Boxing Chen


2024

pdf bib
Sorted LLaMA: Unlocking the Potential of Intermediate Layers of Large Language Models for Dynamic Inference
Parsa Kavehzadeh | Mojtaba Valipour | Marzieh Tahaei | Ali Ghodsi | Boxing Chen | Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) by excelling at understanding and generating human-like text. However, their widespread deployment can be prohibitively expensive. SortedNet is a recent training technique for enabling dynamic inference by leveraging the modularity in networks and sorting sub-models based on computation/accuracy in a nested manner. We extend SortedNet to generative NLP tasks, making large language models dynamic without any Pre-Training and by only replacing Standard Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Sorted Fine-Tuning (SoFT). Our approach boosts model efficiency, eliminating the need for multiple models for various scenarios during inference. We show that this approach can unlock the potential of intermediate layers of transformers in generating the target output. Our sub-models remain integral components of the original model, minimizing storage requirements and transition costs between different computational/latency budgets. The efficacy of our proposed method was demonstrated by applying it to tune LLaMA 2 13B on the Stanford Alpaca dataset for instruction following and TriviaQA for closed-book question answering. Our results show the superior performance of sub-models in comparison to Standard Fine-Tuning and SFT+ICT (Early-Exit), all achieved with very efficient tuning and without additional memory usage during inference.

2023

pdf bib
Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics
Chengxi Li | Kai Fan | Jiajun Bu | Boxing Chen | Zhongqiang Huang | Zhi Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes so that the resulting verse can be sung to the accompanying melody, which is a challenging problem that has attracted some interests in different aspects of the translation process. In this paper, we propose Lyrics-Melody Translation with Adaptive Grouping (LTAG), a holistic solution to automatic song translation by jointly modeling lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment. It is a novel encoder-decoder framework that can simultaneously translate the source lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step through an adaptive note grouping module. To address data scarcity, we commissioned a small amount of training data annotated specifically for this task and used large amounts of automatic training data through back-translation. Experiments conducted on an English-Chinese song translation data set show the effectiveness of our model in both automatic and human evaluations.

pdf bib
Towards Zero-shot Learning for End-to-end Cross-modal Translation Models
Jichen Yang | Kai Fan | Minpeng Liao | Boxing Chen | Zhongqiang Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

One of the main problems in speech translation is the mismatches between different modalities. The second problem, scarcity of parallel data covering multiple modalities, means that the end-to-end multi-modal models tend to perform worse than cascade models, although there are exceptions under favorable conditions. To address these problems, we propose an end-to-end zero-shot speech translation model, connecting two pre-trained uni-modality modules via word rotator’s distance. The model retains the ability of zero-shot, which is like cascade models, and also can be trained in an end-to-end style to avoid error propagation. Our comprehensive experiments on the MuST-C benchmarks show that our end-to-end zero-shot approach performs better than or as well as those of the CTC-based cascade models and that our end-to-end model with supervised training also matches the latest baselines.

pdf bib
Adapting Offline Speech Translation Models for Streaming with Future-Aware Distillation and Inference
Biao Fu | Minpeng Liao | Kai Fan | Zhongqiang Huang | Boxing Chen | Yidong Chen | Xiaodong Shi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

A popular approach to streaming speech translation is to employ a single offline model with a wait-k policy to support different latency requirements, which is simpler than training multiple online models with different latency constraints. However, there is a mismatch problem in using a model trained with complete utterances for streaming inference with partial input. We demonstrate that speech representations extracted at the end of a streaming input are significantly different from those extracted from a complete utterance. To address this issue, we propose a new approach called Future-Aware Streaming Translation (FAST) that adapts an offline ST model for streaming input. FAST includes a Future-Aware Inference (FAI) strategy that incorporates future context through a trainable masked embedding, and a Future-Aware Distillation (FAD) framework that transfers future context from an approximation of full speech to streaming input. Our experiments on the MuST-C EnDe, EnEs, and EnFr benchmarks show that FAST achieves better trade-offs between translation quality and latency than strong baselines. Extensive analyses suggest that our methods effectively alleviate the aforementioned mismatch problem between offline training and online inference.

pdf bib
DePA: Improving Non-autoregressive Translation with Dependency-Aware Decoder
Jiaao Zhan | Qian Chen | Boxing Chen | Wen Wang | Yu Bai | Yang Gao
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)

Non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) models have lower translation quality than autoregressive translation (AT) models because NAT decoders do not depend on previous target tokens in the decoder input. We propose a novel and general Dependency-Aware Decoder (DePA) to enhance target dependency modeling in the decoder of fully NAT models from two perspectives: decoder self-attention and decoder input. First, we propose an autoregressive forward-backward pre-training phase before NAT training, which enables the NAT decoder to gradually learn bidirectional target dependencies for the final NAT training. Second, we transform the decoder input from the source language representation space to the target language representation space through a novel attentive transformation process, which enables the decoder to better capture target dependencies. DePA can be applied to any fully NAT models. Extensive experiments show that DePA consistently improves highly competitive and state-of-the-art fully NAT models on widely used WMT and IWSLT benchmarks by up to 1.88 BLEU gain, while maintaining the inference latency comparable to other fully NAT models.

