Mark Fishel


2024

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Mixing and Matching: Combining Independently Trained Translation Model Components
Taido Purason | Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN 2024)

This paper investigates how to combine encoders and decoders of different independently trained NMT models. Combining encoders/decoders is not directly possible since the intermediate representations of any two independent NMT models are different and cannot be combined without modification. To address this, firstly, a dimension adapter is added if the encoder and decoder have different embedding dimensionalities, and secondly, representation adapter layers are added to align the encoder’s representations for the decoder to process. As a proof of concept, this paper looks at many-to-Estonian translation and combines a massively multilingual encoder (NLLB) and a high-quality language-specific decoder. The paper successfully demonstrates that the sentence representations of two independent NMT models can be made compatible without changing the pre-trained components while keeping translation quality from deteriorating. Results show improvements in both translation quality and speed for many-to-one translation over the baseline multilingual model.

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No Error Left Behind: Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction with Pre-trained Translation Models
Agnes Luhtaru | Elizaveta Korotkova | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) enhances language proficiency and promotes effective communication, but research has primarily centered around English. We propose a simple approach to multilingual and low-resource GEC by exploring the potential of multilingual machine translation (MT) models for error correction. We show that MT models are not only capable of error correction out-of-the-box, but that they can also be fine-tuned to even better correction quality. Results show the effectiveness of this approach, with our multilingual model outperforming similar-sized mT5-based models and even competing favourably with larger models.

2023

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True Detective: A Deep Abductive Reasoning Benchmark Undoable for GPT-3 and Challenging for GPT-4
Maksym Del | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated solid zero-shot reasoning capabilities, which is reflected in their performance on the current test tasks. This calls for a more challenging benchmark requiring highly advanced reasoning ability to be solved. In this paper, we introduce such a benchmark, consisting of 191 long-form (1200 words on average) mystery narratives constructed as detective puzzles. Puzzles are sourced from the “5 Minute Mystery” platform and include a multiple-choice question for evaluation. Only 47% of humans solve a puzzle successfully on average, while the best human solvers achieve over 80% success rate. We show that GPT-3 models barely outperform random on this benchmark (with 28% accuracy) while state-of-the-art GPT-4 solves only 38% of puzzles. This indicates that there is still a significant gap in the deep reasoning abilities of LLMs and humans and highlights the need for further research in this area. Our work introduces a challenging benchmark for future studies on reasoning in language models and contributes to a better understanding of the limits of LLMs’ abilities.

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

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

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Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)
Tanel Alumäe | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

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Automatic Transcription for Estonian Children’s Speech
Agnes Luhtaru | Rauno Jaaska | Karl Kruusamäe | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

We evaluate the impact of recent improvements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) on transcribing Estonian children’s speech. Our research focuses on fine-tuning large ASR models with a 10-hour Estonian children’s speech dataset to create accurate transcriptions. Our results show that large pre-trained models hold great potential when fine-tuned first with a more substantial Estonian adult speech corpus and then further trained with children’s speech.

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Translated Benchmarks Can Be Misleading: the Case of Estonian Question Answering
Hele-Andra Kuulmets | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Translated test datasets are a popular and cheaper alternative to native test datasets. However, one of the properties of translated data is the existence of cultural knowledge unfamiliar to the target language speakers. This can make translated test datasets differ significantly from native target datasets. As a result, we might inaccurately estimate the performance of the models in the target language. In this paper, we use both native and translated Estonian QA datasets to study this topic more closely. We discover that relying on the translated test dataset results in an overestimation of the model’s performance on native Estonian data.

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Neural Text-to-Speech Synthesis for Võro
Liisa Rätsep | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

This paper presents the first high-quality neural text-to-speech (TTS) system for Võro, a minority language spoken in Southern Estonia. By leveraging existing Estonian TTS models and datasets, we analyze whether common low-resource NLP techniques, such as cross-lingual transfer learning from related languages or multi-task learning, can benefit our low-resource use case. Our results show that we can achieve high-quality Võro TTS without transfer learning and that using more diverse training data can even decrease synthesis quality. While these techniques may still be useful in some cases, our work highlights the need for caution when applied in specific low-resource scenarios, and it can provide valuable insights for future low-resource research and efforts in preserving minority languages.

