Holger Schwenk


2023

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Speech-to-Speech Translation for a Real-world Unwritten Language
Peng-Jen Chen | Kevin Tran | Yilin Yang | Jingfei Du | Justine Kao | Yu-An Chung | Paden Tomasello | Paul-Ambroise Duquenne | Holger Schwenk | Hongyu Gong | Hirofumi Inaguma | Sravya Popuri | Changhan Wang | Juan Pino | Wei-Ning Hsu | Ann Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training data collection, modeling choices to benchmark dataset release. First, we present efforts on creating human annotated data, automatically mining data from large unlabeled speech datasets, and adopting pseudo-labeling to produce weakly supervised data. On the modeling, we take advantage of recent advances in applying self-supervised discrete representations as target for prediction in S2ST and show the effectiveness of leveraging additional text supervision from Mandarin, a language similar to Hokkien, in model training. Finally, we release an S2ST benchmark set to facilitate future research in this field.

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Multilingual Representation Distillation with Contrastive Learning
Weiting Tan | Kevin Heffernan | Holger Schwenk | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Multilingual sentence representations from large models encode semantic information from two or more languages and can be used for different cross-lingual information retrieval and matching tasks. In this paper, we integrate contrastive learning into multilingual representation distillation and use it for quality estimation of parallel sentences (i.e., find semantically similar sentences that can be used as translations of each other). We validate our approach with multilingual similarity search and corpus filtering tasks. Experiments across different low-resource languages show that our method greatly outperforms previous sentence encoders such as LASER, LASER3, and LaBSE.

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BLASER: A Text-Free Speech-to-Speech Translation Evaluation Metric
Mingda Chen | Paul-Ambroise Duquenne | Pierre Andrews | Justine Kao | Alexandre Mourachko | Holger Schwenk | Marta R. Costa-jussà
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

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SpeechMatrix: A Large-Scale Mined Corpus of Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translations
Paul-Ambroise Duquenne | Hongyu Gong | Ning Dong | Jingfei Du | Ann Lee | Vedanuj Goswami | Changhan Wang | Juan Pino | Benoît Sagot | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present SpeechMatrix, a large-scale multilingual corpus of speech-to-speech translations mined from real speech of European Parliament recordings. It contains speech alignments in 136 language pairs with a total of 418 thousand hours of speech. To evaluate the quality of this parallel speech, we train bilingual speech-to-speech translation models on mined data only and establish extensive baseline results on EuroParl-ST, VoxPopuli and FLEURS test sets. Enabled by the multilinguality of SpeechMatrix, we also explore multilingual speech-to-speech translation, a topic which was addressed by few other works. We also demonstrate that model pre-training and sparse scaling using Mixture-of-Experts bring large gains to translation performance. The mined data and models will be publicly released

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xSIM++: An Improved Proxy to Bitext Mining Performance for Low-Resource Languages
Mingda Chen | Kevin Heffernan | Onur Çelebi | Alexandre Mourachko | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We introduce a new proxy score for evaluating bitext mining based on similarity in a multilingual embedding space: xsim++. In comparison to xsim, this improved proxy leverages rule-based approaches to extend English sentences in any evaluation set with synthetic, hard-to-distinguish examples which more closely mirror the scenarios we encounter during large-scale mining. We validate this proxy by running a significant number of bitext mining experiments for a set of low-resource languages, and subsequently train NMT systems on the mined data. In comparison to xsim, we show that xsim++ is better correlated with the downstream BLEU scores of translation systems trained on mined bitexts, providing a reliable proxy of bitext mining performance without needing to run expensive bitext mining pipelines. xsim++ also reports performance for different error types, offering more fine-grained feedbacks for model development.

