Barry Haddow


2024

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Prosody in Cascade and Direct Speech-to-Text Translation: a case study on Korean Wh-Phrases
Giulio Zhou | Tsz Kin Lam | Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) has typically been addressed with cascade systems, where speech recognition systems generate a transcription that is subsequently passed to a translation model. While there has been a growing interest in developing direct speech translation systems to avoid propagating errors and losing non-verbal content, prior work in direct S2TT has struggled to conclusively establish the advantages of integrating the acoustic signal directly into the translation process. This work proposes using contrastive evaluation to quantitatively measure the ability of direct S2TT systems to disambiguate utterances where prosody plays a crucial role. Specifically, we evaluated Korean-English translation systems on a test set containing wh-phrases, for which prosodic features are necessary to produce translations with the correct intent, whether it’s a statement, a yes/no question, a wh-question, and more. Our results clearly demonstrate the value of direct translation systems over cascade translation models, with a notable 12.9% improvement in overall accuracy in ambiguous cases, along with up to a 15.6% increase in F1 scores for one of the major intent categories. To the best of our knowledge, this work stands as the first to provide quantitative evidence that direct S2TT models can effectively leverage prosody. The code for our evaluation is openly accessible and freely available for review and utilisation.

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Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca
Pinzhen Chen | Shaoxiong Ji | Nikolay Bogoychev | Andrey Kutuzov | Barry Haddow | Kenneth Heafield
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Foundational large language models (LLMs) can be instruction-tuned to perform open-domain question answering, facilitating applications like chat assistants. While such efforts are often carried out in a single language, we empirically analyze cost-efficient strategies for multilingual scenarios. Our study employs the Alpaca dataset and machine translations of it to form multilingual data, which is then used to tune LLMs through either low-rank adaptation or full-parameter training. Under a controlled computation budget, comparisons show that multilingual tuning is on par or better than tuning a model for each language. Furthermore, multilingual tuning with downsampled data can be as powerful and more robust. Our findings serve as a guide for expanding language support through instruction tuning.

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Contrastive Decoding Reduces Hallucinations in Large Multilingual Machine Translation Models
Jonas Waldendorf | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), models will sometimes generate repetitive or fluent output that is not grounded in the source sentence. This phenomenon is known as hallucination and is a problem even in large-scale multilingual translation models. We propose to use Contrastive Decoding, an algorithm developed to improve generation from unconditional language models, to mitigate hallucinations in NMT. Specifically, we maximise the log-likelihood difference between a model and the same model with reduced contribution from the encoder outputs. Additionally, we propose an alternative implementation of Contrastive Decoding that dynamically weights the difference based on the maximum probability in the output distribution to reduce the effect of CD when the model is confident of its prediction. We evaluate our methods using the Small (418M) and Medium (1.2B) M2M models across 21 low and medium-resource language pairs. Our results show a 14.6 ± 0.5 and 11.0 ± 0.6 maximal increase in the mean COMET scores for the Small and Medium models on those sentences for which the M2M models initially generate a hallucination., respectively.

2023

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PMIndiaSum: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Headline Summarization for Languages in India
Ashok Urlana | Pinzhen Chen | Zheng Zhao | Shay Cohen | Manish Shrivastava | Barry Haddow
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

This paper introduces PMIndiaSum, a multilingual and massively parallel summarization corpus focused on languages in India. Our corpus provides a training and testing ground for four language families, 14 languages, and the largest to date with 196 language pairs. We detail our construction workflow including data acquisition, processing, and quality assurance. Furthermore, we publish benchmarks for monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual summarization by fine-tuning, prompting, as well as translate-and-summarize. Experimental results confirm the crucial role of our data in aiding summarization between Indian languages. Our dataset is publicly available and can be freely modified and re-distributed.

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Efficient CTC Regularization via Coarse Labels for End-to-End Speech Translation
Biao Zhang | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

For end-to-end speech translation, regularizing the encoder with the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) objective using the source transcript or target translation as labels can greatly improve quality. However, CTC demands an extra prediction layer over the vocabulary space, bringing in non-negligible model parameters and computational overheads, although this layer becomes useless at inference. In this paper, we re-examine the need for genuine vocabulary labels for CTC for regularization and explore strategies to reduce the CTC label space, targeting improved efficiency without quality degradation. We propose coarse labeling for CTC (CoLaCTC), which merges vocabulary labels via simple heuristic rules, such as using truncation, division or modulo (MOD) operations. Despite its simplicity, our experiments on 4 source and 8 target languages show that CoLaCTC with MOD particularly can compress the label space aggressively to 256 and even further, gaining training efficiency (1.18× ∼ 1.77× speedup depending on the original vocabulary size) yet still delivering comparable or better performance than the CTC baseline. We also show that CoLaCTC successfully generalizes to CTC regularization regardless of using transcript or translation for labeling.

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Self-training Reduces Flicker in Retranslation-based Simultaneous Translation
Sukanta Sen | Rico Sennrich | Biao Zhang | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In simultaneous translation, the retranslation approach has the advantage of requiring no modifications to the inference engine. However, in order to reduce the undesirable flicker in the output, previous work has resorted to increasing the latency through masking, and introducing specialised inference, thus losing the simplicity of the approach. In this work, we show that self-training improves the flicker-latency tradeoff, while maintaining similar translation quality to the original. Our analysis indicates that self-training reduces flicker by controlling monotonicity. Furthermore, self-training can be combined with biased beam search to further improve the flicker-latency tradeoff.

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Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation
Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow | Tom Kocmi | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2023 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT23): LLMs Are Here but Not Quite There Yet
Tom Kocmi | Eleftherios Avramidis | Rachel Bawden | Ondřej Bojar | Anton Dvorkovich | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Markus Freitag | Thamme Gowda | Roman Grundkiewicz | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Benjamin Marie | Christof Monz | Makoto Morishita | Kenton Murray | Makoto Nagata | Toshiaki Nakazawa | Martin Popel | Maja Popović | Mariya Shmatova
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

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).