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Machine Translation for Low-resource Finno-Ugric Languages
Lisa Yankovskaya | Maali Tars | Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

This paper focuses on neural machine translation (NMT) for low-resource Finno-Ugric languages. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we extend existing and collect new parallel and monolingual corpora for 20 languages, (2) we expand the 200-language translation benchmark FLORES-200 with manual translations into nine new languages, and (3) we present experiments using the collected data to create NMT systems for the included languages and investigate the impact of back-translation data on the NMT performance for low-resource languages. Experimental results show that carefully selected limited amounts of back-translation directions yield the best results in terms of translation scores, for both high-resource and low-resource output languages.

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Distilling Estonian Text Domains for Production-Oriented Machine Translation
Elizaveta Korotkova | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

This paper explores knowledge distillation for multi-domain neural machine translation (NMT). We focus on the Estonian-English translation direction and experiment with distilling the knowledge of multiple domain-specific teacher models into a single student model that is tiny and efficient. Our experiments use a large parallel dataset of 18 million sentence pairs, consisting of 10 corpora, divided into 6 domain groups based on source similarity, and incorporate forward-translated monolingual data. Results show that tiny student models can cope with multiple domains even in case of large corpora, with different approaches benefiting frequent and low-resource domains.

2022

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National Language Technology Platform for Public Administration
Marko Tadić | Daša Farkaš | Matea Filko | Artūrs Vasiļevskis | Andrejs Vasiļjevs | Jānis Ziediņš | Željka Motika | Mark Fishel | Hrafn Loftsson | Jón Guðnason | Claudia Borg | Keith Cortis | Judie Attard | Donatienne Spiteri
Proceedings of the Workshop Towards Digital Language Equality within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This article presents the work in progress on the collaborative project of several European countries to develop National Language Technology Platform (NLTP). The project aims at combining the most advanced Language Technology tools and solutions in a new, state-of-the-art, Artificial Intelligence driven, National Language Technology Platform for five EU/EEA official and lower-resourced languages.

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Cross-lingual Similarity of Multilingual Representations Revisited
Maksym Del | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Related works used indexes like CKA and variants of CCA to measure the similarity of cross-lingual representations in multilingual language models. In this paper, we argue that assumptions of CKA/CCA align poorly with one of the motivating goals of cross-lingual learning analysis, i.e., explaining zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. We highlight what valuable aspects of cross-lingual similarity these indexes fail to capture and provide a motivating case study demonstrating the problem empirically. Then, we introduce Average Neuron-Wise Correlation (ANC) as a straightforward alternative that is exempt from the difficulties of CKA/CCA and is good specifically in a cross-lingual context. Finally, we use ANC to construct evidence that the previously introduced “first align, then predict” pattern takes place not only in masked language models (MLMs) but also in multilingual models with causal language modeling objectives (CLMs). Moreover, we show that the pattern extends to the scaled versions of the MLMs and CLMs (up to 85x original mBERT). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/TartuNLP/xsim

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

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

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

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MTee: Open Machine Translation Platform for Estonian Government
Toms Bergmanis | Marcis Pinnis | Roberts Rozis | Jānis Šlapiņš | Valters Šics | Berta Bernāne | Guntars Pužulis | Endijs Titomers | Andre Tättar | Taido Purason | Hele-Andra Kuulmets | Agnes Luhtaru | Liisa Rätsep | Maali Tars | Annika Laumets-Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

We present the MTee project - a research initiative funded via an Estonian public procurement to develop machine translation technology that is open-source and free of charge. The MTee project delivered an open-source platform serving state-of-the-art machine translation systems supporting four domains for six language pairs translating from Estonian into English, German, and Russian and vice-versa. The platform also features grammatical error correction and speech translation for Estonian and allows for formatted document translation and automatic domain detection. The software, data and training workflows for machine translation engines are all made publicly available for further use and research.

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National Language Technology Platform (NLTP): overall view
Artūrs Vasiļevskis | Jānis Ziediņš | Marko Tadić | Željka Motika | Mark Fishel | Hrafn Loftsson | Jón Gu | Claudia Borg | Keith Cortis | Judie Attard | Donatienne Spiteri
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

The work in progress on the CEF Action National Language Technology Platform (NLTP) is presented. The Action aims at combining the most advanced Language Technology (LT) tools and solutions in a new state-of-the-art, Artificial Intelli- gence (AI) driven, National Language Technology Platform (NLTP).