2022

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Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages
Kevin Heffernan | Onur Çelebi | Holger Schwenk
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages. We move away from the popular one-for-all multilingual models and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representations, but most prominently enable all languages to still be encoded in the same representational space. We focus on teacher-student training, allowing all encoders to be mutually compatible for bitext mining, and enabling fast learning of new languages. We also combine supervised and self-supervised training, allowing encoders to take advantage of monolingual training data. Our approach significantly outperforms the original LASER encoder. We study very low-resource languages and handle 44 African languages, many of which are not covered by any other model. For these languages, we train sentence encoders and mine bitexts. Adding these mined bitexts yielded an improvement of 3.8 BLEU for NMT into English.

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Findings of the WMT’22 Shared Task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages
David Adelani | Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Akshita Bhagia | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Jesse Dodge | Fahim Faisal | Christian Federmann | Natalia Fedorova | Francisco Guzmán | Sergey Koshelev | Jean Maillard | Vukosi Marivate | Jonathan Mbuya | Alexandre Mourachko | Safiyyah Saleem | Holger Schwenk | Guillaume Wenzek
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

We present the results of the WMT’22 SharedTask on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. The shared taskincluded both a data and a systems track, alongwith additional innovations, such as a focus onAfrican languages and extensive human evaluation of submitted systems. We received 14system submissions from 8 teams, as well as6 data track contributions. We report a largeprogress in the quality of translation for Africanlanguages since the last iteration of this sharedtask: there is an increase of about 7.5 BLEUpoints across 72 language pairs, and the average BLEU scores went from 15.09 to 22.60.

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Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data
Ann Lee | Hongyu Gong | Paul-Ambroise Duquenne | Holger Schwenk | Peng-Jen Chen | Changhan Wang | Sravya Popuri | Yossi Adi | Juan Pino | Jiatao Gu | Wei-Ning Hsu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We present a textless speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system that can translate speech from one language into another language and can be built without the need of any text data. Different from existing work in the literature, we tackle the challenge in modeling multi-speaker target speech and train the systems with real-world S2ST data. The key to our approach is a self-supervised unit-based speech normalization technique, which finetunes a pre-trained speech encoder with paired audios from multiple speakers and a single reference speaker to reduce the variations due to accents, while preserving the lexical content. With only 10 minutes of paired data for speech normalization, we obtain on average 3.2 BLEU gain when training the S2ST model on the VoxPopuli S2ST dataset, compared to a baseline trained on un-normalized speech target. We also incorporate automatically mined S2ST data and show an additional 2.0 BLEU gain. To our knowledge, we are the first to establish a textless S2ST technique that can be trained with real-world data and works for multiple language pairs.

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T-Modules: Translation Modules for Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Machine Translation
Paul-Ambroise Duquenne | Hongyu Gong | Benoît Sagot | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present a new approach to perform zero-shot cross-modal transfer between speech and text for translation tasks. Multilingual speech and text are encoded in a joint fixed-size representation space. Then, we compare different approaches to decode these multimodal and multilingual fixed-size representations, enabling zero-shot translation between languages and modalities. All our models are trained without the need of cross-modal labeled translation data. Despite a fixed-size representation, we achieve very competitive results on several text and speech translation tasks. In particular, we significantly improve the state-of-the-art for zero-shot speech translation on Must-C. Incorporating a speech decoder in our framework, we introduce the first results for zero-shot direct speech-to-speech and text-to-speech translation.

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stopes - Modular Machine Translation Pipelines
Pierre Andrews | Guillaume Wenzek | Kevin Heffernan | Onur Çelebi | Anna Sun | Ammar Kamran | Yingzhe Guo | Alexandre Mourachko | Holger Schwenk | Angela Fan
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Neural machine translation, as other natural language deep learning applications, is hungry for data. As research evolves, the data pipelines supporting that research evolve too, oftentimes re-implementing the same core components. Despite the potential of modular codebases, researchers have but little time to put code structure and reusability first. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard to publish clean, reproducible code to benefit a wider audience. In this paper, we motivate and describe stopes , a framework that addresses these issues while empowering scalability and versatility for research use cases. This library was a key enabler of the No Language Left Behind project, establishing new state of the art performance for a multilingual machine translation model covering 200 languages. stopes and the pipelines described are released under the MIT license at https://github.com/facebookresearch/stopes.