pdf bib
Tailor: A Soft-Prompt-Based Approach to Attribute-Based Controlled Text Generation
Kexin Yang | Dayiheng Liu | Wenqiang Lei | Baosong Yang | Mingfeng Xue | Boxing Chen | Jun Xie
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Attribute-based Controlled Text Generation (CTG) refers to generating sentences that satisfy desirable attributes (e.g., emotions and topics). Existing work usually utilize fine-tuning or resort to extra attribute classifiers, yet suffer from increases in storage and inference time. To address these concerns, we explore attribute-based CTG in a parameter-efficient manner. In short, the proposed Tailor represents each attribute as a pre-trained continuous vector i.e., single-attribute prompt), which guides the generation of a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to satisfy a pre-specified attribute. These prompts can be simply concatenated as a whole for multi-attribute CTG without any re-training. Nevertheless, this may raise problems of fluency downgrading and position sensitivity. To solve this, Tailor provides two solutions to enhance the combination. The former contains a multi-attribute prompt mask and a re-indexing position sequence to bridge the gap between the training (one single-attribute prompt for each task) and the testing stage (concatenating two prompts). The latter introduces a trainable prompt connector to further enhance the combinations. Experiments demonstrate that, only requiring 0.08% extra training parameters of the GPT-2, Tailor can achieve effective and general improvements on eleven attribute-specific generation tasks.

pdf bib
A Simple Concatenation can Effectively Improve Speech Translation
Linlin Zhang | Kai Fan | Boxing Chen | Luo Si
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A triple speech translation data comprises speech, transcription, and translation. In the end-to-end paradigm, text machine translation (MT) usually plays the role of a teacher model for the speech translation (ST) via knowledge distillation. Parameter sharing with the teacher is often adopted to construct the ST model architecture, however, the two modalities are independently fed and trained via different losses. This situation does not match ST’s properties across two modalities and also limits the upper bound of the performance. Inspired by the works of video Transformer, we propose a simple unified cross-modal ST method, which concatenates speech and text as the input, and builds a teacher that can utilize both cross-modal information simultaneously. Experimental results show that in our unified ST framework, models can effectively utilize the auxiliary information from speech and text, and achieve compelling results on MuST-C datasets.

2022

pdf bib
Attention Mechanism with Energy-Friendly Operations
Yu Wan | Baosong Yang | Dayiheng Liu | Rong Xiao | Derek Wong | Haibo Zhang | Boxing Chen | Lidia Chao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from the energy consumption aspects. After reaching the conclusion that the energy costs of several energy-friendly operations are far less than their multiplication counterparts, we build a novel attention model by replacing multiplications with either selective operations or additions. Empirical results on three machine translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model, against the vanilla one, achieves competitable accuracy while saving 99% and 66% energy during alignment calculation and the whole attention procedure. Our code will be released upon the acceptance.

pdf bib
GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation
Kexin Yang | Dayiheng Liu | Wenqiang Lei | Baosong Yang | Haibo Zhang | Xue Zhao | Wenqing Yao | Boxing Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) incorporates various external conditions to obtain desirable paraphrases. However, existing works only highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of CPG (i.e., lexically and syntactically CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework (GCPG), which represents both lexical and syntactical conditions as text sequences and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. Under GCPG, we reconstruct commonly adopted lexical condition (i.e., Keywords) and syntactical conditions (i.e., Part-Of-Speech sequence, Constituent Tree, Masked Template and Sentential Exemplar) and study the combination of the two types. In particular, for Sentential Exemplar condition, we propose a novel exemplar construction method — Syntax-Similarity based Exemplar (SSE). SSE retrieves a syntactically similar but lexically different sentence as the exemplar for each target sentence, avoiding exemplar-side words copying problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPG with SSE achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks. In addition, the combination of lexical and syntactical conditions shows the significant controllable ability of paraphrase generation, and these empirical results could provide novel insight to user-oriented paraphrasing.

pdf bib
Challenges of Neural Machine Translation for Short Texts
Yu Wan | Baosong Yang | Derek Fai Wong | Lidia Sam Chao | Liang Yao | Haibo Zhang | Boxing Chen
Computational Linguistics, Volume 48, Issue 2 - June 2022

Short texts (STs) present in a variety of scenarios, including query, dialog, and entity names. Most of the exciting studies in neural machine translation (NMT) are focused on tackling open problems concerning long sentences rather than short ones. The intuition behind is that, with respect to human learning and processing, short sequences are generally regarded as easy examples. In this article, we first dispel this speculation via conducting preliminary experiments, showing that the conventional state-of-the-art NMT approach, namely, Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017), still suffers from over-translation and mistranslation errors over STs. After empirically investigating the rationale behind this, we summarize two challenges in NMT for STs associated with translation error types above, respectively: (1) the imbalanced length distribution in training set intensifies model inference calibration over STs, leading to more over-translation cases on STs; and (2) the lack of contextual information forces NMT to have higher data uncertainty on short sentences, and thus NMT model is troubled by considerable mistranslation errors. Some existing approaches, like balancing data distribution for training (e.g., data upsampling) and complementing contextual information (e.g., introducing translation memory) can alleviate the translation issues in NMT for STs. We encourage researchers to investigate other challenges in NMT for STs, thus reducing ST translation errors and enhancing translation quality.

pdf bib
Efficient Cluster-Based k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation
Dexin Wang | Kai Fan | Boxing Chen | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) has been recently proposed as a non-parametric solution for domain adaptation in neural machine translation (NMT). It aims to alleviate the performance degradation of advanced MT systems in translating out-of-domain sentences by coordinating with an additional token-level feature-based retrieval module constructed from in-domain data. Previous studies (Khandelwal et al., 2021; Zheng et al., 2021) have already demonstrated that non-parametric NMT is even superior to models fine-tuned on out-of-domain data. In spite of this success, kNN retrieval is at the expense of high latency, in particular for large datastores. To make it practical, in this paper, we explore a more efficient kNN-MT and propose to use clustering to improve the retrieval efficiency. Concretely, we first propose a cluster-based Compact Network for feature reduction in a contrastive learning manner to compress context features into 90+% lower dimensional vectors. We then suggest a cluster-based pruning solution to filter out 10% 40% redundant nodes in large datastores while retaining translation quality. Our proposed methods achieve better or comparable performance while reducing up to 57% inference latency against the advanced non-parametric MT model on several machine translation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods maintain the most useful information of the original datastore and the Compact Network shows good generalization on unseen domains. Codes are available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/PCKMT.

