Adaptive Feature Selection for End-to-End Speech Translation

Information in speech signals is not evenly distributed, making it an additional challenge for end-to-end (E2E) speech translation (ST) to learn to focus on informative features. In this paper, we propose adaptive feature selection (AFS) for encoder-decoder based E2E ST. We first pre-train an ASR encoder and apply AFS to dynamically estimate the importance of each encoded speech feature to SR. A ST encoder, stacked on top of the ASR encoder, then receives the filtered features from the (frozen) ASR encoder. We take L0DROP (Zhang et al., 2020) as the backbone for AFS, and adapt it to sparsify speech features with respect to both temporal and feature dimensions. Results on LibriSpeech En-Fr and MuST-C benchmarks show that AFS facilitates learning of ST by pruning out ~84% temporal features, yielding an average translation gain of ~1.3-1.6 BLEU and a decoding speedup of ~1.4x. In particular, AFS reduces the performance gap compared to the cascade baseline, and outperforms it on LibriSpeech En-Fr with a BLEU score of 18.56 (without data augmentation)

On Romanization for Model Transfer Between Scripts in Neural Machine Translation

Transfer learning is a popular strategy to improve the quality of low-resource machine translation. For an optimal transfer of the embedding layer, the child and parent model should share a substantial part of the vocabulary. This is not the case when transferring to languages with a different script. We explore the benefit of romanization in this scenario. Our results show that romanization entails information loss and is thus not always superior to simpler vocabulary transfer methods, but can improve the transfer between related languages with different scripts. We compare two romanization tools and find that they exhibit different degrees of information loss, which affects translation quality. Finally, we extend romanization to the target side, showing that this can be a successful strategy when coupled with a simple deromanization model.

On Exposure Bias, Hallucination and Domain Shift in Neural Machine Translation

The standard training algorithm in neural machine translation (NMT) suffers from exposure bias, and alternative algorithms have been proposed to mitigate this. However, the practical impact of exposure bias is under debate. In this paper, we link exposure bias to another well-known problem in NMT, namely the tendency to generate hallucinations under domain shift. In experiments on three datasets with multiple test domains, we show that exposure bias is partially to blame for hallucinations, and that training with Minimum Risk Training, which avoids exposure bias, can mitigate this. Our analysis explains why exposure bias is more problematic under domain shift, and also links exposure bias to the beam search problem, i.e. performance deterioration with increasing beam size. Our results provide a new justification for methods that reduce exposure bias: even if they do not increase performance on in-domain test sets, they can increase model robustness to domain shift.

Improving Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation and Zero-Shot Translation

Massively multilingual models for neural machine translation (NMT) are theoretically attractive, but often underperform bilingual models and deliver poor zero-shot translations. In this paper, we explore ways to improve them. We argue that multilingual NMT requires stronger modeling capacity to support language pairs with varying typological characteristics, and overcome this bottleneck via language-specific components and deepening NMT architectures. We identify the off-target translation issue (i.e. translating into a wrong target language) as the major source of the inferior zero-shot performance, and propose random online backtranslation to enforce the translation of unseen training language pairs. Experiments on OPUS-100 (a novel multilingual dataset with 100 languages) show that our approach substantially narrows the performance gap with bilingual models in both one-to-many and many-to-many settings, and improves zero-shot performance by ~10 BLEU, approaching conventional pivot-based methods.

On Sparsifying Encoder Outputs in Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Sequence-to-sequence models usually transfer all encoder outputs to the decoder for generation. In this work, by contrast, we hypothesize that these encoder outputs can be compressed to shorten the sequence delivered for decoding. We take Transformer as the testbed and introduce a layer of stochastic gates in-between the encoder and the decoder. The gates are regularized using the expected value of the sparsity-inducing L0penalty, resulting in completely masking-out a subset of encoder outputs. In other words, via joint training, the L0DROP layer forces Transformer to route information through a subset of its encoder states. We investigate the effects of this sparsification on two machine translation and two summarization tasks. Experiments show that, depending on the task, around 40-70% of source encodings can be pruned without significantly compromising quality. The decrease of the output length endows L0DROP with the potential of improving decoding efficiency, where it yields a speedup of up to 1.65x on document summarization tasks against the standard Transformer. We analyze the L0DROP behaviour and observe that it exhibits systematic preferences for pruning certain word types, e.g., function words and punctuation get pruned most. Inspired by these observations, we explore the feasibility of specifying rule-based patterns that mask out encoder outputs based on information such as part-of-speech tags, word frequency and word position.

A Set of Recommendations for Assessing Human-Machine Parity in Language Translation

The quality of machine translation has increased remarkably over the past years, to the degree that it was found to be indistinguishable from professional human translation in a number of empirical investigations. We reassess Hassan et al.'s 2018 investigation into Chinese to English news translation, showing that the finding of human-machine parity was owed to weaknesses in the evaluation design - which is currently considered best practice in the field. We show that the professional human translations contained significantly fewer errors, and that perceived quality in human evaluation depends on the choice of raters, the availability of linguistic context, and the creation of reference translations. Our results call for revisiting current best practices to assess strong machine translation systems in general and human-machine parity in particular, for which we offer a set of recommendations based on our empirical findings.

X-Stance: A Multilingual Multi-Target Dataset for Stance Detection

We extract a large-scale stance detection dataset from comments written by candidates of elections in Switzerland. The dataset consists of German, French and Italian text, allowing for a cross-lingual evaluation of stance detection. It contains 67 000 comments on more than 150 political issues (targets). Unlike stance detection models that have specific target issues, we use the dataset to train a single model on all the issues. To make learning across targets possible, we prepend to each instance a natural question that represents the target (e.g. "Do you support X?"). Baseline results from multilingual BERT show that zero-shot cross-lingual and cross-target transfer of stance detection is moderately successful with this approach.

Domain Robustness in Neural Machine Translation

Translating text that diverges from the training domain is a key challenge for neural machine translation (NMT). Domain robustness - the generalization of models to unseen test domains - is low compared to statistical machine translation. In this paper, we investigate the performance of NMT on out-of-domain test sets, and ways to improve it. We observe that hallucination (translations that are fluent but unrelated to the source) is common in out-of-domain settings, and we empirically compare methods that improve adequacy (reconstruction), out-of-domain translation (subword regularization), or robustness against adversarial examples (defensive distillation), as well as noisy channel models. In experiments on German to English OPUS data, and German to Romansh, a low-resource scenario, we find that several methods improve domain robustness, reconstruction standing out as a method that not only improves automatic scores, but also shows improvements in a manual assessments of adequacy, albeit at some loss in fluency. However, out-of-domain performance is still relatively low and domain robustness remains an open problem.

Domain, Translationese and Noise in Synthetic Data for Neural Machine Translation

The quality of neural machine translation can be improved by leveraging additional monolingual resources to create synthetic training data. Source-side monolingual data can be (forward-)translated into the target language for self-training; target-side monolingual data can be back-translated. It has been widely reported that back-translation delivers superior results, but could this be due to artefacts in the test sets? We perform a case study using French-English news translation task and separate test sets based on their original languages. We show that forward translation delivers superior gains in terms of BLEU on sentences that were originally in the source language, complementing previous studies which show large improvements with back-translation on sentences that were originally in the target language. To better understand when and why forward and back-translation are effective, we study the role of domains, translationese, and noise. While translationese effects are well known to influence MT evaluation, we also find evidence that news data from different languages shows subtle domain differences, which is another explanation for varying performance on different portions of the test set. We perform additional low-resource experiments which demonstrate that forward translation is more sensitive to the quality of the initial translation system than back-translation, and tends to perform worse in low-resource settings.