2021

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WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia
Holger Schwenk | Vishrav Chaudhary | Shuo Sun | Hongyu Gong | Francisco Guzmán
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

We present an approach based on multilingual sentence embeddings to automatically extract parallel sentences from the content of Wikipedia articles in 96 languages, including several dialects or low-resource languages. We do not limit the extraction process to alignments with English, but we systematically consider all possible language pairs. In total, we are able to extract 135M parallel sentences for 16720 different language pairs, out of which only 34M are aligned with English. This corpus is freely available. To get an indication on the quality of the extracted bitexts, we train neural MT baseline systems on the mined data only for 1886 languages pairs, and evaluate them on the TED corpus, achieving strong BLEU scores for many language pairs. The WikiMatrix bitexts seem to be particularly interesting to train MT systems between distant languages without the need to pivot through English.

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CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the Web
Holger Schwenk | Guillaume Wenzek | Sergey Edunov | Edouard Grave | Armand Joulin | Angela Fan
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)

We show that margin-based bitext mining in a multilingual sentence space can be successfully scaled to operate on monolingual corpora of billions of sentences. We use 32 snapshots of a curated common crawl corpus (Wenzel et al, 2019) totaling 71 billion unique sentences. Using one unified approach for 90 languages, we were able to mine 10.8 billion parallel sentences, out of which only 2.9 billions are aligned with English. We illustrate the capability of our scalable mining system to create high quality training sets from one language to any other by training hundreds of different machine translation models and evaluating them on the many-to-many TED benchmark. Further, we evaluate on competitive translation benchmarks such as WMT and WAT. Using only mined bitext, we set a new state of the art for a single system on the WMT’19 test set for English-German/Russian/Chinese. In particular, our English/German and English/Russian systems outperform the best single ones by over 4 BLEU points and are on par with best WMT’19 systems, which train on the WMT training data and augment it with backtranslation. We also achieve excellent results for distant languages pairs like Russian/Japanese, outperforming the best submission at the 2020 WAT workshop. All of the mined bitext will be freely available.

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FST: the FAIR Speech Translation System for the IWSLT21 Multilingual Shared Task
Yun Tang | Hongyu Gong | Xian Li | Changhan Wang | Juan Pino | Holger Schwenk | Naman Goyal
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

In this paper, we describe our end-to-end multilingual speech translation system submitted to the IWSLT 2021 evaluation campaign on the Multilingual Speech Translation shared task. Our system is built by leveraging transfer learning across modalities, tasks and languages. First, we leverage general-purpose multilingual modules pretrained with large amounts of unlabelled and labelled data. We further enable knowledge transfer from the text task to the speech task by training two tasks jointly. Finally, our multilingual model is finetuned on speech translation task-specific data to achieve the best translation results. Experimental results show our system outperforms the reported systems, including both end-to-end and cascaded based approaches, by a large margin. In some translation directions, our speech translation results evaluated on the public Multilingual TEDx test set are even comparable with the ones from a strong text-to-text translation system, which uses the oracle speech transcripts as input.

2020

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MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering
Patrick Lewis | Barlas Oguz | Ruty Rinott | Sebastian Riedel | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Question answering (QA) models have shown rapid progress enabled by the availability of large, high-quality benchmark datasets. Such annotated datasets are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English, making building QA systems that work well in other languages challenging. In order to develop such systems, it is crucial to invest in high quality multilingual evaluation benchmarks to measure progress. We present MLQA, a multi-way aligned extractive QA evaluation benchmark intended to spur research in this area. MLQA contains QA instances in 7 languages, English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Hindi, Vietnamese and Simplified Chinese. MLQA has over 12K instances in English and 5K in each other language, with each instance parallel between 4 languages on average. We evaluate state-of-the-art cross-lingual models and machine-translation-based baselines on MLQA. In all cases, transfer results are shown to be significantly behind training-language performance.