pdf bib
UniTE: Unified Translation Evaluation
Yu Wan | Dayiheng Liu | Baosong Yang | Haibo Zhang | Boxing Chen | Derek Wong | Lidia Chao
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Translation quality evaluation plays a crucial role in machine translation. According to the input format, it is mainly separated into three tasks, i.e., reference-only, source-only and source-reference-combined. Recent methods, despite their promising results, are specifically designed and optimized on one of them. This limits the convenience of these methods, and overlooks the commonalities among tasks. In this paper, we propose , which is the first unified framework engaged with abilities to handle all three evaluation tasks. Concretely, we propose monotonic regional attention to control the interaction among input segments, and unified pretraining to better adapt multi-task training. We testify our framework on WMT 2019 Metrics and WMT 2020 Quality Estimation benchmarks. Extensive analyses show that our single model can universally surpass various state-of-the-art or winner methods across tasks.Both source code and associated models are available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/UniTE.

pdf bib
PSP: Pre-trained Soft Prompts for Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization
Xiaochen Liu | Yang Gao | Yu Bai | Jiawei Li | Yinan Hu | Heyan Huang | Boxing Chen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Few-shot abstractive summarization has become a challenging task in natural language generation. To support it, we developed a novel soft prompts architecture coupled with a prompt pre-training plus prompt fine-tuning paradigm, which is effective and tunes only extremely light parameters. To meet the structure of the generation models, the soft prompts comprise continuous input embeddings across an encoder and a decoder. Importantly, a new inner-prompt placed in the text is introduced to capture document-level information. The aim is to devote attention to understanding the document that better prompts the model to generate document-related content. In the training process, the prompt pre-training with self-supervised pseudo-data firstly teaches the model basic summarizing capability. Then, with few-shot examples, only the designed lightweight soft prompts are fine-tuned. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets show that our method, with only 0.1% of the parameters, outperforms full-model tuning where all model parameters are tuned. It also surpasses Prompt Tuning by a large margin and delivers competitive results against Prefix-Tuning with 3% of the parameters.

pdf bib
Non-Parametric Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Speech Translation
Yichao Du | Weizhi Wang | Zhirui Zhang | Boxing Chen | Tong Xu | Jun Xie | Enhong Chen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The end-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST) has received increasing attention due to the potential of its less error propagation, lower latency and fewer parameters. However, the effectiveness of neural-based approaches to this task is severely limited by the available training corpus, especially for domain adaptation where in-domain triplet data is scarce or nonexistent. In this paper, we propose a novel non-parametric method that leverages in-domain text translation corpus to achieve domain adaptation for E2E-ST systems. To this end, we first incorporate an additional encoder into the pre-trained E2E-ST model to realize text translation modeling, based on which the decoder’s output representations for text and speech translation tasks are unified by reducing the correspondent representation mismatch in available triplet training data. During domain adaptation, a k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) classifier is introduced to produce the final translation distribution using the external datastore built by the domain-specific text translation corpus, while the universal output representation is adopted to perform a similarity search. Experiments on the Europarl-ST benchmark demonstrate that when in-domain text translation data is involved only, our proposed approach significantly improves baseline by 12.82 BLEU on average in all translation directions, even outperforming the strong in-domain fine-tuning strategy.

pdf bib
Discrete Cross-Modal Alignment Enables Zero-Shot Speech Translation
Chen Wang | Yuchen Liu | Boxing Chen | Jiajun Zhang | Wei Luo | Zhongqiang Huang | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

End-to-end Speech Translation (ST) aims at translating the source language speech into target language text without generating the intermediate transcriptions. However, the training of end-to-end methods relies on parallel ST data, which are difficult and expensive to obtain. Fortunately, the supervised data for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) are usually more accessible, making zero-shot speech translation a potential direction. Existing zero-shot methods fail to align the two modalities of speech and text into a shared semantic space, resulting in much worse performance compared to the supervised ST methods. In order to enable zero-shot ST, we propose a novel Discrete Cross-Modal Alignment (DCMA) method that employs a shared discrete vocabulary space to accommodate and match both modalities of speech and text. Specifically, we introduce a vector quantization module to discretize the continuous representations of speech and text into a finite set of virtual tokens, and use ASR data to map corresponding speech and text to the same virtual token in a shared codebook. This way, source language speech can be embedded in the same semantic space as the source language text, which can be then transformed into target language text with an MT module. Experiments on multiple language pairs demonstrate that our zero-shot ST method significantly improves the SOTA, and even performers on par with the strong supervised ST baselines.