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Machine Translation for Livonian: Catering to 20 Speakers
Matīss Rikters | Marili Tomingas | Tuuli Tuisk | Valts Ernštreits | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Livonian is one of the most endangered languages in Europe with just a tiny handful of speakers and virtually no publicly available corpora. In this paper we tackle the task of developing neural machine translation (NMT) between Livonian and English, with a two-fold aim: on one hand, preserving the language and on the other – enabling access to Livonian folklore, lifestories and other textual intangible heritage as well as making it easier to create further parallel corpora. We rely on Livonian’s linguistic similarity to Estonian and Latvian and collect parallel and monolingual data for the four languages for translation experiments. We combine different low-resource NMT techniques like zero-shot translation, cross-lingual transfer and synthetic data creation to reach the highest possible translation quality as well as to find which base languages are empirically more helpful for transfer to Livonian. The resulting NMT systems and the collected monolingual and parallel data, including a manually translated and verified translation benchmark, are publicly released via OPUS and Huggingface repositories.

2021

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

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Translation Transformers Rediscover Inherent Data Domains
Maksym Del | Elizaveta Korotkova | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

Many works proposed methods to improve the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models in a domain/multi-domain adaptation scenario. However, an understanding of how NMT baselines represent text domain information internally is still lacking. Here we analyze the sentence representations learned by NMT Transformers and show that these explicitly include the information on text domains, even after only seeing the input sentences without domains labels. Furthermore, we show that this internal information is enough to cluster sentences by their underlying domains without supervision. We show that NMT models produce clusters better aligned to the actual domains compared to pre-trained language models (LMs). Notably, when computed on document-level, NMT cluster-to-domain correspondence nears 100%. We use these findings together with an approach to NMT domain adaptation using automatically extracted domains. Whereas previous work relied on external LMs for text clustering, we propose re-using the NMT model as a source of unsupervised clusters. We perform an extensive experimental study comparing two approaches across two data scenarios, three language pairs, and both sentence-level and document-level clustering, showing equal or significantly superior performance compared to LMs.

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Direct Exploitation of Attention Weights for Translation Quality Estimation
Lisa Yankovskaya | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

The paper presents our submission to the WMT2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). We participate in sentence-level predictions of human judgments and post-editing effort. We propose a glass-box approach based on attention weights extracted from machine translation systems. In contrast to the previous works, we directly explore attention weight matrices without replacing them with general metrics (like entropy). We show that some of our models can be trained with a small amount of a high-cost labelled data. In the absence of training data our approach still demonstrates a moderate linear correlation, when trained with synthetic data.

2020

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Unsupervised Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation
Marina Fomicheva | Shuo Sun | Lisa Yankovskaya | Frédéric Blain | Francisco Guzmán | Mark Fishel | Nikolaos Aletras | Vishrav Chaudhary | Lucia Specia
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

Quality Estimation (QE) is an important component in making Machine Translation (MT) useful in real-world applications, as it is aimed to inform the user on the quality of the MT output at test time. Existing approaches require large amounts of expert annotated data, computation, and time for training. As an alternative, we devise an unsupervised approach to QE where no training or access to additional resources besides the MT system itself is required. Different from most of the current work that treats the MT system as a black box, we explore useful information that can be extracted from the MT system as a by-product of translation. By utilizing methods for uncertainty quantification, we achieve very good correlation with human judgments of quality, rivaling state-of-the-art supervised QE models. To evaluate our approach we collect the first dataset that enables work on both black-box and glass-box approaches to QE.