2019

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Margin-based Parallel Corpus Mining with Multilingual Sentence Embeddings
Mikel Artetxe | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Machine translation is highly sensitive to the size and quality of the training data, which has led to an increasing interest in collecting and filtering large parallel corpora. In this paper, we propose a new method for this task based on multilingual sentence embeddings. In contrast to previous approaches, which rely on nearest neighbor retrieval with a hard threshold over cosine similarity, our proposed method accounts for the scale inconsistencies of this measure, considering the margin between a given sentence pair and its closest candidates instead. Our experiments show large improvements over existing methods. We outperform the best published results on the BUCC mining task and the UN reconstruction task by more than 10 F1 and 30 precision points, respectively. Filtering the English-German ParaCrawl corpus with our approach, we obtain 31.2 BLEU points on newstest2014, an improvement of more than one point over the best official filtered version.

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Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond
Mikel Artetxe | Holger Schwenk
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7

We introduce an architecture to learn joint multilingual sentence representations for 93 languages, belonging to more than 30 different families and written in 28 different scripts. Our system uses a single BiLSTM encoder with a shared byte-pair encoding vocabulary for all languages, which is coupled with an auxiliary decoder and trained on publicly available parallel corpora. This enables us to learn a classifier on top of the resulting embeddings using English annotated data only, and transfer it to any of the 93 languages without any modification. Our experiments in cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI data set), cross-lingual document classification (MLDoc data set), and parallel corpus mining (BUCC data set) show the effectiveness of our approach. We also introduce a new test set of aligned sentences in 112 languages, and show that our sentence embeddings obtain strong results in multilingual similarity search even for low- resource languages. Our implementation, the pre-trained encoder, and the multilingual test set are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER.

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Low-Resource Corpus Filtering Using Multilingual Sentence Embeddings
Vishrav Chaudhary | Yuqing Tang | Francisco Guzmán | Holger Schwenk | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT19 low-resource parallel corpus filtering shared task. Our main approach is based on the LASER toolkit (Language-Agnostic SEntence Representations), which uses an encoder-decoder architecture trained on a parallel corpus to obtain multilingual sentence representations. We then use the representations directly to score and filter the noisy parallel sentences without additionally training a scoring function. We contrast our approach to other promising methods and show that LASER yields strong results. Finally, we produce an ensemble of different scoring methods and obtain additional gains. Our submission achieved the best overall performance for both the Nepali-English and Sinhala-English 1M tasks by a margin of 1.3 and 1.4 BLEU respectively, as compared to the second best systems. Moreover, our experiments show that this technique is promising for low and even no-resource scenarios.

2018

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A Corpus for Multilingual Document Classification in Eight Languages
Holger Schwenk | Xian Li
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations
Alexis Conneau | Ruty Rinott | Guillaume Lample | Adina Williams | Samuel Bowman | Holger Schwenk | Veselin Stoyanov
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in cross-lingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 14 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.

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Filtering and Mining Parallel Data in a Joint Multilingual Space
Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We learn a joint multilingual sentence embedding and use the distance between sentences in different languages to filter noisy parallel data and to mine for parallel data in large news collections. We are able to improve a competitive baseline on the WMT’14 English to German task by 0.3 BLEU by filtering out 25% of the training data. The same approach is used to mine additional bitexts for the WMT’14 system and to obtain competitive results on the BUCC shared task to identify parallel sentences in comparable corpora. The approach is generic, it can be applied to many language pairs and it is independent of the architecture of the machine translation system.