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FINDINGS OF THE IWSLT 2023 EVALUATION CAMPAIGN
Milind Agarwal | Sweta Agrawal | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Luisa Bentivogli | Ondřej Bojar | Claudia Borg | Marine Carpuat | Roldano Cattoni | Mauro Cettolo | Mingda Chen | William Chen | Khalid Choukri | Alexandra Chronopoulou | Anna Currey | Thierry Declerck | Qianqian Dong | Kevin Duh | Yannick Estève | Marcello Federico | Souhir Gahbiche | Barry Haddow | Benjamin Hsu | Phu Mon Htut | Hirofumi Inaguma | Dávid Javorský | John Judge | Yasumasa Kano | Tom Ko | Rishu Kumar | Pengwei Li | Xutai Ma | Prashant Mathur | Evgeny Matusov | Paul McNamee | John P. McCrae | Kenton Murray | Maria Nadejde | Satoshi Nakamura | Matteo Negri | Ha Nguyen | Jan Niehues | Xing Niu | Atul Kr. Ojha | John E. Ortega | Proyag Pal | Juan Pino | Lonneke van der Plas | Peter Polák | Elijah Rippeth | Elizabeth Salesky | Jiatong Shi | Matthias Sperber | Sebastian Stüker | Katsuhito Sudoh | Yun Tang | Brian Thompson | Kevin Tran | Marco Turchi | Alex Waibel | Mingxuan Wang | Shinji Watanabe | Rodolfo Zevallos
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 20th IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 9 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, multilingual, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and formality control. The shared tasks attracted a total of 38 submissions by 31 teams. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

2022

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Survey of Low-Resource Machine Translation
Barry Haddow | Rachel Bawden | Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Jindřich Helcl | Alexandra Birch
Computational Linguistics, Volume 48, Issue 3 - September 2022

We present a survey covering the state of the art in low-resource machine translation (MT) research. There are currently around 7,000 languages spoken in the world and almost all language pairs lack significant resources for training machine translation models. There has been increasing interest in research addressing the challenge of producing useful translation models when very little translated training data is available. We present a summary of this topical research field and provide a description of the techniques evaluated by researchers in several recent shared tasks in low-resource MT.

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Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Philipp Koehn | Loïc Barrault | Ondřej Bojar | Fethi Bougares | Rajen Chatterjee | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Alexander Fraser | Markus Freitag | Yvette Graham | Roman Grundkiewicz | Paco Guzman | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Tom Kocmi | André Martins | Makoto Morishita | Christof Monz | Masaaki Nagata | Toshiaki Nakazawa | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Martin Popel | Marco Turchi | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

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Findings of the 2022 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT22)
Tom Kocmi | Rachel Bawden | Ondřej Bojar | Anton Dvorkovich | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Thamme Gowda | Yvette Graham | Roman Grundkiewicz | Barry Haddow | Rebecca Knowles | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Makoto Morishita | Masaaki Nagata | Toshiaki Nakazawa | Michal Novák | Martin Popel | Maja Popović
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

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).

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Don’t Discard Fixed-Window Audio Segmentation in Speech-to-Text Translation
Chantal Amrhein | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

For real-life applications, it is crucial that end-to-end spoken language translation models perform well on continuous audio, without relying on human-supplied segmentation. For online spoken language translation, where models need to start translating before the full utterance is spoken,most previous work has ignored the segmentation problem. In this paper, we compare various methods for improving models’ robustness towards segmentation errors and different segmentation strategies in both offline and online settings and report results on translation quality, flicker and delay. Our findings on five different language pairs show that a simple fixed-window audio segmentation can perform surprisingly well given the right conditions.

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Findings of the IWSLT 2022 Evaluation Campaign
Antonios Anastasopoulos | Loïc Barrault | Luisa Bentivogli | Marcely Zanon Boito | Ondřej Bojar | Roldano Cattoni | Anna Currey | Georgiana Dinu | Kevin Duh | Maha Elbayad | Clara Emmanuel | Yannick Estève | Marcello Federico | Christian Federmann | Souhir Gahbiche | Hongyu Gong | Roman Grundkiewicz | Barry Haddow | Benjamin Hsu | Dávid Javorský | Vĕra Kloudová | Surafel Lakew | Xutai Ma | Prashant Mathur | Paul McNamee | Kenton Murray | Maria Nǎdejde | Satoshi Nakamura | Matteo Negri | Jan Niehues | Xing Niu | John Ortega | Juan Pino | Elizabeth Salesky | Jiatong Shi | Matthias Sperber | Sebastian Stüker | Katsuhito Sudoh | Marco Turchi | Yogesh Virkar | Alexander Waibel | Changhan Wang | Shinji Watanabe
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)

The evaluation campaign of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation featured eight shared tasks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Offline speech translation, (iii) Speech to speech translation, (iv) Low-resource speech translation, (v) Multilingual speech translation, (vi) Dialect speech translation, (vii) Formality control for speech translation, (viii) Isometric speech translation. A total of 27 teams participated in at least one of the shared tasks. This paper details, for each shared task, the purpose of the task, the data that were released, the evaluation metrics that were applied, the submissions that were received and the results that were achieved.

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Quantifying Synthesis and Fusion and their Impact on Machine Translation
Arturo Oncevay | Duygu Ataman | Niels Van Berkel | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch | Johannes Bjerva
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Theoretical work in morphological typology offers the possibility of measuring morphological diversity on a continuous scale. However, literature in Natural Language Processing (NLP) typically labels a whole language with a strict type of morphology, e.g. fusional or agglutinative. In this work, we propose to reduce the rigidity of such claims, by quantifying morphological typology at the word and segment level. We consider Payne (2017)’s approach to classify morphology using two indices: synthesis (e.g. analytic to polysynthetic) and fusion (agglutinative to fusional). For computing synthesis, we test unsupervised and supervised morphological segmentation methods for English, German and Turkish, whereas for fusion, we propose a semi-automatic method using Spanish as a case study. Then, we analyse the relationship between machine translation quality and the degree of synthesis and fusion at word (nouns and verbs for English-Turkish, and verbs in English-Spanish) and segment level (previous language pairs plus English-German in both directions). We complement the word-level analysis with human evaluation, and overall, we observe a consistent impact of both indexes on machine translation quality.