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

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BERGAMOT-LATTE Submissions for the WMT20 Quality Estimation Shared Task
Marina Fomicheva | Shuo Sun | Lisa Yankovskaya | Frédéric Blain | Vishrav Chaudhary | Mark Fishel | Francisco Guzmán | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents our submission to the WMT2020 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). We participate in Task and Task 2 focusing on sentence-level prediction. We explore (a) a black-box approach to QE based on pre-trained representations; and (b) glass-box approaches that leverage various indicators that can be extracted from the neural MT systems. In addition to training a feature-based regression model using glass-box quality indicators, we also test whether they can be used to predict MT quality directly with no supervision. We assess our systems in a multi-lingual setting and show that both types of approaches generalise well across languages. Our black-box QE models tied for the winning submission in four out of seven language pairs inTask 1, thus demonstrating very strong performance. The glass-box approaches also performed competitively, representing a light-weight alternative to the neural-based models.

2019

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

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

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

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

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University of Tartu’s Multilingual Multi-domain WMT19 News Translation Shared Task Submission
Andre Tättar | Elizaveta Korotkova | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

This paper describes the University of Tartu’s submission to the news translation shared task of WMT19, where the core idea was to train a single multilingual system to cover several language pairs of the shared task and submit its results. We only used the constrained data from the shared task. We describe our approach and its results and discuss the technical issues we faced.

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

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Findings of the WMT 2019 Shared Tasks on Quality Estimation
Erick Fonseca | Lisa Yankovskaya | André F. T. Martins | Mark Fishel | Christian Federmann
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

We report the results of the WMT19 shared task on Quality Estimation, i.e. the task of predicting the quality of the output of machine translation systems given just the source text and the hypothesis translations. The task includes estimation at three granularity levels: word, sentence and document. A novel addition is evaluating sentence-level QE against human judgments: in other words, designing MT metrics that do not need a reference translation. This year we include three language pairs, produced solely by neural machine translation systems. Participating teams from eleven institutions submitted a variety of systems to different task variants and language pairs.

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Quality Estimation and Translation Metrics via Pre-trained Word and Sentence Embeddings
Elizaveta Yankovskaya | Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

We propose the use of pre-trained embeddings as features of a regression model for sentence-level quality estimation of machine translation. In our work we combine freely available BERT and LASER multilingual embeddings to train a neural-based regression model. In the second proposed method we use as an input features not only pre-trained embeddings, but also log probability of any machine translation (MT) system. Both methods are applied to several language pairs and are evaluated both as a classical quality estimation system (predicting the HTER score) as well as an MT metric (predicting human judgements of translation quality).

2018

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

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

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

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

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Phrase-based Unsupervised Machine Translation with Compositional Phrase Embeddings
Maksym Del | Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the University of Tartu’s submission to the unsupervised machine translation track of WMT18 news translation shared task. We build several baseline translation systems for both directions of the English-Estonian language pair using monolingual data only; the systems belong to the phrase-based unsupervised machine translation paradigm where we experimented with phrase lengths of up to 3. As a main contribution, we performed a set of standalone experiments with compositional phrase embeddings as a substitute for phrases as individual vocabulary entries. Results show that reasonable n-gram vectors can be obtained by simply summing up individual word vectors which retains or improves the performance of phrase-based unsupervised machine tranlation systems while avoiding limitations of atomic phrase vectors.

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Quality Estimation with Force-Decoded Attention and Cross-lingual Embeddings
Elizaveta Yankovskaya | Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the submissions of the team from the University of Tartu for the sentence-level Quality Estimation shared task of WMT18. The proposed models use features based on attention weights of a neural machine translation system and cross-lingual phrase embeddings as input features of a regression model. Two of the proposed models require only a neural machine translation system with an attention mechanism with no additional resources. Results show that combining neural networks and baseline features leads to significant improvements over the baseline features alone.

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Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation
Sander Tars | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

We present an approach to neural machine translation (NMT) that supports multiple domains in a single model and allows switching between the domains when translating. The core idea is to treat text domainsasdistinctlanguagesandusemultilingual NMT methods to create multi-domain translation systems; we show that this approach results in significant translation quality gains over fine-tuning. We also explore whether the knowledge of pre-specified text domains is necessary; turns out that it is after all, but also that when it is not known quite high translation quality can be reached, and even higher than with known domains in some cases.