2017

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Learning Joint Multilingual Sentence Representations with Neural Machine Translation
Holger Schwenk | Matthijs Douze
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

In this paper, we use the framework of neural machine translation to learn joint sentence representations across six very different languages. Our aim is that a representation which is independent of the language, is likely to capture the underlying semantics. We define a new cross-lingual similarity measure, compare up to 1.4M sentence representations and study the characteristics of close sentences. We provide experimental evidence that sentences that are close in embedding space are indeed semantically highly related, but often have quite different structure and syntax. These relations also hold when comparing sentences in different languages.

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Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data
Alexis Conneau | Douwe Kiela | Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault | Antoine Bordes
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Many modern NLP systems rely on word embeddings, previously trained in an unsupervised manner on large corpora, as base features. Efforts to obtain embeddings for larger chunks of text, such as sentences, have however not been so successful. Several attempts at learning unsupervised representations of sentences have not reached satisfactory enough performance to be widely adopted. In this paper, we show how universal sentence representations trained using the supervised data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference datasets can consistently outperform unsupervised methods like SkipThought vectors on a wide range of transfer tasks. Much like how computer vision uses ImageNet to obtain features, which can then be transferred to other tasks, our work tends to indicate the suitability of natural language inference for transfer learning to other NLP tasks. Our encoder is publicly available.

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Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Text Classification
Alexis Conneau | Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault | Yann Lecun
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

The dominant approach for many NLP tasks are recurrent neural networks, in particular LSTMs, and convolutional neural networks. However, these architectures are rather shallow in comparison to the deep convolutional networks which have pushed the state-of-the-art in computer vision. We present a new architecture (VDCNN) for text processing which operates directly at the character level and uses only small convolutions and pooling operations. We are able to show that the performance of this model increases with the depth: using up to 29 convolutional layers, we report improvements over the state-of-the-art on several public text classification tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that very deep convolutional nets have been applied to text processing.

2015

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Improving continuous space language models auxiliary features
Walid Aransa | Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

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Continuous Adaptation to User Feedback for Statistical Machine Translation
Frédéric Blain | Fethi Bougares | Amir Hazem | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Incremental Adaptation Strategies for Neural Network Language Models
Alex Ter-Sarkisov | Holger Schwenk | Fethi Bougares | Loïc Barrault
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality

2014

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LIUM English-to-French spoken language translation system and the Vecsys/LIUM automatic speech recognition system for Italian language for IWSLT 2014
Anthony Rousseau | Loïc Barrault | Paul Deléglise | Yannick Estève | Holger Schwenk | Samir Bennacef | Armando Muscariello | Stephan Vanni
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the Spoken Language Translation system developed by the LIUM for the IWSLT 2014 evaluation campaign. We participated in two of the proposed tasks: (i) the Automatic Speech Recognition task (ASR) in two languages, Italian with the Vecsys company, and English alone, (ii) the English to French Spoken Language Translation task (SLT). We present the approaches and specificities found in our systems, as well as the results from the evaluation campaign.

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The MateCat Tool
Marcello Federico | Nicola Bertoldi | Mauro Cettolo | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi | Marco Trombetti | Alessandro Cattelan | Antonio Farina | Domenico Lupinetti | Andrea Martines | Alberto Massidda | Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault | Frederic Blain | Philipp Koehn | Christian Buck | Ulrich Germann
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

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Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder–Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation
Kyunghyun Cho | Bart van Merriënboer | Caglar Gulcehre | Dzmitry Bahdanau | Fethi Bougares | Holger Schwenk | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

2013

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Issues in incremental adaptation of statistical MT from human post-edits
Mauro Cettolo | Christophe Servan | Nicola Bertoldi | Marcello Federico | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Post-editing Technology and Practice

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Multimodal Comparable Corpora as Resources for Extracting Parallel Data: Parallel Phrases Extraction
Haithem Afli | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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A Multi-Domain Translation Model Framework for Statistical Machine Translation
Rico Sennrich | Holger Schwenk | Walid Aransa
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

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Semi-supervised transliteration mining from parallel and comparable corpora
Walid Aransa | Holger Schwenk | Loic Barrault
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

