Ioan Calapodescu


2023

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NAVER LABS Europe’s Multilingual Speech Translation Systems for the IWSLT 2023 Low-Resource Track
Edward Gow-Smith | Alexandre Berard | Marcely Zanon Boito | Ioan Calapodescu
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)

This paper presents NAVER LABS Europe’s systems for Tamasheq-French and Quechua-Spanish speech translation in the IWSLT 2023 Low-Resource track. Our work attempts to maximize translation quality in low-resource settings using multilingual parameter-efficient solutions that leverage strong pre-trained models. Our primary submission for Tamasheq outperforms the previous state of the art by 7.5 BLEU points on the IWSLT 2022 test set, and achieves 23.6 BLEU on this year’s test set, outperforming the second best participant by 7.7 points. For Quechua, we also rank first and achieve 17.7 BLEU, despite having only two hours of translation data. Finally, we show that our proposed multilingual architecture is also competitive for high-resource languages, outperforming the best unconstrained submission to the IWSLT 2021 Multilingual track, despite using much less training data and compute.

2022

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DaLC: Domain Adaptation Learning Curve Prediction for Neural Machine Translation
Cheonbok Park | Hantae Kim | Ioan Calapodescu | Hyun Chang Cho | Vassilina Nikoulina
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Domain Adaptation (DA) of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model often relies on a pre-trained general NMT model which is adapted to the new domain on a sample of in-domain parallel data. Without parallel data, there is no way to estimate the potential benefit of DA, nor the amount of parallel samples it would require. It is however a desirable functionality that could help MT practitioners to make an informed decision before investing resources in dataset creation. We propose a Domain adaptation Learning Curve prediction (DaLC) model that predicts prospective DA performance based on in-domain monolingual samples in the source language. Our model relies on the NMT encoder representations combined with various instance and corpus-level features. We demonstrate that instance-level is better able to distinguish between different domains compared to corpus-level frameworks proposed in previous studies Finally, we perform in-depth analyses of the results highlighting the limitations of our approach, and provide directions for future research.

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Multimodal Robustness for Neural Machine Translation
Yuting Zhao | Ioan Calapodescu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we look at the case of a Generic text-to-text NMT model that has to deal with data coming from various modalities, like speech, images, or noisy text extracted from the web. We propose a two-step method, based on composable adapters, to deal with this problem of Multimodal Robustness. In a first step, we separately learn domain adapters and modality specific adapters, to deal with noisy input coming from various sources: ASR, OCR, or noisy text (UGC). In a second step, we combine these components at runtime via dynamic routing or, when the source of noise is unknown, via two new transfer learning mechanisms (Fast Fusion and Multi Fusion). We show that our method provides a flexible, state-of-the-art, architecture able to deal with noisy multimodal inputs.

2021

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Controlling Prosody in End-to-End TTS: A Case Study on Contrastive Focus Generation
Siddique Latif | Inyoung Kim | Ioan Calapodescu | Laurent Besacier
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

While End-2-End Text-to-Speech (TTS) has made significant progresses over the past few years, these systems still lack intuitive user controls over prosody. For instance, generating speech with fine-grained prosody control (prosodic prominence, contextually appropriate emotions) is still an open challenge. In this paper, we investigate whether we can control prosody directly from the input text, in order to code information related to contrastive focus which emphasizes a specific word that is contrary to the presuppositions of the interlocutor. We build and share a specific dataset for this purpose and show that it allows to train a TTS system were this fine-grained prosodic feature can be correctly conveyed using control tokens. Our evaluation compares synthetic and natural utterances and shows that prosodic patterns of contrastive focus (variations of Fo, Intensity and Duration) can be learnt accurately. Such a milestone is important to allow, for example, smart speakers to be programmatically controlled in terms of output prosody.

2020

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Naver Labs Europe’s Participation in the Robustness, Chat, and Biomedical Tasks at WMT 2020
Alexandre Berard | Ioan Calapodescu | Vassilina Nikoulina | Jerin Philip
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes Naver Labs Europe’s participation in the Robustness, Chat, and Biomedical Translation tasks at WMT 2020. We propose a bidirectional German-English model that is multi-domain, robust to noise, and which can translate entire documents (or bilingual dialogues) at once. We use the same ensemble of such models as our primary submission to all three tasks and achieve competitive results. We also experiment with language model pre-training techniques and evaluate their impact on robustness to noise and out-of-domain translation. For German, Spanish, Italian, and French to English translation in the Biomedical Task, we also submit our recently released multilingual Covid19NMT model.

2019

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“Sentiment Aware Map” : exploration cartographique de points d’intérêt via l’analyse de sentiments au niveau des aspects ()
Ioan Calapodescu | Caroline Brun | Vassilina Nikoulina | Salah Aït-Mokhtar
Actes de la Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN) PFIA 2019. Volume IV : Démonstrations

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Machine Translation of Restaurant Reviews: New Corpus for Domain Adaptation and Robustness
Alexandre Berard | Ioan Calapodescu | Marc Dymetman | Claude Roux | Jean-Luc Meunier | Vassilina Nikoulina
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation

We share a French-English parallel corpus of Foursquare restaurant reviews, and define a new task to encourage research on Neural Machine Translation robustness and domain adaptation, in a real-world scenario where better-quality MT would be greatly beneficial. We discuss the challenges of such user-generated content, and train good baseline models that build upon the latest techniques for MT robustness. We also perform an extensive evaluation (automatic and human) that shows significant improvements over existing online systems. Finally, we propose task-specific metrics based on sentiment analysis or translation accuracy of domain-specific polysemous words.

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Naver Labs Europe’s Systems for the Document-Level Generation and Translation Task at WNGT 2019
Fahimeh Saleh | Alexandre Berard | Ioan Calapodescu | Laurent Besacier
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation

Recently, neural models led to significant improvements in both machine translation (MT) and natural language generation tasks (NLG). However, generation of long descriptive summaries conditioned on structured data remains an open challenge. Likewise, MT that goes beyond sentence-level context is still an open issue (e.g., document-level MT or MT with metadata). To address these challenges, we propose to leverage data from both tasks and do transfer learning between MT, NLG, and MT with source-side metadata (MT+NLG). First, we train document-based MT systems with large amounts of parallel data. Then, we adapt these models to pure NLG and MT+NLG tasks by fine-tuning with smaller amounts of domain-specific data. This end-to-end NLG approach, without data selection and planning, outperforms the previous state of the art on the Rotowire NLG task. We participated to the “Document Generation and Translation” task at WNGT 2019, and ranked first in all tracks.

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Naver Labs Europe’s Systems for the WMT19 Machine Translation Robustness Task
Alexandre Berard | Ioan Calapodescu | Claude Roux
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

This paper describes the systems that we submitted to the WMT19 Machine Translation robustness task. This task aims to improve MT’s robustness to noise found on social media, like informal language, spelling mistakes and other orthographic variations. The organizers provide parallel data extracted from a social media website in two language pairs: French-English and Japanese-English (one for each language direction). The goal is to obtain the best scores on unseen test sets from the same source, according to automatic metrics (BLEU) and human evaluation. We propose one single and one ensemble system for each translation direction. Our ensemble models ranked first in all language pairs, according to BLEU evaluation. We discuss the pre-processing choices that we made, and present our solutions for robustness to noise and domain adaptation.

2013

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SORT: An Interactive Source-Rewriting Tool for Improved Translation
Shachar Mirkin | Sriram Venkatapathy | Marc Dymetman | Ioan Calapodescu
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations