Gender Lost In Translation: How Bridging The Gap Between Languages Affects Gender Bias in Zero-Shot Multilingual Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) models often suffer from gender biases that harm users and society at large. In this work, we explore how bridging the gap between languages for which parallel data is not available affects gender bias in multilingual NMT, specifically for zero-shot directions. We evaluate translation between grammatical gender languages which requires preserving the inherent gender information from the source in the target language. We study the effect of encouraging language-agnostic hidden representations on models' ability to preserve gender and compare pivot-based and zero-shot translation regarding the influence of the bridge language (participating in all language pairs during training) on gender preservation. We find that language-agnostic representations mitigate zero-shot models' masculine bias, and with increased levels of gender inflection in the bridge language, pivoting surpasses zero-shot translation regarding fairer gender preservation for speaker-related gender agreement.

Perturbation-based QE: An Explainable, Unsupervised Word-level Quality Estimation Method for Blackbox Machine Translation

Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of predicting the quality of Machine Translation (MT) system output, without using any gold-standard translation references. State-of-the-art QE models are supervised: they require human-labeled quality of some MT system output on some datasets for training, making them domain-dependent and MT-system-dependent. There has been research on unsupervised QE, which requires glass-box access to the MT systems, or parallel MT data to generate synthetic errors for training QE models. In this paper, we present Perturbation-based QE - a word-level Quality Estimation approach that works simply by analyzing MT system output on perturbed input source sentences. Our approach is unsupervised, explainable, and can evaluate any type of blackbox MT systems, including the currently prominent large language models (LLMs) with opaque internal processes. For language directions with no labeled QE data, our approach has similar or better performance than the zero-shot supervised approach on the WMT21 shared task. Our approach is better at detecting gender bias and word-sense-disambiguation errors in translation than supervised QE, indicating its robustness to out-of-domain usage. The performance gap is larger when detecting errors on a nontraditional translation-prompting LLM, indicating that our approach is more generalizable to different MT systems. We give examples demonstrating our approach's explainability power, where it shows which input source words have influence on a certain MT output word.

Train Global, Tailor Local: Minimalist Multilingual Translation into Endangered Languages

In many humanitarian scenarios, translation into severely low resource languages often does not require a universal translation engine, but a dedicated text-specific translation engine. For example, healthcare records, hygienic procedures, government communication, emergency procedures and religious texts are all limited texts. While generic translation engines for all languages do not exist, translation of multilingually known limited texts into new, endangered languages may be possible and reduce human translation effort. We attempt to leverage translation resources from many rich resource languages to efficiently produce best possible translation quality for a well known text, which is available in multiple languages, in a new, severely low resource language. We examine two approaches: 1. best selection of seed sentences to jump start translations in a new language in view of best generalization to the remainder of a larger targeted text(s), and 2. we adapt large general multilingual translation engines from many other languages to focus on a specific text in a new, unknown language. We find that adapting large pretrained multilingual models to the domain/text first and then to the severely low resource language works best. If we also select a best set of seed sentences, we can improve average chrF performance on new test languages from a baseline of 21.9 to 50.7, while reducing the number of seed sentences to only around 1,000 in the new, unknown language.

Continually learning new languages

Multilingual speech recognition with neural networks is often implemented with batch-learning, when all of the languages are available before training. An ability to add new languages after the prior training sessions can be economically beneficial, but the main challenge is catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we combine the qualities of weight factorization, transfer learning and Elastic Weight Consolidation in order to counter catastrophic forgetting and facilitate learning new languages quickly. Such combination allowed us to eliminate catastrophic forgetting while still achieving performance for the new languages comparable with having all languages at once, in experiments of learning from an initial 10 languages to achieve 27 languages

Learning an Artificial Language for Knowledge-Sharing in Multilingual Translation

The cornerstone of multilingual neural translation is shared representations across languages. Given the theoretically infinite representation power of neural networks, semantically identical sentences are likely represented differently. While representing sentences in the continuous latent space ensures expressiveness, it introduces the risk of capturing of irrelevant features which hinders the learning of a common representation. In this work, we discretize the encoder output latent space of multilingual models by assigning encoder states to entries in a codebook, which in effect represents source sentences in a new artificial language. This discretization process not only offers a new way to interpret the otherwise black-box model representations, but, more importantly, gives potential for increasing robustness in unseen testing conditions. We validate our approach on large-scale experiments with realistic data volumes and domains. When tested in zero-shot conditions, our approach is competitive with two strong alternatives from the literature. We also use the learned artificial language to analyze model behavior, and discover that using a similar bridge language increases knowledge-sharing among the remaining languages.

