a) alignment dependency: the multilingual KGC is always realized with joint entity or relation alignment, which introduces additional alignment models and increases the complexity of the whole framework; (b) training inefficiency: the trained model will only be used for the completion of one target KG, although the data from all KGs are used simultaneously. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel multilingual KGC framework with language-sensitive multi-graph attention such that the missing links on all given KGs can be inferred by a universal knowledge completion model. Specifically, we first build a relational graph neural network by sharing the embeddings of aligned nodes to transfer language-independent knowledge. Meanwhile, a language-sensitive multi-graph attention (LSMGA) is proposed to deal with the information inconsistency among different KGs. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvements on the DBP-5L and E-PKG datasets.

Neural code generation models are nowadays widely adopted to generate code from natural language descriptions automatically. Recently, pre-trained neural models equipped with token-level retrieval capabilities have exhibited great potentials in neural machine translation. However, applying them directly to code generation experience challenges: the use of the retrieval-based mechanism inevitably introduces extraneous noise to the generation process, resulting in even syntactically incorrect code. Computationally, such models necessitate frequent searches of the cached datastore, which turns out to be time-consuming. To address these issues, we propose kNN-TRANX, a token-level retrieval augmented code generation method. kNN-TRANX allows for searches in smaller datastores tailored for the code generation task. It leverages syntax constraints for the retrieval of datastores, which reduces the impact of retrieve noise. We evaluate kNN-TRANX on two public datasets and the experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Text image machine translation (TIMT) which translates source language text images into target language texts has attracted intensive attention in recent years. Although the end-to-end TIMT model directly generates target translation from encoded text image features with an efficient architecture, it lacks the recognized source language information resulting in a decrease in translation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-modal Cross-lingual Interactive Model (CCIM) to incorporate source language information by synchronously generating source language and target language results through an interactive attention mechanism between two language decoders. Extensive experimental results have shown the interactive decoder significantly outperforms end-to-end TIMT models and has faster decoding speed with smaller model size than cascade models.

Document image translation (DIT) aims to translate text embedded in images from one language to another. It is a challenging task that needs to understand visual layout with text semantics simultaneously. However, existing methods struggle to capture the crucial visual layout in real-world complex document images. In this work, we make the first attempt to incorporate layout knowledge into DIT in an end-to-end way. Specifically, we propose a novel Layout-aware end-to-end Document Image Translation (LayoutDIT) with multi-step conductive decoder. A layout-aware encoder is first introduced to model visual layout relations with raw OCR results. Then a novel multi-step conductive decoder is unified with hidden states conduction across three step-decoders to achieve the document translation step by step. Benefiting from the layout-aware end-to-end joint training, our LayoutDIT outperforms state-of-the-art methods with better parameter efficiency. Besides, we create a new multi-domain document image translation dataset to validate the model’s generalization. Extensive experiments show that LayoutDIT has a good generalization in diverse and complex layout scenes.

The ability to actively ground task instructions from an egocentric view is crucial for AI agents to accomplish tasks or assist humans virtually. One important step towards this goal is to localize and track key active objects that undergo major state change as a consequence of human actions/interactions to the environment without being told exactly what/where to ground (e.g., localizing and tracking the ‘sponge‘ in video from the instruction “Dip the sponge into the bucket.”). While existing works approach this problem from a pure vision perspective, we investigate to which extent the textual modality (i.e., task instructions) and their interaction with visual modality can be beneficial. Specifically, we propose to improve phrase grounding models’ ability on localizing the active objects by: (1) learning the role of ‘objects undergoing change‘ and extracting them accurately from the instructions, (2) leveraging pre- and post-conditions of the objects during actions, and (3) recognizing the objects more robustly with descriptional knowledge. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract the aforementioned action-object knowledge, and design a per-object aggregation masking technique to effectively perform joint inference on object phrases and symbolic knowledge. We evaluate our framework on Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which leads to>54% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE-Det localization + tracking task, >7% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE tracking task, and >3% improvements in average precision (AP) on the Ego4D SCOD task.

