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1. Learning to Stop in Structured Prediction for Neural Machine Translation

   Ma, Mingbo; Zheng, Renjie; Huang, Liang (January 2019, Proceedings of NAACL 2019)

   Beam search optimization (Wiseman and Rush, 2016) resolves many issues in neural machine translation. However, this method lacks principled stopping criteria and does not learn how to stop during training, and the model naturally prefers longer hypotheses during the testing time in practice since they use the raw score instead of the probability-based score. We propose a novel ranking method which enables an optimal beam search stop- ping criteria. We further introduce a structured prediction loss function which penalizes suboptimal finished candidates produced by beam search during training. Experiments of neural machine translation on both synthetic data and real languages (German→English and Chinese→English) demonstrate our pro- posed methods lead to better length and BLEU score. 

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2. ParallelAttentionMechanismsinNeuralMachine Translation

   Medina, Julian; Kalita, Jugal (December 2018, International Conference on Machine Learning Applications)

   Recent papers in neural machine translation have proposed the strict use of attention mechanisms over previous stan- dards such as recurrent and convolutional neural networks (RNNs and CNNs). We propose that by running traditionally stacked encoding branches from encoder-decoder attention- focused architectures in parallel, that even more sequential operations can be removed from the model and thereby de- crease training time. In particular, we modify the recently published attention-based architecture called Transformer by Google, by replacing sequential attention modules with par- allel ones, reducing the amount of training time and substan- tially improving BLEU scores at the same time. Experiments over the English to German and English to French translation tasks show that our model establishes a new state of the art. 

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3. Guiding Large Language Models to Post-Edit Machine Translation with Error Annotations

   Ki, Dayeon; Carpuat, Marine; Duh, Kevin; Gomez, Helena; