Machine Translation Meta Evaluation through Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets

Recent machine translation (MT) metrics calibrate their effectiveness by correlating with human judgement but without any insights about their behaviour across different error types. Challenge sets are used to probe specific dimensions of metric behaviour but there are very few such datasets and they either focus on a limited number of phenomena or a limited number of language pairs. We introduce ACES, a contrastive challenge set spanning 146 language pairs, aimed at discovering whether metrics can identify 68 translation accuracy errors. These phenomena range from simple alterations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We conduct a large-scale study by benchmarking ACES on 50 metrics submitted to the WMT 2022 and 2023 metrics shared tasks. We benchmark metric performance, assess their incremental performance over successive campaigns, and measure their sensitivity to a range of linguistic phenomena. We also investigate claims that Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective as MT evaluators by evaluating on ACES. Our results demonstrate that different metric families struggle with different phenomena and that LLM-based methods fail to demonstrate reliable performance. Our analyses indicate that most metrics ignore the source sentence, tend to prefer surface-level overlap and end up incorporating properties of base models which are not always beneficial. We expand ACES to include error span annotations, denoted as SPAN-ACES and we use this dataset to evaluate span-based error metrics showing these metrics also need considerable improvement. Finally, we provide a set of recommendations for building better MT metrics, including focusing on error labels instead of scores, ensembling, designing strategies to explicitly focus on the source sentence, focusing on semantic content and choosing the right base model for representations.

ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets at WMT 2023

We benchmark the performance of segmentlevel metrics submitted to WMT 2023 using the ACES Challenge Set (Amrhein et al., 2022). The challenge set consists of 36K examples representing challenges from 68 phenomena and covering 146 language pairs. The phenomena range from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. For each metric, we provide a detailed profile of performance over a range of error categories as well as an overall ACES-Score for quick comparison. We also measure the incremental performance of the metrics submitted to both WMT 2023 and 2022. We find that 1) there is no clear winner among the metrics submitted to WMT 2023, and 2) performance change between the 2023 and 2022 versions of the metrics is highly variable. Our recommendations are similar to those from WMT 2022. Metric developers should focus on: building ensembles of metrics from different design families, developing metrics that pay more attention to the source and rely less on surface-level overlap, and carefully determining the influence of multilingual embeddings on MT evaluation.

MULTI3NLU++: A Multilingual, Multi-Intent, Multi-Domain Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world's languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user's goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics

As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of such metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.

Investigating the use of Paraphrase Generation for Question Reformulation in the FRANK QA system

We present a study into the ability of paraphrase generation methods to increase the variety of natural language questions that the FRANK Question Answering system can answer. We first evaluate paraphrase generation methods on the LC-QuAD 2.0 dataset using both automatic metrics and human judgement, and discuss their correlation. Error analysis on the dataset is also performed using both automatic and manual approaches, and we discuss how paraphrase generation and evaluation is affected by data points which contain error. We then simulate an implementation of the best performing paraphrase generation method (an English-French backtranslation) into FRANK in order to test our original hypothesis, using a small challenge dataset. Our two main conclusions are that cleaning of LC-QuAD 2.0 is required as the errors present can affect evaluation; and that, due to limitations of FRANK's parser, paraphrase generation is not a method which we can rely on to improve the variety of natural language questions that FRANK can answer.

Cross-lingual Inference with A Chinese Entailment Graph

Predicate entailment detection is a crucial task for question-answering from text, where previous work has explored unsupervised learning of entailment graphs from typed open relation triples. In this paper, we present the first pipeline for building Chinese entailment graphs, which involves a novel high-recall open relation extraction (ORE) method and the first Chinese fine-grained entity typing dataset under the FIGER type ontology. Through experiments on the Levy-Holt dataset, we verify the strength of our Chinese entailment graph, and reveal the cross-lingual complementarity: on the parallel Levy-Holt dataset, an ensemble of Chinese and English entailment graphs outperforms both monolingual graphs, and raises unsupervised SOTA by 4.7 AUC points.

Blindness to Modality Helps Entailment Graph Mining

Understanding linguistic modality is widely seen as important for downstream tasks such as Question Answering and Knowledge Graph Population. Entailment Graph learning might also be expected to benefit from attention to modality. We build Entailment Graphs using a news corpus filtered with a modality parser, and show that stripping modal modifiers from predicates in fact increases performance. This suggests that for some tasks, the pragmatics of modal modification of predicates allows them to contribute as evidence of entailment.

Incorporating Temporal Information in Entailment Graph Mining

We present a novel method for injecting temporality into entailment graphs to address the problem of spurious entailments, which may arise from similar but temporally distinct events involving the same pair of entities. We focus on the sports domain in which the same pairs of teams play on different occasions, with different outcomes. We present an unsupervised model that aims to learn entailments such as win/lose $\rightarrow$ play, while avoiding the pitfall of learning non-entailments such as win $\not\rightarrow$ lose. We evaluate our model on a manually constructed dataset, showing that incorporating time intervals and applying a temporal window around them, are effective strategies.

Modality and Negation in Event Extraction

Language provides speakers with a rich system of modality for expressing thoughts about events, without being committed to their actual occurrence. Modality is commonly used in the political news domain, where both actual and possible courses of events are discussed. NLP systems struggle with these semantic phenomena, often incorrectly extracting events which did not happen, which can lead to issues in downstream applications. We present an open-domain, lexicon-based event extraction system that captures various types of modality. This information is valuable for Question Answering, Knowledge Graph construction and Fact-checking tasks, and our evaluation shows that the system is sufficiently strong to be used in downstream applications.

Multivalent Entailment Graphs for Question Answering

Drawing inferences between open-domain natural language predicates is a necessity for true language understanding. There has been much progress in unsupervised learning of entailment graphs for this purpose. We make three contributions: (1) we reinterpret the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis to model entailment between predicates of different valencies, like DEFEAT(Biden, Trump) entails WIN(Biden); (2) we actualize this theory by learning unsupervised Multivalent Entailment Graphs of open-domain predicates; and (3) we demonstrate the capabilities of these graphs on a novel question answering task. We show that directional entailment is more helpful for inference than bidirectional similarity on questions of fine-grained semantics. We also show that drawing on evidence across valencies answers more questions than by using only the same valency evidence.