2021

pdf bib
TermMind: Alibaba’s WMT21 Machine Translation Using Terminologies Task Submission
Ke Wang | Shuqin Gu | Boxing Chen | Yu Zhao | Weihua Luo | Yuqi Zhang
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes our work in the WMT 2021 Machine Translation using Terminologies Shared Task. We participate in the shared translation terminologies task in English to Chinese language pair. To satisfy terminology constraints on translation, we use a terminology data augmentation strategy based on Transformer model. We used tags to mark and add the term translations into the matched sentences. We created synthetic terms using phrase tables extracted from bilingual corpus to increase the proportion of term translations in training data. Detailed pre-processing and filtering on data, in-domain finetuning and ensemble method are used in our system. Our submission obtains competitive results in the terminology-targeted evaluation.

pdf bib
QEMind: Alibaba’s Submission to the WMT21 Quality Estimation Shared Task
Jiayi Wang | Ke Wang | Boxing Chen | Yu Zhao | Weihua Luo | Yuqi Zhang
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

Quality Estimation, as a crucial step of quality control for machine translation, has been explored for years. The goal is to to investigate automatic methods for estimating the quality of machine translation results without reference translations. In this year’s WMT QE shared task, we utilize the large-scale XLM-Roberta pre-trained model and additionally propose several useful features to evaluate the uncertainty of the translations to build our QE system, named QEMind . The system has been applied to the sentence-level scoring task of Direct Assessment and the binary score prediction task of Critical Error Detection. In this paper, we present our submissions to the WMT 2021 QE shared task and an extensive set of experimental results have shown us that our multilingual systems outperform the best system in the Direct Assessment QE task of WMT 2020.

pdf bib
RoBLEURT Submission for WMT2021 Metrics Task
Yu Wan | Dayiheng Liu | Baosong Yang | Tianchi Bi | Haibo Zhang | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo | Derek F. Wong | Lidia S. Chao
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

In this paper, we present our submission to Shared Metrics Task: RoBLEURT (Robustly Optimizing the training of BLEURT). After investigating the recent advances of trainable metrics, we conclude several aspects of vital importance to obtain a well-performed metric model by: 1) jointly leveraging the advantages of source-included model and reference-only model, 2) continuously pre-training the model with massive synthetic data pairs, and 3) fine-tuning the model with data denoising strategy. Experimental results show that our model reaching state-of-the-art correlations with the WMT2020 human annotations upon 8 out of 10 to-English language pairs.

pdf bib
Manifold Adversarial Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Guandan Chen | Kai Fan | Kaibo Zhang | Boxing Chen | Zhongqiang Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

pdf bib
Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation
Xin Zheng | Zhirui Zhang | Shujian Huang | Boxing Chen | Jun Xie | Weihua Luo | Jiajun Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Recently, kNN-MT (Khandelwal et al., 2020) has shown the promising capability of directly incorporating the pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with domain-specific token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to achieve domain adaptation without retraining. Despite being conceptually attractive, it heavily relies on high-quality in-domain parallel corpora, limiting its capability on unsupervised domain adaptation, where in-domain parallel corpora are scarce or nonexistent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences in the target language to construct an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. To this end, we first introduce an autoencoder task based on the target language, and then insert lightweight adapters into the original NMT model to map the token-level representation of this task to the ideal representation of the translation task. Experiments on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly improves the translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data, while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zhengxxn/UDA-KNN.

pdf bib
Rethinking Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation: From a Perspective of Latent Variables
Weizhi Wang | Zhirui Zhang | Yichao Du | Boxing Chen | Jun Xie | Weihua Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Zero-shot translation, directly translating between language pairs unseen in training, is a promising capability of multilingual neural machine translation (NMT). However, it usually suffers from capturing spurious correlations between the output language and language invariant semantics due to the maximum likelihood training objective, leading to poor transfer performance on zero-shot translation. In this paper, we introduce a denoising autoencoder objective based on pivot language into traditional training objective to improve the translation accuracy on zero-shot directions. The theoretical analysis from the perspective of latent variables shows that our approach actually implicitly maximizes the probability distributions for zero-shot directions. On two benchmark machine translation datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method is able to effectively eliminate the spurious correlations and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a remarkable performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Victorwz/zs-nmt-dae.

pdf bib
Mutual-Learning Improves End-to-End Speech Translation
Jiawei Zhao | Wei Luo | Boxing Chen | Andrew Gilman
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

A currently popular research area in end-to-end speech translation is the use of knowledge distillation from a machine translation (MT) task to improve the speech translation (ST) task. However, such scenario obviously only allows one way transfer, which is limited by the performance of the teacher model. Therefore, We hypothesis that the knowledge distillation-based approaches are sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an alternative–a trainable mutual-learning scenario, where the MT and the ST models are collaboratively trained and are considered as peers, rather than teacher/student. This allows us to improve the performance of end-to-end ST more effectively than with a teacher-student paradigm. As a side benefit, performance of the MT model also improves. Experimental results show that in our mutual-learning scenario, models can effectively utilise the auxiliary information from peer models and achieve compelling results on Must-C dataset.

pdf bib
Context-Interactive Pre-Training for Document Machine Translation
Pengcheng Yang | Pei Zhang | Boxing Chen | Jun Xie | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Document machine translation aims to translate the source sentence into the target language in the presence of additional contextual information. However, it typically suffers from a lack of doc-level bilingual data. To remedy this, here we propose a simple yet effective context-interactive pre-training approach, which targets benefiting from external large-scale corpora. The proposed model performs inter sentence generation to capture the cross-sentence dependency within the target document, and cross sentence translation to make better use of valuable contextual information. Comprehensive experiments illustrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, which significantly outperforms a variety of baselines.

pdf bib
Continual Learning for Neural Machine Translation
Yue Cao | Hao-Ran Wei | Boxing Chen | Xiaojun Wan
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Neural machine translation (NMT) models are data-driven and require large-scale training corpus. In practical applications, NMT models are usually trained on a general domain corpus and then fine-tuned by continuing training on the in-domain corpus. However, this bears the risk of catastrophic forgetting that the performance on the general domain is decreased drastically. In this work, we propose a new continual learning framework for NMT models. We consider a scenario where the training is comprised of multiple stages and propose a dynamic knowledge distillation technique to alleviate the problem of catastrophic forgetting systematically. We also find that the bias exists in the output linear projection when fine-tuning on the in-domain corpus, and propose a bias-correction module to eliminate the bias. We conduct experiments on three representative settings of NMT application. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to baseline models in all settings.