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Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation: It’s Not as Fast as it Seems
Jindřich Helcl | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Efficient machine translation models are commercially important as they can increase inference speeds, and reduce costs and carbon emissions. Recently, there has been much interest in non-autoregressive (NAR) models, which promise faster translation. In parallel to the research on NAR models, there have been successful attempts to create optimized autoregressive models as part of the WMT shared task on efficient translation. In this paper, we point out flaws in the evaluation methodology present in the literature on NAR models and we provide a fair comparison between a state-of-the-art NAR model and the autoregressive submissions to the shared task. We make the case for consistent evaluation of NAR models, and also for the importance of comparing NAR models with other widely used methods for improving efficiency. We run experiments with a connectionist-temporal-classification-based (CTC) NAR model implemented in C++ and compare it with AR models using wall clock times. Our results show that, although NAR models are faster on GPUs, with small batch sizes, they are almost always slower under more realistic usage conditions. We call for more realistic and extensive evaluation of NAR models in future work.

2021

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SLTEV: Comprehensive Evaluation of Spoken Language Translation
Ebrahim Ansari | Ondřej Bojar | Barry Haddow | Mohammad Mahmoudi
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Automatic evaluation of Machine Translation (MT) quality has been investigated over several decades. Spoken Language Translation (SLT), esp. when simultaneous, needs to consider additional criteria and does not have a standard evaluation procedure and a widely used toolkit. To fill the gap, we develop SLTev, an open-source tool for assessing SLT in a comprehensive way. SLTev reports the quality, latency, and stability of an SLT candidate output based on the time-stamped transcript and reference translation into a target language. For quality, we rely on sacreBLEU which provides MT evaluation measures such as chrF or BLEU. For latency, we propose two new scoring techniques. For stability, we extend the previously defined measures with a normalized Flicker in our work. We also propose a new averaging of older measures. A preliminary version of SLTev was used in the IWSLT 2020 shared task. Moreover, a growing collection of test datasets directly accessible by SLTev are provided for system evaluation comparable across papers.

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ELITR Multilingual Live Subtitling: Demo and Strategy
Ondřej Bojar | Dominik Macháček | Sangeet Sagar | Otakar Smrž | Jonáš Kratochvíl | Peter Polák | Ebrahim Ansari | Mohammad Mahmoudi | Rishu Kumar | Dario Franceschini | Chiara Canton | Ivan Simonini | Thai-Son Nguyen | Felix Schneider | Sebastian Stüker | Alex Waibel | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich | Philip Williams
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

This paper presents an automatic speech translation system aimed at live subtitling of conference presentations. We describe the overall architecture and key processing components. More importantly, we explain our strategy for building a complex system for end-users from numerous individual components, each of which has been tested only in laboratory conditions. The system is a working prototype that is routinely tested in recognizing English, Czech, and German speech and presenting it translated simultaneously into 42 target languages.

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Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation
Loic Barrault | Ondrej Bojar | Fethi Bougares | Rajen Chatterjee | Marta R. Costa-jussa | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Alexander Fraser | Markus Freitag | Yvette Graham | Roman Grundkiewicz | Paco Guzman | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | Tom Kocmi | Andre Martins | Makoto Morishita | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2021 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT21)
Farhad Akhbardeh | Arkady Arkhangorodsky | Magdalena Biesialska | Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Vishrav Chaudhary | Marta R. Costa-jussa | Cristina España-Bonet | Angela Fan | Christian Federmann | Markus Freitag | Yvette Graham | Roman Grundkiewicz | Barry Haddow | Leonie Harter | Kenneth Heafield | Christopher Homan | Matthias Huck | Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire | Jungo Kasai | Daniel Khashabi | Kevin Knight | Tom Kocmi | Philipp Koehn | Nicholas Lourie | Christof Monz | Makoto Morishita | Masaaki Nagata | Ajay Nagesh | Toshiaki Nakazawa | Matteo Negri | Santanu Pal | Allahsera Auguste Tapo | Marco Turchi | Valentin Vydrin | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents the results of the newstranslation task, the multilingual low-resourcetranslation for Indo-European languages, thetriangular translation task, and the automaticpost-editing task organised as part of the Con-ference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2021.In the news task, participants were asked tobuild machine translation systems for any of10 language pairs, to be evaluated on test setsconsisting mainly of news stories. The taskwas also opened up to additional test suites toprobe specific aspects of translation.

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Exploring Unsupervised Pretraining Objectives for Machine Translation
Christos Baziotis | Ivan Titov | Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Beyond Sentence-Level End-to-End Speech Translation: Context Helps
Biao Zhang | Ivan Titov | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Document-level contextual information has shown benefits to text-based machine translation, but whether and how context helps end-to-end (E2E) speech translation (ST) is still under-studied. We fill this gap through extensive experiments using a simple concatenation-based context-aware ST model, paired with adaptive feature selection on speech encodings for computational efficiency. We investigate several decoding approaches, and introduce in-model ensemble decoding which jointly performs document- and sentence-level translation using the same model. Our results on the MuST-C benchmark with Transformer demonstrate the effectiveness of context to E2E ST. Compared to sentence-level ST, context-aware ST obtains better translation quality (+0.18-2.61 BLEU), improves pronoun and homophone translation, shows better robustness to (artificial) audio segmentation errors, and reduces latency and flicker to deliver higher quality for simultaneous translation.