Transliteration is the process of writing a word (mainly proper noun) from one language in the alphabet of another language. This process requires mapping the pronunciation of the word from the source language to the closest possible pronunciation in the target language. In this paper we introduce a new semi-supervised transliteration mining method for parallel and comparable corpora. The method is mainly based on a new suggested Three Levels of Similarity (TLS) scores to extract the transliteration pairs. The first level calculates the similarity of of all vowel letters and consonants letters. The second level calculates the similarity of long vowels and vowel letters at beginning and end position of the words and consonants letters. The third level calculates the similarity consonants letters only. We applied our method on Arabic-English parallel and comparable corpora. We evaluated the extracted transliteration pairs using a statistical based transliteration system. This system is built using letters instead or words as tokens. The transliteration system achieves an accuracy of 0.50 and a mean F-score 0.8958 when trained on transliteration pairs extracted from a parallel corpus. The accuracy is 0.30 and the mean F-score 0.84 when we used instead a comparable corpus to automatically extract the transliteration pairs. This shows that the proposed semi-supervised transliteration mining algorithm is effective and can be applied to other language pairs. We also evaluated two segmentation techniques and reported the impact on the transliteration performance.

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Incremental adaptation using translation information and post-editing analysis
Frédéric Blain | Holger Schwenk | Jean Senellart
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

It is well known that statistical machine translation systems perform best when they are adapted to the task. In this paper we propose new methods to quickly perform incremental adaptation without the need to obtain word-by-word alignments from GIZA or similar tools. The main idea is to use an automatic translation as pivot to infer alignments between the source sentence and the reference translation, or user correction. We compared our approach to the standard method to perform incremental re-training. We achieve similar results in the BLEU score using less computational resources. Fast retraining is particularly interesting when we want to almost instantly integrate user feed-back, for instance in a post-editing context or machine translation assisted CAT tool. We also explore several methods to combine the translation models.

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Collaborative Machine Translation Service for Scientific texts
Patrik Lambert | Jean Senellart | Laurent Romary | Holger Schwenk | Florian Zipser | Patrice Lopez | Frédéric Blain
Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Continuous Space Translation Models for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation
Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters

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A General Framework to Weight Heterogeneous Parallel Data for Model Adaptation in Statistical MT
Kashif Shah | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers

The standard procedure to train the translation model of a phrase-based SMT system is to concatenate all available parallel data, to perform word alignment, to extract phrase pairs and to calculate translation probabilities by simple relative frequency. However, parallel data is quite inhomogeneous in many practical applications with respect to several factors like data source, alignment quality, appropriateness to the task, etc. We propose a general framework to take into account these factors during the calculation of the phrase-table, e.g. by better distributing the probability mass of the individual phrase pairs. No additional feature functions are needed. We report results on two well-known tasks: the IWSLT’11 and WMT’11 evaluations, in both conditions translating from English to French. We give detailed results for different functions to weight the bitexts. Our best systems improve a strong baseline by up to one BLEU point without any impact on the computational complexity during training or decoding.

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Large, Pruned or Continuous Space Language Models on a GPU for Statistical Machine Translation
Holger Schwenk | Anthony Rousseau | Mohammed Attik
Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT 2012 Workshop: Will We Ever Really Replace the N-gram Model? On the Future of Language Modeling for HLT

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LIUM’s SMT Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2012
Christophe Servan | Patrik Lambert | Anthony Rousseau | Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Automatic Translation of Scientific Documents in the HAL Archive
Patrik Lambert | Holger Schwenk | Frédéric Blain
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

This paper describes the development of a statistical machine translation system between French and English for scientific papers. This system will be closely integrated into the French HAL open archive, a collection of more than 100.000 scientific papers. We describe the creation of in-domain parallel and monolingual corpora, the development of a domain specific translation system with the created resources, and its adaptation using monolingual resources only. These techniques allowed us to improve a generic system by more than 10 BLEU points.