pdf bib
Breaking the Corpus Bottleneck for Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Cross-Task Pre-training
Linqing Chen | Junhui Li | Zhengxian Gong | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo | Min Zhang | Guodong Zhou
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)

Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale document-level parallel corpora. To break the corpus bottleneck, in this paper we aim to improve context-aware NMT by taking the advantage of the availability of both large-scale sentence-level parallel dataset and source-side monolingual documents. To this end, we propose two pre-training tasks. One learns to translate a sentence from source language to target language on the sentence-level parallel dataset while the other learns to translate a document from deliberately noised to original on the monolingual documents. Importantly, the two pre-training tasks are jointly and simultaneously learned via the same model, thereafter fine-tuned on scale-limited parallel documents from both sentence-level and document-level perspectives. Experimental results on four translation tasks show that our approach significantly improves translation performance. One nice property of our approach is that the fine-tuned model can be used to translate both sentences and documents.

pdf bib
G-Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation
Guangsheng Bao | Yue Zhang | Zhiyang Teng | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo
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 MT models are still far from satisfactory. Existing work extend translation unit from single sentence to multiple sentences. However, study shows that when we further enlarge the translation unit to a whole document, supervised training of Transformer can fail. In this paper, we find such failure is not caused by overfitting, but by sticking around local minima during training. Our analysis shows that the increased complexity of target-to-source attention is a reason for the failure. As a solution, we propose G-Transformer, introducing locality assumption as an inductive bias into Transformer, reducing the hypothesis space of the attention from target to source. Experiments show that G-Transformer converges faster and more stably than Transformer, achieving new state-of-the-art BLEU scores for both nonpretraining and pre-training settings on three benchmark datasets.

pdf bib
Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
Xin Zheng | Zhirui Zhang | Junliang Guo | Shujian Huang | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

kNN-MT, recently proposed by Khandelwal et al. (2020a), successfully combines pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to improve the translation accuracy. However, the traditional kNN algorithm used in kNN-MT simply retrieves a same number of nearest neighbors for each target token, which may cause prediction errors when the retrieved neighbors include noises. In this paper, we propose Adaptive kNN-MT to dynamically determine the number of k for each target token. We achieve this by introducing a light-weight Meta-k Network, which can be efficiently trained with only a few training samples. On four benchmark machine translation datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method is able to effectively filter out the noises in retrieval results and significantly outperforms the vanilla kNN-MT model. Even more noteworthy is that the Meta-k Network learned on one domain could be directly applied to other domains and obtain consistent improvements, illustrating the generality of our method. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zhengxxn/adaptive-knn-mt.

2020

pdf bib
Self-Paced Learning for Neural Machine Translation
Yu Wan | Baosong Yang | Derek F. Wong | Yikai Zhou | Lidia S. Chao | Haibo Zhang | Boxing Chen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recent studies have proven that the training of neural machine translation (NMT) can be facilitated by mimicking the learning process of humans. Nevertheless, achievements of such kind of curriculum learning rely on the quality of artificial schedule drawn up with the handcrafted features, e.g. sentence length or word rarity. We ameliorate this procedure with a more flexible manner by proposing self-paced learning, where NMT model is allowed to 1) automatically quantify the learning confidence over training examples; and 2) flexibly govern its learning via regulating the loss in each iteration step. Experimental results over multiple translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model yields better performance than strong baselines and those models trained with human-designed curricula on both translation quality and convergence speed.

pdf bib
Long-Short Term Masking Transformer: A Simple but Effective Baseline for Document-level Neural Machine Translation
Pei Zhang | Boxing Chen | Niyu Ge | Kai Fan
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Many document-level neural machine translation (NMT) systems have explored the utility of context-aware architecture, usually requiring an increasing number of parameters and computational complexity. However, few attention is paid to the baseline model. In this paper, we research extensively the pros and cons of the standard transformer in document-level translation, and find that the auto-regressive property can simultaneously bring both the advantage of the consistency and the disadvantage of error accumulation. Therefore, we propose a surprisingly simple long-short term masking self-attention on top of the standard transformer to both effectively capture the long-range dependence and reduce the propagation of errors. We examine our approach on the two publicly available document-level datasets. We can achieve a strong result in BLEU and capture discourse phenomena.

pdf bib
Iterative Domain-Repaired Back-Translation
Hao-Ran Wei | Zhirui Zhang | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In this paper, we focus on the domain-specific translation with low resources, where in-domain parallel corpora are scarce or nonexistent. One common and effective strategy for this case is exploiting in-domain monolingual data with the back-translation method. However, the synthetic parallel data is very noisy because they are generated by imperfect out-of-domain systems, resulting in the poor performance of domain adaptation. To address this issue, we propose a novel iterative domain-repaired back-translation framework, which introduces the Domain-Repair (DR) model to refine translations in synthetic bilingual data. To this end, we construct corresponding data for the DR model training by round-trip translating the monolingual sentences, and then design the unified training framework to optimize paired DR and NMT models jointly. Experiments on adapting NMT models between specific domains and from the general domain to specific domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, achieving 15.79 and 4.47 BLEU improvements on average over unadapted models and back-translation.