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Surprise Language Challenge: Developing a Neural Machine Translation System between Pashto and English in Two Months
Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow | Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Jindrich Helcl | Jonas Waldendorf | Felipe Sánchez Martínez | Mikel Forcada | Víctor Sánchez Cartagena | Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz | Miquel Esplà-Gomis | Wilker Aziz | Lina Murady | Sevi Sariisik | Peggy van der Kreeft | Kay Macquarrie
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Research Track

In the media industry and the focus of global reporting can shift overnight. There is a compelling need to be able to develop new machine translation systems in a short period of time and in order to more efficiently cover quickly developing stories. As part of the EU project GoURMET and which focusses on low-resource machine translation and our media partners selected a surprise language for which a machine translation system had to be built and evaluated in two months(February and March 2021). The language selected was Pashto and an Indo-Iranian language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan and India. In this period we completed the full pipeline of development of a neural machine translation system: data crawling and cleaning and aligning and creating test sets and developing and testing models and and delivering them to the user partners. In this paperwe describe rapid data creation and experiments with transfer learning and pretraining for this low-resource language pair. We find that starting from an existing large model pre-trained on 50languages leads to far better BLEU scores than pretraining on one high-resource language pair with a smaller model. We also present human evaluation of our systems and which indicates that the resulting systems perform better than a freely available commercial system when translating from English into Pashto direction and and similarly when translating from Pashto into English.

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Operating a Complex SLT System with Speakers and Human Interpreters
Ondřej Bojar | Vojtěch Srdečný | Rishu Kumar | Otakar Smrž | Felix Schneider | Barry Haddow | Phil Williams | Chiara Canton
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Automatic Spoken Language Translation in Real-World Settings (ASLTRW)

We describe our experience with providing automatic simultaneous spoken language translation for an event with human interpreters. We provide a detailed overview of the systems we use, focusing on their interconnection and the issues it brings. We present our tools to monitor the pipeline and a web application to present the results of our SLT pipeline to the end users. Finally, we discuss various challenges we encountered, their possible solutions and we suggest improvements for future deployments.

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The University of Edinburgh’s Submission to the IWSLT21 Simultaneous Translation Task
Sukanta Sen | Ulrich Germann | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

We describe our submission to the IWSLT 2021 shared task on simultaneous text-to-text English-German translation. Our system is based on the re-translation approach where the agent re-translates the whole source prefix each time it receives a new source token. This approach has the advantage of being able to use a standard neural machine translation (NMT) inference engine with beam search, however, there is a risk that incompatibility between successive re-translations will degrade the output. To improve the quality of the translations, we experiment with various approaches: we use a fixed size wait at the beginning of the sentence, we use a language model score to detect translatable units, and we apply dynamic masking to determine when the translation is unstable. We find that a combination of dynamic masking and language model score obtains the best latency-quality trade-off.

2020

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Statistical Power and Translationese in Machine Translation Evaluation
Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The term translationese has been used to describe features of translated text, and in this paper, we provide detailed analysis of potential adverse effects of translationese on machine translation evaluation. Our analysis shows differences in conclusions drawn from evaluations that include translationese in test data compared to experiments that tested only with text originally composed in that language. For this reason we recommend that reverse-created test data be omitted from future machine translation test sets. In addition, we provide a re-evaluation of a past machine translation evaluation claiming human-parity of MT. One important issue not previously considered is statistical power of significance tests applied to comparison of human and machine translation. Since the very aim of past evaluations was investigation of ties between human and MT systems, power analysis is of particular importance, to avoid, for example, claims of human parity simply corresponding to Type II error resulting from the application of a low powered test. We provide detailed analysis of tests used in such evaluations to provide an indication of a suitable minimum sample size for future studies.

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Bridging Linguistic Typology and Multilingual Machine Translation with Multi-View Language Representations
Arturo Oncevay | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Sparse language vectors from linguistic typology databases and learned embeddings from tasks like multilingual machine translation have been investigated in isolation, without analysing how they could benefit from each other’s language characterisation. We propose to fuse both views using singular vector canonical correlation analysis and study what kind of information is induced from each source. By inferring typological features and language phylogenies, we observe that our representations embed typology and strengthen correlations with language relationships. We then take advantage of our multi-view language vector space for multilingual machine translation, where we achieve competitive overall translation accuracy in tasks that require information about language similarities, such as language clustering and ranking candidates for multilingual transfer. With our method, we can easily project and assess new languages without expensive retraining of massive multilingual or ranking models, which are major disadvantages of related approaches.

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Language Model Prior for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Christos Baziotis | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The scarcity of large parallel corpora is an important obstacle for neural machine translation. A common solution is to exploit the knowledge of language models (LM) trained on abundant monolingual data. In this work, we propose a novel approach to incorporate a LM as prior in a neural translation model (TM). Specifically, we add a regularization term, which pushes the output distributions of the TM to be probable under the LM prior, while avoiding wrong predictions when the TM “disagrees” with the LM. This objective relates to knowledge distillation, where the LM can be viewed as teaching the TM about the target language. The proposed approach does not compromise decoding speed, because the LM is used only at training time, unlike previous work that requires it during inference. We present an analysis of the effects that different methods have on the distributions of the TM. Results on two low-resource machine translation datasets show clear improvements even with limited monolingual data.

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Architecture of a Scalable, Secure and Resilient Translation Platform for Multilingual News Media
Susie Coleman | Andrew Secker | Rachel Bawden | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms

This paper presents an example architecture for a scalable, secure and resilient Machine Translation (MT) platform, using components available via Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is increasingly common for a single news organisation to publish and monitor news sources in multiple languages. A growth in news sources makes this increasingly challenging and time-consuming but MT can help automate some aspects of this process. Building a translation service provides a single integration point for news room tools that use translation technology allowing MT models to be integrated into a system once, rather than each time the translation technology is needed. By using a range of services provided by AWS, it is possible to architect a platform where multiple pre-existing technologies are combined to build a solution, as opposed to developing software from scratch for deployment on a single virtual machine. This increases the speed at which a platform can be developed and allows the use of well-maintained services. However, a single service also provides challenges. It is key to consider how the platform will scale when handling many users and how to ensure the platform is resilient.