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Traduction automatique à partir de corpus comparables: extraction de phrases parallèles à partir de données comparables multimodales (Automatic Translation from Comparable corpora : extracting parallel sentences from multimodal comparable corpora) [in French]
Haithem Afli | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the Joint Conference JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2012, volume 2: TALN

2011

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Parametric Weighting of Parallel Data for Statistical Machine Translation
Kashif Shah | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Qualitative Analysis of Post-Editing for High Quality Machine Translation
Frédéric Blain | Jean Senellart | Holger Schwenk | Mirko Plitt | Johann Roturier
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIII: Papers

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LIUM’s systems for the IWSLT 2011 speech translation tasks
Anthony Rousseau | Fethi Bougares | Paul Deléglise | Holger Schwenk | Yannick Estève
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the three systems developed by the LIUM for the IWSLT 2011 evaluation campaign. We participated in three of the proposed tasks, namely the Automatic Speech Recognition task (ASR), the ASR system combination task (ASR_SC) and the Spoken Language Translation task (SLT), since these tasks are all related to speech translation. We present the approaches and specificities we developed on each task.

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Investigations on Translation Model Adaptation Using Monolingual Data
Patrik Lambert | Holger Schwenk | Christophe Servan | Sadaf Abdul-Rauf
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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LIUM’s SMT Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2011
Holger Schwenk | Patrik Lambert | Loïc Barrault | Christophe Servan | Sadaf Abdul-Rauf | Haithem Afli | Kashif Shah
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

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LIUM SMT Machine Translation System for WMT 2010
Patrik Lambert | Sadaf Abdul-Rauf | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

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Translation Model Adaptation by Resampling
Kashif Shah | Loïc Barrault | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

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Adaptation d’un Système de Traduction Automatique Statistique avec des Ressources monolingues
Holger Schwenk
Actes de la 17e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Articles longs

Les performances d’un système de traduction statistique dépendent beaucoup de la qualité et de la quantité des données d’apprentissage disponibles. La plupart des textes parallèles librement disponibles proviennent d’organisations internationales. Le jargon observé dans ces textes n’est pas très adapté pour construire un système de traduction pour d’autres domaines. Nous présentons dans cet article une technique pour adapter le modèle de traduction à un domaine différent en utilisant des textes dans la langue source uniquement. Nous obtenons des améliorations significatives du score BLEU dans des systèmes de traduction de l’arabe vers le français et vers l’anglais.

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N-gram-based machine translation enhanced with neural networks
Francisco Zamora-Martinez | Maria Jose Castro-Bleda | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

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Multilinguisme et traitement automatique des langues [Multilinguism and natural language processing]
Holger Schwenk | Emmanuel Morin
Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 51, Numéro 2 : Multilinguisme et traitement automatique des langues [Multilingualism and Natural Language Processing]

2009

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SMT and SPE Machine Translation Systems for WMT‘09
Holger Schwenk | Sadaf Abdul-Rauf | Loïc Barrault | Jean Senellart
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Exploiting Comparable Corpora with TER and TERp
Sadaf Abdul-Rauf | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: from Parallel to Non-parallel Corpora (BUCC)

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On the Use of Comparable Corpora to Improve SMT performance
Sadaf Abdul-Rauf | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL 2009)

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LIUM’s statistical machine translation system for IWSLT 2009
Holger Schwenk | Loïc Barrault | Yannick Estève | Patrik Lambert
Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the systems developed by the LIUM laboratory for the 2009 IWSLT evaluation. We participated in the Arabic and Chinese to English BTEC tasks. We developed three different systems: a statistical phrase-based system using the Moses toolkit, an Statistical Post-Editing system and a hierarchical phrase-based system based on Joshua. A continuous space language model was deployed to improve the modeling of the target language. These systems are combined by a confusion network based approach.