2017

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C-3MA: Tartu-Riga-Zurich Translation Systems for WMT17
Matīss Rikters | Chantal Amrhein | Maksym Del | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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bleu2vec: the Painfully Familiar Metric on Continuous Vector Space Steroids
Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Confidence through Attention
Matīss Rikters | Mark Fishel
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVI: Research Track

2015

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Leveraging Compounds to Improve Noun Phrase Translation from Chinese and German
Xiao Pu | Laura Mascarell | Andrei Popescu-Belis | Mark Fishel | Ngoc-Quang Luong | Martin Volk
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2015 Student Research Workshop

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Detecting Document-level Context Triggers to Resolve Translation Ambiguity
Laura Mascarell | Mark Fishel | Martin Volk
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Discourse in Machine Translation

2014

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Handling technical OOVs in SMT
Mark Fishel | Rico Sennrich
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

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Machine Translation for Subtitling: A Large-Scale Evaluation
Thierry Etchegoyhen | Lindsay Bywood | Mark Fishel | Panayota Georgakopoulou | Jie Jiang | Gerard van Loenhout | Arantza del Pozo | Mirjam Sepesy Maučec | Anja Turner | Martin Volk
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

This article describes a large-scale evaluation of the use of Statistical Machine Translation for professional subtitling. The work was carried out within the FP7 EU-funded project SUMAT and involved two rounds of evaluation: a quality evaluation and a measure of productivity gain/loss. We present the SMT systems built for the project and the corpora they were trained on, which combine professionally created and crowd-sourced data. Evaluation goals, methodology and results are presented for the eleven translation pairs that were evaluated by professional subtitlers. Overall, a majority of the machine translated subtitles received good quality ratings. The results were also positive in terms of productivity, with a global gain approaching 40%. We also evaluated the impact of applying quality estimation and filtering of poor MT output, which resulted in higher productivity gains for filtered files as opposed to fully machine-translated files. Finally, we present and discuss feedback from the subtitlers who participated in the evaluation, a key aspect for any eventual adoption of machine translation technology in professional subtitling.

2013

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Statistical Machine Translation for Automobile Marketing Texts
Samuel Läubli | Mark Fishel | Manuela Weibel | Martin Volk
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIV: Posters

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SMT Approaches for Commercial Translation of Subtitles
Thierry Etchegoyhen | Mark Fishel | Jie Jiang | Mirjam Sepesy Maucec
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIV: User track

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SUMAT: An Online Service for Subtitling by Machine Translation
P. Georgakopoulou | L. Bywood | Thierry Etchegoyen | Mark Fishel | Jie Jiang | G. van Loenhout | A. del Pozo | D. Spiliotopoulos | Mirjam Sepesy Maucec | A. Turner
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIV: European projects

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Assessing post-editing efficiency in a realistic translation environment
Samuel Läubli | Mark Fishel | Gary Massey | Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow | Martin Volk
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Post-editing Technology and Practice

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Ranking Translations using Error Analysis and Quality Estimation
Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Combining Statistical Machine Translation and Translation Memories with Domain Adaptation
Samuel Läubli | Mark Fishel | Martin Volk | Manuela Weibel
Proceedings of the 19th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2013)

2012

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TerrorCat: a Translation Error Categorization-based MT Quality Metric
Mark Fishel | Rico Sennrich | Maja Popović | Ondřej Bojar
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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SUMAT: Data Collection and Parallel Corpus Compilation for Machine Translation of Subtitles
Volha Petukhova | Rodrigo Agerri | Mark Fishel | Sergio Penkale | Arantza del Pozo | Mirjam Sepesy Maučec | Andy Way | Panayota Georgakopoulou | Martin Volk
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Subtitling and audiovisual translation have been recognized as areas that could greatly benefit from the introduction of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) followed by post-editing, in order to increase efficiency of subtitle production process. The FP7 European project SUMAT (An Online Service for SUbtitling by MAchine Translation: http://www.sumat-project.eu) aims to develop an online subtitle translation service for nine European languages, combined into 14 different language pairs, in order to semi-automate the subtitle translation processes of both freelance translators and subtitling companies on a large scale. In this paper we discuss the data collection and parallel corpus compilation for training SMT systems, which includes several procedures such as data partition, conversion, formatting, normalization and alignment. We discuss in detail each data pre-processing step using various approaches. Apart from the quantity (around 1 million subtitles per language pair), the SUMAT corpus has a number of very important characteristics. First of all, high quality both in terms of translation and in terms of high-precision alignment of parallel documents and their contents has been achieved. Secondly, the contents are provided in one consistent format and encoding. Finally, additional information such as type of content in terms of genres and domain is available.