Efficient Speech Translation with Pre-trained Models

When building state-of-the-art speech translation models, the need for large computational resources is a significant obstacle due to the large training data size and complex models. The availability of pre-trained models is a promising opportunity to build strong speech translation systems efficiently. In a first step, we investigate efficient strategies to build cascaded and end-to-end speech translation systems based on pre-trained models. Using this strategy, we can train and apply the models on a single GPU. While the end-to-end models show superior translation performance to cascaded ones, the application of this technology has a limitation on the need for additional end-to-end training data. In a second step, we proposed an additional similarity loss to encourage the model to generate similar hidden representations for speech and transcript. Using this technique, we can increase the data efficiency and improve the translation quality by 6 BLEU points in scenarios with limited end-to-end training data.

Adaptive multilingual speech recognition with pretrained models

Multilingual speech recognition with supervised learning has achieved great results as reflected in recent research. With the development of pretraining methods on audio and text data, it is imperative to transfer the knowledge from unsupervised multilingual models to facilitate recognition, especially in many languages with limited data. Our work investigated the effectiveness of using two pretrained models for two modalities: wav2vec 2.0 for audio and MBART50 for text, together with the adaptive weight techniques to massively improve the recognition quality on the public datasets containing CommonVoice and Europarl. Overall, we noticed an 44% improvement over purely supervised learning, and more importantly, each technique provides a different reinforcement in different languages. We also explore other possibilities to potentially obtain the best model by slightly adding either depth or relative attention to the architecture.

LibriS2S: A German-English Speech-to-Speech Translation Corpus

Recently, we have seen an increasing interest in the area of speech-to-text translation. This has led to astonishing improvements in this area. In contrast, the activities in the area of speech-to-speech translation is still limited, although it is essential to overcome the language barrier. We believe that one of the limiting factors is the availability of appropriate training data. We address this issue by creating LibriS2S, to our knowledge the first publicly available speech-to-speech training corpus between German and English. For this corpus, we used independently created audio for German and English leading to an unbiased pronunciation of the text in both languages. This allows the creation of a new text-to-speech and speech-to-speech translation model that directly learns to generate the speech signal based on the pronunciation of the source language. Using this created corpus, we propose Text-to-Speech models based on the example of the recently proposed FastSpeech 2 model that integrates source language information. We do this by adapting the model to take information such as the pitch, energy or transcript from the source speech as additional input.

CUNI-KIT System for Simultaneous Speech Translation Task at IWSLT 2022

In this paper, we describe our submission to the Simultaneous Speech Translation at IWSLT 2022. We explore strategies to utilize an offline model in a simultaneous setting without the need to modify the original model. In our experiments, we show that our onlinization algorithm is almost on par with the offline setting while being 3x faster than offline in terms of latency on the test set. We make our system publicly available.

Multilingual Simultaneous Speech Translation

Applications designed for simultaneous speech translation during events such as conferences or meetings need to balance quality and lag while displaying translated text to deliver a good user experience. One common approach to building online spoken language translation systems is by leveraging models built for offline speech translation. Based on a technique to adapt end-to-end monolingual models, we investigate multilingual models and different architectures (end-to-end and cascade) on the ability to perform online speech translation. On the multilingual TEDx corpus, we show that the approach generalizes to different architectures. We see similar gains in latency reduction (40% relative) across languages and architectures. However, the end-to-end architecture leads to smaller translation quality losses after adapting to the online model. Furthermore, the approach even scales to zero-shot directions.