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Removing European Language Barriers with Innovative Machine Translation Technology
Dario Franceschini | Chiara Canton | Ivan Simonini | Armin Schweinfurth | Adelheid Glott | Sebastian Stüker | Thai-Son Nguyen | Felix Schneider | Thanh-Le Ha | Alex Waibel | Barry Haddow | Philip Williams | Rico Sennrich | Ondřej Bojar | Sangeet Sagar | Dominik Macháček | Otakar Smrž
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms

This paper presents our progress towards deploying a versatile communication platform in the task of highly multilingual live speech translation for conferences and remote meetings live subtitling. The platform has been designed with a focus on very low latency and high flexibility while allowing research prototypes of speech and text processing tools to be easily connected, regardless of where they physically run. We outline our architecture solution and also briefly compare it with the ELG platform. Technical details are provided on the most important components and we summarize the test deployment events we ran so far.

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Adaptive Feature Selection for End-to-End Speech Translation
Biao Zhang | Ivan Titov | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Information in speech signals is not evenly distributed, making it an additional challenge for end-to-end (E2E) speech translation (ST) to learn to focus on informative features. In this paper, we propose adaptive feature selection (AFS) for encoder-decoder based E2E ST. We first pre-train an ASR encoder and apply AFS to dynamically estimate the importance of each encoded speech feature to ASR. A ST encoder, stacked on top of the ASR encoder, then receives the filtered features from the (frozen) ASR encoder. We take L0DROP (Zhang et al., 2020) as the backbone for AFS, and adapt it to sparsify speech features with respect to both temporal and feature dimensions. Results on LibriSpeech EnFr and MuST-C benchmarks show that AFS facilitates learning of ST by pruning out ~84% temporal features, yielding an average translation gain of ~1.3-1.6 BLEU and a decoding speedup of ~1.4x. In particular, AFS reduces the performance gap compared to the cascade baseline, and outperforms it on LibriSpeech En-Fr with a BLEU score of 18.56 (without data augmentation).

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Assessing Human-Parity in Machine Translation on the Segment Level
Yvette Graham | Christian Federmann | Maria Eskevich | Barry Haddow
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Recent machine translation shared tasks have shown top-performing systems to tie or in some cases even outperform human translation. Such conclusions about system and human performance are, however, based on estimates aggregated from scores collected over large test sets of translations and unfortunately leave some remaining questions unanswered. For instance, simply because a system significantly outperforms the human translator on average may not necessarily mean that it has done so for every translation in the test set. Firstly, are there remaining source segments present in evaluation test sets that cause significant challenges for top-performing systems and can such challenging segments go unnoticed due to the opacity of current human evaluation procedures? To provide insight into these issues we carefully inspect the outputs of top-performing systems in the most recent WMT-19 news translation shared task for all language pairs in which a system either tied or outperformed human translation. Our analysis provides a new method of identifying the remaining segments for which either machine or human perform poorly. For example, in our close inspection of WMT-19 English to German and German to English we discover the segments that disjointly proved a challenge for human and machine. For English to Russian, there were no segments included in our sample of translations that caused a significant challenge for the human translator, while we again identify the set of segments that caused issues for the top-performing system.

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ParaCrawl: Web-Scale Acquisition of Parallel Corpora
Marta Bañón | Pinzhen Chen | Barry Haddow | Kenneth Heafield | Hieu Hoang | Miquel Esplà-Gomis | Mikel L. Forcada | Amir Kamran | Faheem Kirefu | Philipp Koehn | Sergio Ortiz Rojas | Leopoldo Pla Sempere | Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Elsa Sarrías | Marek Strelec | Brian Thompson | William Waites | Dion Wiggins | Jaume Zaragoza
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We report on methods to create the largest publicly available parallel corpora by crawling the web, using open source software. We empirically compare alternative methods and publish benchmark data sets for sentence alignment and sentence pair filtering. We also describe the parallel corpora released and evaluate their quality and their usefulness to create machine translation systems.

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ELITR: European Live Translator
Ondřej Bojar | Dominik Macháček | Sangeet Sagar | Otakar Smrž | Jonáš Kratochvíl | Ebrahim Ansari | Dario Franceschini | Chiara Canton | Ivan Simonini | Thai-Son Nguyen | Felix Schneider | Sebastian Stücker | Alex Waibel | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich | Philip Williams
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

ELITR (European Live Translator) project aims to create a speech translation system for simultaneous subtitling of conferences and online meetings targetting up to 43 languages. The technology is tested by the Supreme Audit Office of the Czech Republic and by alfaview®, a German online conferencing system. Other project goals are to advance document-level and multilingual machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and automatic minuting.

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Dynamic Masking for Improved Stability in Online Spoken Language Translation
Yuekun Yao | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)

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Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation
Loïc Barrault | Ondřej Bojar | Fethi Bougares | Rajen Chatterjee | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Alexander Fraser | Yvette Graham | Paco Guzman | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | André Martins | Makoto Morishita | Christof Monz | Masaaki Nagata | Toshiaki Nakazawa | Matteo Negri
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2020 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT20)
Loïc Barrault | Magdalena Biesialska | Ondřej Bojar | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Christian Federmann | Yvette Graham | Roman Grundkiewicz | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Eric Joanis | Tom Kocmi | Philipp Koehn | Chi-kiu Lo | Nikola Ljubešić | Christof Monz | Makoto Morishita | Masaaki Nagata | Toshiaki Nakazawa | Santanu Pal | Matt Post | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents the results of the news translation task and the similar language translation task, both organised alongside the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2020. In the news task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 11 language pairs, to be evaluated on test sets consisting mainly of news stories. The task was also opened up to additional test suites to probe specific aspects of translation. In the similar language translation task, participants built machine translation systems for translating between closely related pairs of languages.