Role-oriented dialogue summarization is to generate summaries for different roles in the dialogue, e.g., merchants and consumers. Existing methods handle this task by summarizing each role’s content separately and thus are prone to ignore the information from other roles. However, we believe that other roles’ content could benefit the quality of summaries, such as the omitted information mentioned by other roles. Therefore, we propose a novel role interaction enhanced method for role-oriented dialogue summarization. It adopts cross attention and decoder self-attention interactions to interactively acquire other roles’ critical information. The cross attention interaction aims to select other roles’ critical dialogue utterances, while the decoder self-attention interaction aims to obtain key information from other roles’ summaries. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on two public role-oriented dialogue summarization datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that other roles’ content could help generate summaries with more complete semantics and correct topic structures.

We explore the application of state-of-the-art NER algorithms to ASR-generated call center transcripts. Previous work in this domain focused on the use of a BiLSTM-CRF model which relied on Flair embeddings; however, such a model is unwieldy in terms of latency and memory consumption. In a production environment, end users require low-latency models which can be readily integrated into existing pipelines. To that end, we present two different models which can be utilized based on the latency and accuracy requirements of the user. First, we propose a set of models which utilize state-of-the-art Transformer language models (RoBERTa) to develop a high-accuracy NER system trained on custom annotated set of call center transcripts. We then use our best-performing Transformer-based model to label a large number of transcripts, which we use to pretrain a BiLSTM-CRF model and further fine-tune on our annotated dataset. We show that this model, while not as accurate as its Transformer-based counterpart, is highly effective in identifying items which require redaction for privacy law compliance. Further, we propose a new general annotation scheme for NER in the call-center environment.

Dialogue summarization has drawn much attention recently. Especially in the customer service domain, agents could use dialogue summaries to help boost their works by quickly knowing customer’s issues and service progress. These applications require summaries to contain the perspective of a single speaker and have a clear topic flow structure, while neither are available in existing datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel Chinese dataset for Customer Service Dialogue Summarization (CSDS). CSDS improves the abstractive summaries in two aspects: (1) In addition to the overall summary for the whole dialogue, role-oriented summaries are also provided to acquire different speakers’ viewpoints. (2) All the summaries sum up each topic separately, thus containing the topic-level structure of the dialogue. We define tasks in CSDS as generating the overall summary and different role-oriented summaries for a given dialogue. Next, we compare various summarization methods on CSDS, and experiment results show that existing methods are prone to generate redundant and incoherent summaries. Besides, the performance becomes much worse when analyzing the performance on role-oriented summaries and topic structures. We hope that this study could benchmark Chinese dialogue summarization and benefit further studies.

Cross-lingual Entity alignment is an essential part of building a knowledge graph, which can help integrate knowledge among different language knowledge graphs. In the real KGs, there exists an imbalance among the information in the same hierarchy of corresponding entities, which results in the heterogeneity of neighborhood structure, making this task challenging. To tackle this problem, we propose a dual attention network for cross-lingual entity alignment (DAEA). Specifically, our dual attention consists of relation-aware graph attention and hierarchical attention. The relation-aware graph attention aims at selectively aggregating multi-hierarchy neighborhood information to alleviate the difference of heterogeneity among counterpart entities. The hierarchical attention adaptively aggregates the low-hierarchy and the high-hierarchy information, which is beneficial to balance the neighborhood information of counterpart entities and distinguish non-counterpart entities with similar structures. Finally, we treat cross-lingual entity alignment as a process of linking prediction. Experimental results on three real-world cross-lingual entity alignment datasets have shown the effectiveness of DAEA.

Previous studies combining knowledge graph (KG) with neural machine translation (NMT) have two problems: i) Knowledge under-utilization: they only focus on the entities that appear in both KG and training sentence pairs, making much knowledge in KG unable to be fully utilized. ii) Granularity mismatch: the current KG methods utilize the entity as the basic granularity, while NMT utilizes the sub-word as the granularity, making the KG different to be utilized in NMT. To alleviate above problems, we propose a multi-task learning method on sub-entity granularity. Specifically, we first split the entities in KG and sentence pairs into sub-entity granularity by using joint BPE. Then we utilize the multi-task learning to combine the machine translation task and knowledge reasoning task. The extensive experiments on various translation tasks have demonstrated that our method significantly outperforms the baseline models in both translation quality and handling the entities.