pdf bib
Bilingual Dictionary Based Neural Machine Translation without Using Parallel Sentences
Xiangyu Duan | Baijun Ji | Hao Jia | Min Tan | Min Zhang | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we propose a new task of machine translation (MT), which is based on no parallel sentences but can refer to a ground-truth bilingual dictionary. Motivated by the ability of a monolingual speaker learning to translate via looking up the bilingual dictionary, we propose the task to see how much potential an MT system can attain using the bilingual dictionary and large scale monolingual corpora, while is independent on parallel sentences. We propose anchored training (AT) to tackle the task. AT uses the bilingual dictionary to establish anchoring points for closing the gap between source language and target language. Experiments on various language pairs show that our approaches are significantly better than various baselines, including dictionary-based word-by-word translation, dictionary-supervised cross-lingual word embedding transformation, and unsupervised MT. On distant language pairs that are hard for unsupervised MT to perform well, AT performs remarkably better, achieving performances comparable to supervised SMT trained on more than 4M parallel sentences.

pdf bib
Domain Transfer based Data Augmentation for Neural Query Translation
Liang Yao | Baosong Yang | Haibo Zhang | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Query translation (QT) serves as a critical factor in successful cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). Due to the lack of parallel query samples, neural-based QT models are usually optimized with synthetic data which are derived from large-scale monolingual queries. Nevertheless, such kind of pseudo corpus is mostly produced by a general-domain translation model, making it be insufficient to guide the learning of QT model. In this paper, we extend the data augmentation with a domain transfer procedure, thus to revise synthetic candidates to search-aware examples. Specifically, the domain transfer model is built upon advanced Transformer, in which layer coordination and mixed attention are exploited to speed up the refining process and leverage parameters from a pre-trained cross-lingual language model. In order to examine the effectiveness of the proposed method, we collected French-to-English and Spanish-to-English QT test sets, each of which consists of 10,000 parallel query pairs with careful manual-checking. Qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that our model significantly outperforms strong baselines and the related domain transfer methods on both translation quality and retrieval accuracy.

2019

pdf bib
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Abstractive Sentence Summarization through Teaching Generation and Attention
Xiangyu Duan | Mingming Yin | Min Zhang | Boxing Chen | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstractive Sentence Summarization (ASSUM) targets at grasping the core idea of the source sentence and presenting it as the summary. It is extensively studied using statistical models or neural models based on the large-scale monolingual source-summary parallel corpus. But there is no cross-lingual parallel corpus, whose source sentence language is different to the summary language, to directly train a cross-lingual ASSUM system. We propose to solve this zero-shot problem by using resource-rich monolingual ASSUM system to teach zero-shot cross-lingual ASSUM system on both summary word generation and attention. This teaching process is along with a back-translation process which simulates source-summary pairs. Experiments on cross-lingual ASSUM task show that our proposed method is significantly better than pipeline baselines and previous works, and greatly enhances the cross-lingual performances closer to the monolingual performances.

pdf bib
Lattice Transformer for Speech Translation
Pei Zhang | Niyu Ge | Boxing Chen | Kai Fan
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent advances in sequence modeling have highlighted the strengths of the transformer architecture, especially in achieving state-of-the-art machine translation results. However, depending on the up-stream systems, e.g., speech recognition, or word segmentation, the input to translation system can vary greatly. The goal of this work is to extend the attention mechanism of the transformer to naturally consume the lattice in addition to the traditional sequential input. We first propose a general lattice transformer for speech translation where the input is the output of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) which contains multiple paths and posterior scores. To leverage the extra information from the lattice structure, we develop a novel controllable lattice attention mechanism to obtain latent representations. On the LDC Spanish-English speech translation corpus, our experiments show that lattice transformer generalizes significantly better and outperforms both a transformer baseline and a lattice LSTM. Additionally, we validate our approach on the WMT 2017 Chinese-English translation task with lattice inputs from different BPE segmentations. In this task, we also observe the improvements over strong baselines.

2018

pdf bib
Alibaba’s Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT18
Yongchao Deng | Shanbo Cheng | Jun Lu | Kai Song | Jingang Wang | Shenglan Wu | Liang Yao | Guchun Zhang | Haibo Zhang | Pei Zhang | Changfeng Zhu | Boxing Chen
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the submission systems of Alibaba for WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in 5 translation directions including English ↔ Russian, English ↔ Turkish in both directions and English → Chinese. Our systems are based on Google’s Transformer model architecture, into which we integrated the most recent features from the academic research. We also employed most techniques that have been proven effective during the past WMT years, such as BPE, back translation, data selection, model ensembling and reranking, at industrial scale. For some morphologically-rich languages, we also incorporated linguistic knowledge into our neural network. For the translation tasks in which we have participated, our resulting systems achieved the best case sensitive BLEU score in all 5 directions. Notably, our English → Russian system outperformed the second reranked system by 5 BLEU score.

pdf bib
Alibaba Submission for WMT18 Quality Estimation Task
Jiayi Wang | Kai Fan | Bo Li | Fengming Zhou | Boxing Chen | Yangbin Shi | Luo Si
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

The goal of WMT 2018 Shared Task on Translation Quality Estimation is to investigate automatic methods for estimating the quality of machine translation results without reference translations. This paper presents the QE Brain system, which proposes the neural Bilingual Expert model as a feature extractor based on conditional target language model with a bidirectional transformer and then processes the semantic representations of source and the translation output with a Bi-LSTM predictive model for automatic quality estimation. The system has been applied to the sentence-level scoring and ranking tasks as well as the word-level tasks for finding errors for each word in translations. An extensive set of experimental results have shown that our system outperformed the best results in WMT 2017 Quality Estimation tasks and obtained top results in WMT 2018.