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Automatic MT Error Analysis: Hjerson Helping Addicter
Jan Berka | Ondřej Bojar | Mark Fishel | Maja Popović | Daniel Zeman
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

We present a complex, open source tool for detailed machine translation error analysis providing the user with automatic error detection and classification, several monolingual alignment algorithms as well as with training and test corpus browsing. The tool is the result of a merge of automatic error detection and classification of Hjerson (Popović, 2011) and Addicter (Zeman et al., 2011) into the pipeline and web visualization of Addicter. It classifies errors into categories similar to those of Vilar et al. (2006), such as: morphological, reordering, missing words, extra words and lexical errors. The graphical user interface shows alignments in both training corpus and test data; the different classes of errors are colored. Also, the summary of errors can be displayed to provide an overall view of the MT system's weaknesses. The tool was developed in Linux, but it was tested on Windows too.

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Terra: a Collection of Translation Error-Annotated Corpora
Mark Fishel | Ondřej Bojar | Maja Popović
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Recently the first methods of automatic diagnostics of machine translation have emerged; since this area of research is relatively young, the efforts are not coordinated. We present a collection of translation error-annotated corpora, consisting of automatically produced translations and their detailed manual translation error analysis. Using the collected corpora we evaluate the available state-of-the-art methods of MT diagnostics and assess, how well the methods perform, how they compare to each other and whether they can be useful in practice.

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From Subtitles to Parallel Corpora
Mark Fishel | Yota Georgakopoulou | Sergio Penkale | Volha Petukhova | Matej Rojc | Martin Volk | Andy Way
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

2010

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Linguistically Motivated Unsupervised Segmentation for Machine Translation
Mark Fishel | Harri Kirik
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

In this paper we use statistical machine translation and morphology information from two different morphological analyzers to try to improve translation quality by linguistically motivated segmentation. The morphological analyzers we use are the unsupervised Morfessor morpheme segmentation and analyzer toolkit and the rule-based morphological analyzer T3. Our translations are done using the Moses statistical machine translation toolkit with training on the JRC-Acquis corpora and translating on Estonian to English and English to Estonian language directions. In our work we model such linguistic phenomena as word lemmas and endings and splitting compound words into simpler parts. Also lemma information was used to introduce new factors to the corpora and to use this information for better word alignment or for alternative path back-off translation. From the results we find that even though these methods have shown previously and keep showing promise of improved translation, their success still largely depends on the corpora and language pairs used.

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Simpler Is Better: Re-evaluation of Default Word Alignment Models in Statistical MT
Mark Fishel
Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2009

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Voting and Stacking in Data-Driven Dependency Parsing
Mark Fishel | Joakim Nivre
Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2009)

2008

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Experiments on Processing Overlapping Parallel Corpora
Mark Fishel | Heiki-Jaan Kaalep
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

The number and sizes of parallel corpora keep growing, which makes it necessary to have automatic methods of processing them: combining, checking and improving corpora quality, etc. We here introduce a method which enables performing many of these by exploiting overlapping parallel corpora. The method finds the correspondence between sentence pairs in two corpora: first the corresponding language parts of the corpora are aligned and then the two resulting alignments are compared. The method takes into consideration slight differences in the source documents, different levels of segmentation of the input corpora, encoding differences and other aspects of the task. The paper describes two experiments conducted to test the method. In the first experiment, the Estonian-English part of the JRC-Acquis corpus was combined with another corpus of legislation texts. In the second experiment alternatively aligned versions of the JRC-Acquis are compared to each other with the example of all language pairs between English, Estonian and Latvian. Several additional conclusions about the corpora can be drawn from the results. The method proves to be effective for several parallel corpora processing tasks.

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Mixing and Blending Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies
Yvonne Samuelsson | Oscar Täckström | Sumithra Velupillai | Johan Eklund | Mark Fishel | Markus Saers
CoNLL 2008: Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

2007

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Estonian-English Statistical Machine Translation: the First Results
Mark Fishel | Heiki-Jaan Kaalep | Kadri Muischnek
Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2007)

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