Cross-lingual summarization aims at summarizing a document in one language (e.g., Chinese) into another language (e.g., English). In this paper, we propose a novel method inspired by the translation pattern in the process of obtaining a cross-lingual summary. We first attend to some words in the source text, then translate them into the target language, and summarize to get the final summary. Specifically, we first employ the encoder-decoder attention distribution to attend to the source words. Second, we present three strategies to acquire the translation probability, which helps obtain the translation candidates for each source word. Finally, each summary word is generated either from the neural distribution or from the translation candidates of source words. Experimental results on Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese summarization tasks have shown that our proposed method can significantly outperform the baselines, achieving comparable performance with the state-of-the-art.

Medical entity normalization, which links medical mentions in the text to entities in knowledge bases, is an important research topic in medical natural language processing. In this paper, we focus on Chinese medical procedure entity normalization. However, nonstandard Chinese expressions and combined procedures present challenges in our problem. The existing strategies relying on the discriminative model are poorly to cope with normalizing combined procedure mentions. We propose a sequence generative framework to directly generate all the corresponding medical procedure entities. we adopt two strategies: category-based constraint decoding and category-based model refining to avoid unrealistic results. The method is capable of linking entities when a mention contains multiple procedure concepts and our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve remarkable improvements over existing baselines, particularly significant in the case of multi-implication Chinese medical procedures.

Dialogue contexts are proven helpful in the spoken language understanding (SLU) system and they are typically encoded with explicit memory representations. However, most of the previous models learn the context memory with only one objective to maximizing the SLU performance, leaving the context memory under-exploited. In this paper, we propose a new dialogue logistic inference (DLI) task to consolidate the context memory jointly with SLU in the multi-task framework. DLI is defined as sorting a shuffled dialogue session into its original logical order and shares the same memory encoder and retrieval mechanism as the SLU model. Our experimental results show that various popular contextual SLU models can benefit from our approach, and improvements are quite impressive, especially in slot filling.

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is the task to produce a summary in one particular language for a source document in a different language. Existing methods simply divide this task into two steps: summarization and translation, leading to the problem of error propagation. To handle that, we present an end-to-end CLS framework, which we refer to as Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization (NCLS), for the first time. Moreover, we propose to further improve NCLS by incorporating two related tasks, monolingual summarization and machine translation, into the training process of CLS under multi-task learning. Due to the lack of supervised CLS data, we propose a round-trip translation strategy to acquire two high-quality large-scale CLS datasets based on existing monolingual summarization datasets. Experimental results have shown that our NCLS achieves remarkable improvement over traditional pipeline methods on both English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English CLS human-corrected test sets. In addition, NCLS with multi-task learning can further significantly improve the quality of generated summaries. We make our dataset and code publicly available here: http://www.nlpr.ia.ac.cn/cip/dataset.htm.

In recent years, advances in neural variational inference have achieved many successes in text processing. Examples include neural topic models which are typically built upon variational autoencoder (VAE) with an objective of minimising the error of reconstructing original documents based on the learned latent topic vectors. However, minimising reconstruction errors does not necessarily lead to high quality topics. In this paper, we borrow the idea of reinforcement learning and incorporate topic coherence measures as reward signals to guide the learning of a VAE-based topic model. Furthermore, our proposed model is able to automatically separating background words dynamically from topic words, thus eliminating the pre-processing step of filtering infrequent and/or top frequent words, typically required for learning traditional topic models. Experimental results on the 20 Newsgroups and the NIPS datasets show superior performance both on perplexity and topic coherence measure compared to state-of-the-art neural topic models.

To deploy a spoken language understanding (SLU) model to a new language, language transferring is desired to avoid the trouble of acquiring and labeling a new big SLU corpus. An SLU corpus is a monolingual corpus with domain/intent/slot labels. Translating the original SLU corpus into the target language is an attractive strategy. However, SLU corpora consist of plenty of semantic labels (slots), which general-purpose translators cannot handle well, not to mention additional culture differences. This paper focuses on the language transferring task given a small in-domain parallel SLU corpus. The in-domain parallel corpus can be used as the first adaptation on the general translator. But more importantly, we show how to use reinforcement learning (RL) to further adapt the adapted translator, where translated sentences with more proper slot tags receive higher rewards. Our reward is derived from the source input sentence exclusively, unlike reward via actor-critical methods or computing reward with a ground truth target sentence. Hence we can adapt the translator the second time, using the big monolingual SLU corpus from the source language. We evaluate our approach on Chinese to English language transferring for SLU systems. The experimental results show that the generated English SLU corpus via adaptation and reinforcement learning gives us over 97% in the slot F1 score and over 84% accuracy in domain classification. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed language transferring method. Compared with naive translation, our proposed method improves domain classification accuracy by relatively 22%, and the slot filling F1 score by relatively more than 71%.