pdf bib
Alibaba Submission to the WMT18 Parallel Corpus Filtering Task
Jun Lu | Xiaoyu Lv | Yangbin Shi | Boxing Chen
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the Alibaba Machine Translation Group submissions to the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering. While evaluating the quality of the parallel corpus, the three characteristics of the corpus are investigated, i.e. 1) the bilingual/translation quality, 2) the monolingual quality and 3) the corpus diversity. Both rule-based and model-based methods are adapted to score the parallel sentence pairs. The final parallel corpus filtering system is reliable, easy to build and adapt to other language pairs.

pdf bib
Alibaba Speech Translation Systems for IWSLT 2018
Nguyen Bach | Hongjie Chen | Kai Fan | Cheung-Chi Leung | Bo Li | Chongjia Ni | Rong Tong | Pei Zhang | Boxing Chen | Bin Ma | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

This work describes the En→De Alibaba speech translation system developed for the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2018. In order to improve ASR performance, multiple ASR models including conventional and end-to-end models are built, then we apply model fusion in the final step. ASR pre and post-processing techniques such as speech segmentation, punctuation insertion, and sentence splitting are found to be very useful for MT. We also employed most techniques that have proven effective during the WMT 2018 evaluation, such as BPE, back translation, data selection, model ensembling and reranking. These ASR and MT techniques, combined, improve the speech translation quality significantly.

2017

pdf bib
Cost Weighting for Neural Machine Translation Domain Adaptation
Boxing Chen | Colin Cherry | George Foster | Samuel Larkin
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Neural Machine Translation

In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation technique for neural machine translation called cost weighting, which is appropriate for adaptation scenarios in which a small in-domain data set and a large general-domain data set are available. Cost weighting incorporates a domain classifier into the neural machine translation training algorithm, using features derived from the encoder representation in order to distinguish in-domain from out-of-domain data. Classifier probabilities are used to weight sentences according to their domain similarity when updating the parameters of the neural translation model. We compare cost weighting to two traditional domain adaptation techniques developed for statistical machine translation: data selection and sub-corpus weighting. Experiments on two large-data tasks show that both the traditional techniques and our novel proposal lead to significant gains, with cost weighting outperforming the traditional methods.

pdf bib
NRC Machine Translation System for WMT 2017
Chi-kiu Lo | Boxing Chen | Colin Cherry | George Foster | Samuel Larkin | Darlene Stewart | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

2016

pdf bib
Semi-supervised Convolutional Networks for Translation Adaptation with Tiny Amount of In-domain Data
Boxing Chen | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

pdf bib
Bilingual Methods for Adaptive Training Data Selection for Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | George Foster | Colin Cherry | Fei Huang
Conferences of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: MT Researchers' Track

In this paper, we propose a new data selection method which uses semi-supervised convolutional neural networks based on bitokens (Bi-SSCNNs) for training machine translation systems from a large bilingual corpus. In earlier work, we devised a data selection method based on semi-supervised convolutional neural networks (SSCNNs). The new method, Bi-SSCNN, is based on bitokens, which use bilingual information. When the new methods are tested on two translation tasks (Chinese-to-English and Arabic-to-English), they significantly outperform the other three data selection methods in the experiments. We also show that the BiSSCNN method is much more effective than other methods in preventing noisy sentence pairs from being chosen for training. More interestingly, this method only needs a tiny amount of in-domain data to train the selection model, which makes fine-grained topic-dependent translation adaptation possible. In the follow-up experiments, we find that neural machine translation (NMT) is more sensitive to noisy data than statistical machine translation (SMT). Therefore, Bi-SSCNN which can effectively screen out noisy sentence pairs, can benefit NMT much more than SMT.We observed a BLEU improvement over 3 points on an English-to-French WMT task when Bi-SSCNNs were used.

2015

pdf bib
Representation Based Translation Evaluation Metrics
Boxing Chen | Hongyu Guo
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

pdf bib
Multi-level Evaluation for Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | Hongyu Guo | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2014

pdf bib
Bilingual Sentiment Consistency for Statistical Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | Xiaodan Zhu
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

pdf bib
A comparison of mixture and vector space techniques for translation model adaptation
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | George Foster
Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: MT Researchers Track

In this paper, we propose two extensions to the vector space model (VSM) adaptation technique (Chen et al., 2013b) for statistical machine translation (SMT), both of which result in significant improvements. We also systematically compare the VSM techniques to three mixture model adaptation techniques: linear mixture, log-linear mixture (Foster and Kuhn, 2007), and provenance features (Chiang et al., 2011). Experiments on NIST Chinese-to-English and Arabic-to-English tasks show that all methods achieve significant improvement over a competitive non-adaptive baseline. Except for the original VSM adaptation method, all methods yield improvements in the +1.7-2.0 BLEU range. Combining them gives further significant improvements of up to +2.6-3.3 BLEU over the baseline.

pdf bib
A Systematic Comparison of Smoothing Techniques for Sentence-Level BLEU
Boxing Chen | Colin Cherry
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2013

pdf bib
Simulating Discriminative Training for Linear Mixture Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation
George Foster | Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIV: Papers

pdf bib
Adaptation of Reordering Models for Statistical Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | George Foster | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

pdf bib
Vector Space Model for Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | George Foster
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

pdf bib
Improving AMBER, an MT Evaluation Metric
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | George Foster
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

pdf bib
PORT: a Precision-Order-Recall MT Evaluation Metric for Tuning
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | Samuel Larkin
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2011

pdf bib
Unpacking and Transforming Feature Functions: New Ways to Smooth Phrase Tables
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | George Foster | Howard Johnson
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIII: Papers

pdf bib
Semantic smoothing and fabrication of phrase pairs for SMT
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn | George Foster
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