2019

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Samsung and University of Edinburgh’s System for the IWSLT 2019
Joanna Wetesko | Marcin Chochowski | Pawel Przybysz | Philip Williams | Roman Grundkiewicz | Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Barone | Valerio Miceli | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

This paper describes the joint submission to the IWSLT 2019 English to Czech task by Samsung RD Institute, Poland, and the University of Edinburgh. Our submission was ultimately produced by combining four Transformer systems through a mixture of ensembling and reranking.

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Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 1: Research Papers)
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | André Martins | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Matt Post | Marco Turchi | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 1: Research Papers)

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Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | André Martins | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Matt Post | Marco Turchi | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

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Findings of the 2019 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT19)
Loïc Barrault | Ondřej Bojar | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Philipp Koehn | Shervin Malmasi | Christof Monz | Mathias Müller | Santanu Pal | Matt Post | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

This paper presents the results of the premier shared task organized alongside the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2019. Participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 18 language pairs, to be evaluated on a test set of news stories. The main metric for this task is human judgment of translation quality. The task was also opened up to additional test suites to probe specific aspects of translation.

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Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | André Martins | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Matt Post | Marco Turchi | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

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Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII: Research Track
Mikel Forcada | Andy Way | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII: Research Track

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Global Under-Resourced Media Translation (GoURMET)
Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow | Ivan Tito | Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Rachel Bawden | Felipe Sánchez-Martínez | Mikel L. Forcada | Miquel Esplà-Gomis | Víctor Sánchez-Cartagena | Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz | Wilker Aziz | Andrew Secker | Peggy van der Kreeft
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII: Translator, Project and User Tracks

2018

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Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Matt Post | Lucia Specia | Marco Turchi | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers

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Exploring gap filling as a cheaper alternative to reading comprehension questionnaires when evaluating machine translation for gisting
Mikel L. Forcada | Carolina Scarton | Lucia Specia | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers

A popular application of machine translation (MT) is gisting: MT is consumed as is to make sense of text in a foreign language. Evaluation of the usefulness of MT for gisting is surprisingly uncommon. The classical method uses reading comprehension questionnaires (RCQ), in which informants are asked to answer professionally-written questions in their language about a foreign text that has been machine-translated into their language. Recently, gap-filling (GF), a form of cloze testing, has been proposed as a cheaper alternative to RCQ. In GF, certain words are removed from reference translations and readers are asked to fill the gaps left using the machine-translated text as a hint. This paper reports, for the first time, a comparative evaluation, using both RCQ and GF, of translations from multiple MT systems for the same foreign texts, and a systematic study on the effect of variables such as gap density, gap-selection strategies, and document context in GF. The main findings of the study are: (a) both RCQ and GF clearly identify MT to be useful; (b) global RCQ and GF rankings for the MT systems are mostly in agreement; (c) GF scores vary very widely across informants, making comparisons among MT systems hard, and (d) unlike RCQ, which is framed around documents, GF evaluation can be framed at the sentence level. These findings support the use of GF as a cheaper alternative to RCQ.

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Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Matt Post | Lucia Specia | Marco Turchi | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

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Findings of the 2018 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT18)
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Federmann | Mark Fishel | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper presents the results of the premier shared task organized alongside the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2018. Participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 7 language pairs in both directions, to be evaluated on a test set of news stories. The main metric for this task is human judgment of translation quality. This year, we also opened up the task to additional test sets to probe specific aspects of translation.

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The University of Edinburgh’s Submissions to the WMT18 News Translation Task
Barry Haddow | Nikolay Bogoychev | Denis Emelin | Ulrich Germann | Roman Grundkiewicz | Kenneth Heafield | Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

The University of Edinburgh made submissions to all 14 language pairs in the news translation task, with strong performances in most pairs. We introduce new RNN-variant, mixed RNN/Transformer ensembles, data selection and weighting, and extensions to back-translation.

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Evaluating Discourse Phenomena in Neural Machine Translation
Rachel Bawden | Rico Sennrich | Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

For machine translation to tackle discourse phenomena, models must have access to extra-sentential linguistic context. There has been recent interest in modelling context in neural machine translation (NMT), but models have been principally evaluated with standard automatic metrics, poorly adapted to evaluating discourse phenomena. In this article, we present hand-crafted, discourse test sets, designed to test the models’ ability to exploit previous source and target sentences. We investigate the performance of recently proposed multi-encoder NMT models trained on subtitles for English to French. We also explore a novel way of exploiting context from the previous sentence. Despite gains using BLEU, multi-encoder models give limited improvement in the handling of discourse phenomena: 50% accuracy on our coreference test set and 53.5% for coherence/cohesion (compared to a non-contextual baseline of 50%). A simple strategy of decoding the concatenation of the previous and current sentence leads to good performance, and our novel strategy of multi-encoding and decoding of two sentences leads to the best performance (72.5% for coreference and 57% for coherence/cohesion), highlighting the importance of target-side context.

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Samsung and University of Edinburgh’s System for the IWSLT 2018 Low Resource MT Task
Philip Williams | Marcin Chochowski | Pawel Przybysz | Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

This paper describes the joint submission to the IWSLT 2018 Low Resource MT task by Samsung R&D Institute, Poland, and the University of Edinburgh. We focused on supplementing the very limited in-domain Basque-English training data with out-of-domain data, with synthetic data, and with data for other language pairs. We also experimented with a variety of model architectures and features, which included the development of extensions to the Nematus toolkit. Our submission was ultimately produced by a system combination in which we reranked translations from our strongest individual system using multiple weaker systems.

