Character-level NMT and language similarity

We explore the effectiveness of character-level neural machine translation using Transformer architecture for various levels of language similarity and size of the training dataset on translation between Czech and Croatian, German, Hungarian, Slovak, and Spanish. We evaluate the models using automatic MT metrics and show that translation between similar languages benefits from character-level input segmentation, while for less related languages, character-level vanilla Transformer-base often lags behind subword-level segmentation. We confirm previous findings that it is possible to close the gap by finetuning the already trained subword-level models to character-level.

Negative Lexical Constraints in Neural Machine Translation

This paper explores negative lexical constraining in English to Czech neural machine translation. Negative lexical constraining is used to prohibit certain words or expressions in the translation produced by the neural translation model. We compared various methods based on modifying either the decoding process or the training data. The comparison was performed on two tasks: paraphrasing and feedback-based translation refinement. We also studied to which extent these methods "evade" the constraints presented to the model (usually in the dictionary form) by generating a different surface form of a given constraint.We propose a way to mitigate the issue through training with stemmed negative constraints to counter the model's ability to induce a variety of the surface forms of a word that can result in bypassing the constraint. We demonstrate that our method improves the constraining, although the problem still persists in many cases.

Breeding Machine Translations: Evolutionary approach to survive and thrive in the world of automated evaluation

We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based method for modifying n-best lists produced by a machine translation (MT) system. Our method offers an innovative approach to improving MT quality and identifying weaknesses in evaluation metrics. Using common GA operations (mutation and crossover) on a list of hypotheses in combination with a fitness function (an arbitrary MT metric), we obtain novel and diverse outputs with high metric scores. With a combination of multiple MT metrics as the fitness function, the proposed method leads to an increase in translation quality as measured by other held-out automatic metrics. With a single metric (including popular ones such as COMET) as the fitness function, we find blind spots and flaws in the metric. This allows for an automated search for adversarial examples in an arbitrary metric, without prior assumptions on the form of such example. As a demonstration of the method, we create datasets of adversarial examples and use them to show that reference-free COMET is substantially less robust than the reference-based version.

CUNI Submission in WMT22 General Task

We present the CUNI-Bergamot submission for the WMT22 General translation task. We compete in English$\rightarrow$Czech direction. Our submission further explores block backtranslation techniques. Compared to the previous work, we measure performance in terms of COMET score and named entities translation accuracy. We evaluate performance of MBR decoding compared to traditional mixed backtranslation training and we show a possible synergy when using both of the techniques simultaneously. The results show that both approaches are effective means of improving translation quality and they yield even better results when combined.

CUNI systems for WMT21: Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for Indo-European Languages Shared Task

This paper describes Charles University submission for Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for Indo-European Languages shared task at WMT21. We competed in translation from Catalan into Romanian, Italian and Occitan. Our systems are based on shared multilingual model. We show that using joint model for multiple similar language pairs improves upon translation quality in each pair. We also demonstrate that chararacter-level bilingual models are competitive for very similar language pairs (Catalan-Occitan) but less so for more distant pairs. We also describe our experiments with multi-task learning, where aside from a textual translation, the models are also trained to perform grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.

CUNI systems for WMT21: Terminology translation Shared Task

This paper describes Charles University submission for Terminology translation Shared Task at WMT21. The objective of this task is to design a system which translates certain terms based on a provided terminology database, while preserving high overall translation quality. We competed in English-French language pair. Our approach is based on providing the desired translations alongside the input sentence and training the model to use these provided terms. We lemmatize the terms both during the training and inference, to allow the model to learn how to produce correct surface forms of the words, when they differ from the forms provided in the terminology database. Our submission ranked second in Exact Match metric which evaluates the ability of the model to produce desired terms in the translation.

End-to-End Lexically Constrained Machine Translation for Morphologically Rich Languages

Lexically constrained machine translation allows the user to manipulate the output sentence by enforcing the presence or absence of certain words and phrases. Although current approaches can enforce terms to appear in the translation, they often struggle to make the constraint word form agree with the rest of the generated output. Our manual analysis shows that 46% of the errors in the output of a baseline constrained model for English to Czech translation are related to agreement. We investigate mechanisms to allow neural machine translation to infer the correct word inflection given lemmatized constraints. In particular, we focus on methods based on training the model with constraints provided as part of the input sequence. Our experiments on the English-Czech language pair show that this approach improves the translation of constrained terms in both automatic and manual evaluation by reducing errors in agreement. Our approach thus eliminates inflection errors, without introducing new errors or decreasing the overall quality of the translation.

Rethinking the objectives of extractive question answering

This paper describes two generally applicable approaches towards the significant improvement of the performance of state-of-the-art extractive question answering (EQA) systems. Firstly, contrary to a common belief, it demonstrates that using the objective with independence assumption for span probability $P(a_s,a_e) = P(a_s)P(a_e)$ of span starting at position $a_s$ and ending at position $a_e$ may have adverse effects. Therefore we propose a new compound objective that models joint probability $P(a_s,a_e)$ directly, while still keeping the objective with independency assumption as an auxiliary objective. Our second approach shows the beneficial effect of distantly semi-supervised shared-normalization objective known from (Clark and Gardner, 2017). We show that normalizing over a set of documents similar to the golden passage, and marginalizing over all ground-truth answer string positions leads to the improvement of results from smaller statistical models. Our results are supported via experiments with three QA models (BidAF, BERT, ALBERT) over six datasets. The proposed approaches do not use any additional data. Our code, analysis, pretrained models, and individual results will be available online.

JokeMeter at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Convolutional humor

This paper describes our system that was designed for Humor evaluation within the SemEval-2020 Task 7. The system is based on convolutional neural network architecture. We investigate the system on the official dataset, and we provide more insight to model itself to see how the learned inner features look.

BUT-FIT at SemEval-2020 Task 4: Multilingual commonsense

This paper describes work of the BUT-FIT's team at SemEval 2020 Task 4 - Commonsense Validation and Explanation. We participated in all three subtasks. In subtasks A and B, our submissions are based on pretrained language representation models (namely ALBERT) and data augmentation. We experimented with solving the task for another language, Czech, by means of multilingual models and machine translated dataset, or translated model inputs. We show that with a strong machine translation system, our system can be used in another language with a small accuracy loss. In subtask C, our submission, which is based on pretrained sequence-to-sequence model (BART), ranked 1st in BLEU score ranking, however, we show that the correlation between BLEU and human evaluation, in which our submission ended up 4th, is low. We analyse the metrics used in the evaluation and we propose an additional score based on model from subtask B, which correlates well with our manual ranking, as well as reranking method based on the same principle. We performed an error and dataset analysis for all subtasks and we present our findings.