Multimodal summarization has drawn much attention due to the rapid growth of multimedia data. The output of the current multimodal summarization systems is usually represented in texts. However, we have found through experiments that multimodal output can significantly improve user satisfaction for informativeness of summaries. In this paper, we propose a novel task, multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO). To handle this task, we first collect a large-scale dataset for MSMO research. We then propose a multimodal attention model to jointly generate text and select the most relevant image from the multimodal input. Finally, to evaluate multimodal outputs, we construct a novel multimodal automatic evaluation (MMAE) method which considers both intra-modality salience and inter-modality relevance. The experimental results show the effectiveness of MMAE.

Terms extensively exist in specific domains, and term translation plays a critical role in domain-specific machine translation (MT) tasks. However, it’s a challenging task to translate them correctly for the huge number of pre-existing terms and the endless new terms. To achieve better term translation quality, it is necessary to inject external term knowledge into the underlying MT system. Fortunately, there are plenty of term translation knowledge in parenthetical sentences on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a simple, straightforward and effective framework to improve term translation by learning from parenthetical sentences. This framework includes: (1) a focused web crawler; (2) a parenthetical sentence filter, acquiring parenthetical sentences including bilingual term pairs; (3) a term translation knowledge extractor, extracting bilingual term translation candidates; (4) a probability learner, generating the term translation table for MT decoders. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly improves the translation quality of terms and sentences.

In current research, most tree-based translation models are built directly from parse trees. In this study, we go in another direction and build a translation model with an unsupervised tree structure derived from a novel non-parametric Bayesian model. In the model, we utilize synchronous tree substitution grammars (STSG) to capture the bilingual mapping between language pairs. To train the model efficiently, we develop a Gibbs sampler with three novel Gibbs operators. The sampler is capable of exploring the infinite space of tree structures by performing local changes on the tree nodes. Experimental results show that the string-to-tree translation system using our Bayesian tree structures significantly outperforms the strong baseline string-to-tree system using parse trees.

Although statistical machine translation (SMT) has made great progress since it came into being, the translation of numerical and time expressions is still far from satisfactory. Generally speaking, numbers are likely to be out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words due to their non-exhaustive characteristics even when the size of training data is very large, so it is difficult to obtain accurate translation results for the infinite set of numbers only depending on traditional statistical methods. We propose a language-independent framework to recognize and translate numbers more precisely by using a rule-based method. Through designing operators, we succeed to make rules educible and totally separate from codes, thus, we can extend rules to various language-pairs without re-coding, which contributes a lot to the efficient development of an SMT system with good portability. We classify numbers and time expressions into seven types, which are Arabic number, cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, date, time of day, day of week and figures. A greedy algorithm is developed to deal with rule conflicts. Experiments have shown that our approach can significantly improve the translation performance.

This paper reports on the participation of CASIA (Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences) at the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation 2009. We participated in the challenge tasks for Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation respectively and the BTEC task for Chinese-to-English translation only. For all of the tasks, system performance is improved with some special methods as follows: 1) combining different results of Chinese word segmentation, 2) combining different results of word alignments, 3) adding reliable bilingual words with high probabilities to the training data, 4) handling named entities including person names, location names, organization names, temporal and numerical expressions additionally, 5) combining and selecting translations from the outputs of multiple translation engines, 6) replacing Chinese character with Chinese Pinyin to train the translation model for Chinese-to-English ASR challenge task. This is a new approach that has never been introduced before.

This paper describes our statistical machine translation system (CASIA) used in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2008. In this year's evaluation, we participated in challenge task for Chinese-English and English-Chinese, BTEC task for Chinese-English. Here, we mainly introduce the overview of our system, the primary modules, the key techniques, and the evaluation results.