2017

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Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | Julia Kreutzer
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Deep architectures for Neural Machine Translation
Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Jindřich Helcl | Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2017 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT17)
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Shujian Huang | Matthias Huck | Philipp Koehn | Qun Liu | Varvara Logacheva | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Matt Post | Raphael Rubino | Lucia Specia | Marco Turchi
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Findings of the WMT 2017 Biomedical Translation Shared Task
Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Karin Verspoor | Ondřej Bojar | Arthur Boyer | Cristian Grozea | Barry Haddow | Madeleine Kittner | Yvonne Lichtblau | Pavel Pecina | Roland Roller | Rudolf Rosa | Amy Siu | Philippe Thomas | Saskia Trescher
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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The University of Edinburgh’s Neural MT Systems for WMT17
Rico Sennrich | Alexandra Birch | Anna Currey | Ulrich Germann | Barry Haddow | Kenneth Heafield | Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Philip Williams
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Regularization techniques for fine-tuning in neural machine translation
Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Barry Haddow | Ulrich Germann | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We investigate techniques for supervised domain adaptation for neural machine translation where an existing model trained on a large out-of-domain dataset is adapted to a small in-domain dataset. In this scenario, overfitting is a major challenge. We investigate a number of techniques to reduce overfitting and improve transfer learning, including regularization techniques such as dropout and L2-regularization towards an out-of-domain prior. In addition, we introduce tuneout, a novel regularization technique inspired by dropout. We apply these techniques, alone and in combination, to neural machine translation, obtaining improvements on IWSLT datasets for English→German and English→Russian. We also investigate the amounts of in-domain training data needed for domain adaptation in NMT, and find a logarithmic relationship between the amount of training data and gain in BLEU score.

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Nematus: a Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation
Rico Sennrich | Orhan Firat | Kyunghyun Cho | Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow | Julian Hitschler | Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt | Samuel Läubli | Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Jozef Mokry | Maria Nădejde
Proceedings of the Software Demonstrations of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present Nematus, a toolkit for Neural Machine Translation. The toolkit prioritizes high translation accuracy, usability, and extensibility. Nematus has been used to build top-performing submissions to shared translation tasks at WMT and IWSLT, and has been used to train systems for production environments.

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Practical Neural Machine Translation
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved new breakthroughs in machine translation in recent years. It has dominated recent shared translation tasks in machine translation research, and is also being quickly adopted in industry. The technical differences between NMT and the previously dominant phrase-based statistical approach require that practictioners learn new best practices for building MT systems, ranging from different hardware requirements, new techniques for handling rare words and monolingual data, to new opportunities in continued learning and domain adaptation.This tutorial is aimed at researchers and users of machine translation interested in working with NMT. The tutorial will cover a basic theoretical introduction to NMT, discuss the components of state-of-the-art systems, and provide practical advice for building NMT systems.

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The Samsung and University of Edinburgh’s submission to IWSLT17
Pawel Przybysz | Marcin Chochowski | Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

This paper describes the joint submission of Samsung Research and Development, Warsaw, Poland and the University of Edinburgh team to the IWSLT MT task for TED talks. We took part in two translation directions, en-de and de-en. We also participated in the en-de and de-en lectures SLT task. The models have been trained with an attentional encoder-decoder model using the BiDeep model in Nematus. We filtered the training data to reduce the problem of noisy data, and we use back-translated monolingual data for domain-adaptation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the different techniques that we applied via ablation studies. Our submission system outperforms our baseline, and last year’s University of Edinburgh submission to IWSLT, by more than 5 BLEU.

2016

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Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 1, Research Papers
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Liane Guillou | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Pavel Pecina | Martin Popel | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Matt Post | Lucia Specia | Karin Verspoor | Jörg Tiedemann | Marco Turchi
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 1, Research Papers

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Linguistic Input Features Improve Neural Machine Translation
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 1, Research Papers

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Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Liane Guillou | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Pavel Pecina | Martin Popel | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Matt Post | Lucia Specia | Karin Verspoor | Jörg Tiedemann | Marco Turchi
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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Findings of the 2016 Conference on Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Yvette Graham | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Philipp Koehn | Varvara Logacheva | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Aurélie Névéol | Mariana Neves | Martin Popel | Matt Post | Raphael Rubino | Carolina Scarton | Lucia Specia | Marco Turchi | Karin Verspoor | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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The Edinburgh/LMU Hierarchical Machine Translation System for WMT 2016
Matthias Huck | Alexander Fraser | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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The QT21/HimL Combined Machine Translation System
Jan-Thorsten Peter | Tamer Alkhouli | Hermann Ney | Matthias Huck | Fabienne Braune | Alexander Fraser | Aleš Tamchyna | Ondřej Bojar | Barry Haddow | Rico Sennrich | Frédéric Blain | Lucia Specia | Jan Niehues | Alex Waibel | Alexandre Allauzen | Lauriane Aufrant | Franck Burlot | Elena Knyazeva | Thomas Lavergne | François Yvon | Mārcis Pinnis | Stella Frank
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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Edinburgh Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT 16
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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Edinburgh’s Statistical Machine Translation Systems for WMT16
Philip Williams | Rico Sennrich | Maria Nădejde | Matthias Huck | Barry Haddow | Ondřej Bojar
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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Controlling Politeness in Neural Machine Translation via Side Constraints
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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HimL: Health in my language
Barry Haddow | Alex Fraser
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation: Projects/Products

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Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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HUME: Human UCCA-Based Evaluation of Machine Translation
Alexandra Birch | Omri Abend | Ondřej Bojar | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

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A Joint Dependency Model of Morphological and Syntactic Structure for Statistical Machine Translation
Rico Sennrich | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Rajan Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Chris Hokamp | Matthias Huck | Varvara Logacheva | Pavel Pecina
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2015 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Rajen Chatterjee | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Chris Hokamp | Philipp Koehn | Varvara Logacheva | Christof Monz | Matteo Negri | Matt Post | Carolina Scarton | Lucia Specia | Marco Turchi
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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The Edinburgh/JHU Phrase-based Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2015
Barry Haddow | Matthias Huck | Alexandra Birch | Nikolay Bogoychev | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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HimL (Health in my Language)
Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

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HimL (Health in my Language)
Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

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Mixed domain vs. multi-domain statistical machine translation
Matthias Huck | Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XV: Papers

2014

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Dynamic Topic Adaptation for Phrase-based MT
Eva Hasler | Phil Blunsom | Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Combining domain and topic adaptation for SMT
Eva Hasler | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: MT Researchers Track

Recent years have seen increased interest in adapting translation models to test domains that are known in advance as well as using latent topic representations to adapt to unknown test domains. However, the relationship between domains and latent topics is still somewhat unclear and topic adaptation approaches typically do not make use of domain knowledge in the training data. We show empirically that combining domain and topic adaptation approaches can be beneficial and that topic representations can be used to predict the domain of a test document. Our best combined model yields gains of up to 0.82 BLEU over a domain-adapted translation system and up to 1.67 BLEU over an unadapted system, measured on the stronger of two training conditions.