In statistical machine translation systems, phrases with similar meanings often have similar but not identical distributions of translations. This paper proposes a new soft clustering method to smooth the conditional translation probabilities for a given phrase with those of semantically similar phrases. We call this semantic smoothing (SS). Moreover, we fabricate new phrase pairs that were not observed in training data, but which may be used for decoding. In learning curve experiments against a strong baseline, we obtain a consistent pattern of modest improvement from semantic smoothing, and further modest improvement from phrase pair fabrication.

pdf bib
AMBER: A Modified BLEU, Enhanced Ranking Metric
Boxing Chen | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

pdf bib
Fast Consensus Hypothesis Regeneration for Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | George Foster | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

pdf bib
Lessons from NRC’s Portage System at WMT 2010
Samuel Larkin | Boxing Chen | George Foster | Ulrich Germann | Eric Joanis | Howard Johnson | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

pdf bib
Bilingual Sense Similarity for Statistical Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | George Foster | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

pdf bib
Phrase Clustering for Smoothing TM Probabilities - or, How to Extract Paraphrases from Phrase Tables
Roland Kuhn | Boxing Chen | George Foster | Evan Stratford
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

2009

pdf bib
A Comparative Study of Hypothesis Alignment and its Improvement for Machine Translation System Combination
Boxing Chen | Min Zhang | Haizhou Li | Aiti Aw
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP

pdf bib
Phrase Translation Model Enhanced with Association based Features
Boxing Chen | George Foster | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XII: Papers

2008

pdf bib
I2R multi-pass machine translation system for IWSLT 2008.
Boxing Chen | Deyi Xiong | Min Zhang | Aiti Aw | Haizhou Li
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

In this paper, we describe the system and approach used by the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) for the IWSLT 2008 spoken language translation evaluation campaign. In the system, we integrate various decoding algorithms into a multi-pass translation framework. The multi-pass approach enables us to utilize various decoding algorithm and to explore much more hypotheses. This paper reports our design philosophy, overall architecture, each individual system and various system combination methods that we have explored. The performance on development and test sets are reported in detail in the paper. The system has shown competitive performance with respect to the BLEU and METEOR measures in Chinese-English Challenge and BTEC tasks.

pdf bib
Exploiting N-best Hypotheses for SMT Self-Enhancement
Boxing Chen | Min Zhang | Aiti Aw | Haizhou Li
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, Short Papers

pdf bib
Regenerating Hypotheses for Statistical Machine Translation
Boxing Chen | Min Zhang | Aiti Aw | Haizhou Li
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008)

2007

pdf bib
Better n-best translations through generative n-gram language models
Boxing Chen | Marcello Federico | Mauro Cettolo
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI: Papers

pdf bib
I2R Chinese-English translation system for IWSLT 2007
Boxing Chen | Jun Sun | Hongfei Jiang | Min Zhang | Ai Ti Aw
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

In this paper, we describe the system and approach used by Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) for the IWSLT 2007 spoken language evaluation campaign. A multi-pass approach is exploited to generate and select best translation. First, we use two decoders namely the open source Moses and an in-home syntax-based decoder to generate N-best lists. Next we spawn new translation entries through a word-based n-gram language model estimated on the former N-best entries. Finally, we join the N-best lists from the previous two passes, and select the best translation by rescoring them with additional feature functions. In particular, this paper reports our effort on new translation entry generation and system combination. The performance on development and test sets are reported. The system was ranked first with respect to the BLEU measure in Chinese-to-English open data track.

2006

pdf bib
The ITC-irst SMT system for IWSLT 2006
Boxing Chen | Roldano Cattoni | Nicola Bertoldi | Mauro Cettolo | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

pdf bib
Reordering rules for phrase-based statistical machine translation
Boxing Chen | Mauro Cettolo | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

pdf bib
A Web-based Demonstrator of a Multi-lingual Phrase-based Translation System
Roldano Cattoni | Nicola Bertoldi | Mauro Cettolo | Boxing Chen | Marcello Federico
Demonstrations

2005

pdf bib
Contextes multilingues alignés pour la désambiguïsation sémantique : une étude expérimentale
Boxing Chen | Meriam Haddara | Olivier Kraif | Grégoire Moreau de Montcheuil | Marc El-Bèze
Actes de la 12ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Articles courts

Cet article s’intéresse a la désambiguïsation sémantique d’unités lexicales alignées a travers un corpus multilingue. Nous appliquons une méthode automatique non supervisée basée sur la comparaison de réseaux sémantiques, et nous dégageons un critère permettant de déterminer a priori si 2 unités alignées ont une chance de se désambiguïser mutuellement. Enfin, nous développons une méthode fondée sur un apprentissage a partir de contextes bilingues. En appliquant ce critère afin de déterminer pour quelles unités l’information traductionnelle doit être prise en compte, nous obtenons une amélioration des résultats.

pdf bib
The ITC-irst SMT System for IWSLT-2005
Boxing Chen | Roldano Cattoni | Nicola Bertoldi | Mauro Cettolo | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

2004

pdf bib
Combining clues for lexical level aligning using the Null hypothesis approach
Olivier Kraif | Boxing Chen
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

pdf bib
Using a Word Sense Disambiguation system for translation disambiguation: the LIA-LIDILEM team experiment
Grégoire Moreau de Montcheuil | Marc El-Bèze | Boxing Chen | Olivier Kraif
Proceedings of SENSEVAL-3, the Third International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text

2003

pdf bib
Preparatory Work on Automatic Extraction of Bilingual Multi-Word Units from Parallel Corpora
Boxing Chen | Limin Du
International Journal of Computational Linguistics & Chinese Language Processing, Volume 8, Number 2, August 2003

Search
Co-authors