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Translation Model Adaptation for an Arabic/French News Translation System by Lightly- Supervised Training
Holger Schwenk | Jean Senellart
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XII: Posters

2008

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Large and Diverse Language Models for Statistical Machine Translation
Holger Schwenk | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Volume-II

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The LIUM Arabic/English statistical machine translation system for IWSLT 2008.
Holger Schwenk | Yannick Estève | Sadaf Abdul Rauf
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the system developed by the LIUM laboratory for the 2008 IWSLT evaluation. We only participated in the Arabic/English BTEC task. We developed a statistical phrase-based system using the Moses toolkit and SYSTRAN’s rule-based translation system to perform a morphological decomposition of the Arabic words. A continuous space language model was deployed to improve the modeling of the target language. Both approaches achieved significant improvements in the BLEU score. The system achieves a score of 49.4 on the test set of the 2008 IWSLT evaluation.

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Investigations on large-scale lightly-supervised training for statistical machine translation.
Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

Sentence-aligned bilingual texts are a crucial resource to build statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. In this paper we propose to apply lightly-supervised training to produce additional parallel data. The idea is to translate large amounts of monolingual data (up to 275M words) with an SMT system, and to use those as additional training data. Results are reported for the translation from French into English. We consider two setups: first the intial SMT system is only trained with a very limited amount of human-produced translations, and then the case where we have more than 100 million words. In both conditions, lightly-supervised training achieves significant improvements of the BLEU score.

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First Steps towards a General Purpose French/English Statistical Machine Translation System
Holger Schwenk | Jean-Baptiste Fouet | Jean Senellart
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2007

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A state-of-the-art statistical machine translation system based on Moses
Daniel Déchelotte | Holger Schwenk | Hélène Bonneau-Maynard | Alexandre Allauzen | Gilles Adda
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI: Papers

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Smooth Bilingual N-Gram Translation
Holger Schwenk | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Jose A. R. Fonollosa
Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL)

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Combining Morphosyntactic Enriched Representation with n-best Reranking in Statistical Translation
Hélène Bonneau-Maynard | Alexandre Allauzen | Daniel Déchelotte | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of SSST, NAACL-HLT 2007 / AMTA Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation

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Building a Statistical Machine Translation System for French Using the Europarl Corpus
Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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The TALP ngram-based SMT system for IWSLT 2007
Patrik Lambert | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Josep M. Crego | Maxim Khalilov | José B. Mariño | Rafael E. Banchs | José A. R. Fonollosa | Holger Schwenk
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation

This paper describes TALPtuples, the 2007 N-gram-based statistical machine translation system developed at the TALP Research Center of the UPC (Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya) in Barcelona. Emphasis is put on improvements and extensions of the system of previous years. Mainly, these include optimizing alignment parameters in function of translation metric scores and rescoring with a neural network language model. Results on two translation directions are reported, namely from Arabic and Chinese into English, thoroughly explaining all language-related preprocessing and translation schemes.

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Modèles statistiques enrichis par la syntaxe pour la traduction automatique
Holger Schwenk | Daniel Déchelotte | Hélène Bonneau-Maynard | Alexandre Allauzen
Actes de la 14ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Posters

La traduction automatique statistique par séquences de mots est une voie prometteuse. Nous présentons dans cet article deux évolutions complémentaires. La première permet une modélisation de la langue cible dans un espace continu. La seconde intègre des catégories morpho-syntaxiques aux unités manipulées par le modèle de traduction. Ces deux approches sont évaluées sur la tâche Tc-Star. Les résultats les plus intéressants sont obtenus par la combinaison de ces deux méthodes.

2006

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Continuous space language models for the IWSLT 2006 task
Holger Schwenk | Marta R. Costa-jussà | José A. R. Fonollosa
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

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Continuous Space Language Models for Statistical Machine Translation
Holger Schwenk | Daniel Dechelotte | Jean-Luc Gauvain
Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions

2005

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Training Neural Network Language Models on Very Large Corpora
Holger Schwenk | Jean-Luc Gauvain
Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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