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Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2014 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Johannes Leveling | Christof Monz | Pavel Pecina | Matt Post | Herve Saint-Amand | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia | Aleš Tamchyna
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Edinburgh’s Phrase-based Machine Translation Systems for WMT-14
Nadir Durrani | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Kenneth Heafield
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Dynamic Topic Adaptation for SMT using Distributional Profiles
Eva Hasler | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2013

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Applying Pairwise Ranked Optimisation to Improve the Interpolation of Translation Models
Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondrej Bojar | Christian Buck | Chris Callison-Burch | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Herve Saint-Amand | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Findings of the 2013 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Ondřej Bojar | Christian Buck | Chris Callison-Burch | Christian Federmann | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Christof Monz | Matt Post | Radu Soricut | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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The Feasibility of HMEANT as a Human MT Evaluation Metric
Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow | Ulrich Germann | Maria Nadejde | Christian Buck | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Edinburgh’s Machine Translation Systems for European Language Pairs
Nadir Durrani | Barry Haddow | Kenneth Heafield | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Two Approaches to Correcting Homophone Confusions in a Hybrid Machine Translation System
Pierrette Bouillon | Johanna Gerlach | Ulrich Germann | Barry Haddow | Manny Rayner
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation

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Corpus development for machine translation between standard and dialectal varieties
Barry Haddow | Adolfo Hernández | Friedrich Neubarth | Harald Trost
Proceedings of the Workshop on Adaptation of Language Resources and Tools for Closely Related Languages and Language Variants

2012

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The UEDIN systems for the IWSLT 2012 evaluation
Eva Hasler | Peter Bell | Arnab Ghoshal | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn | Fergus McInnes | Steve Renals | Pawel Swietojanski
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) systems for the IWSLT 2012 Evaluation. We participated in the ASR (English), MT (English-French, German-English) and SLT (English-French) tracks.

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Sparse lexicalised features and topic adaptation for SMT
Eva Hasler | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

We present a new approach to domain adaptation for SMT that enriches standard phrase-based models with lexicalised word and phrase pair features to help the model select appropriate translations for the target domain (TED talks). In addition, we show how source-side sentence-level topics can be incorporated to make the features differentiate between more fine-grained topics within the target domain (topic adaptation). We compare tuning our sparse features on a development set versus on the entire in-domain corpus and introduce a new method of porting them to larger mixed-domain models. Experimental results show that our features improve performance over a MIRA baseline and that in some cases we can get additional improvements with topic features. We evaluate our methods on two language pairs, English-French and German-English, showing promising results.

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Interpolated Backoff for Factored Translation Models
Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers

We propose interpolated backoff methods to strike the balance between traditional surface form translation models and factored models that decompose translation into lemma and morphological feature mapping steps. We show that this approach improves translation quality by 0.5 BLEU (German–English) over phrase-based models, due to the better translation of rare nouns and adjectives.

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Using Source-Language Transformations to Address Register Mismatches in SMT
Manny Rayner | Pierrette Bouillon | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers

Mismatches between training and test data are a ubiquitous problem for real SMT applications. In this paper, we examine a type of mismatch that commonly arises when translating from French and similar languages: available training data is mostly formal register, but test data may well be informal register. We consider methods for defining surface transformations that map common informal language constructions into their formal language counterparts, or vice versa; we then describe two ways to use these mappings, either to create artificial training data or to pre-process source text at run-time. An initial evaluation performed using crowd-sourced comparisons of alternate translations produced by a French-to-English SMT system suggests that both methods can improve performance, with run-time pre-processing being the more effective of the two.

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Towards Effective Use of Training Data in Statistical Machine Translation
Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Analysing the Effect of Out-of-Domain Data on SMT Systems
Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2011

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SampleRank Training for Phrase-Based Machine Translation
Barry Haddow | Abhishek Arun | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

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More Linguistic Annotation for Statistical Machine Translation
Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow | Philip Williams | Hieu Hoang
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

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A Unified Approach to Minimum Risk Training and Decoding
Abhishek Arun | Barry Haddow | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

2009

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Edinburgh’s Submission to all Tracks of the WMT 2009 Shared Task with Reordering and Speed Improvements to Moses
Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Monte Carlo inference and maximization for phrase-based translation
Abhishek Arun | Chris Dyer | Barry Haddow | Phil Blunsom | Adam Lopez | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2009)

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Interactive Assistance to Human Translators using Statistical Machine Translation Methods
Philipp Koehn | Barry Haddow
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XII: Papers

2008

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Exploiting Multiply Annotated Corpora in Biomedical Information Extraction Tasks
Barry Haddow | Beatrice Alex
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper discusses the problem of utilising multiply annotated data in training biomedical information extraction systems. Two corpora, annotated with entities and relations, and containing a number of multiply annotated documents, are used to train named entity recognition and relation extraction systems. Several methods of automatically combining the multiple annotations to produce a single annotation are compared, but none produces better results than simply picking one of the annotated versions at random. It is also shown that adding extra singly annotated documents produces faster performance gains than adding extra multiply annotated documents.

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Using Automated Feature Optimisation to Create an Adaptable Relation Extraction System
Barry Haddow
Proceedings of the Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing

2007

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Recognising Nested Named Entities in Biomedical Text
Beatrice Alex | Barry Haddow | Claire Grover
Biological, translational, and clinical language processing

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The Extraction of Enriched Protein-Protein Interactions from Biomedical Text
Barry Haddow | Michael Matthews
Biological, translational, and clinical language processing

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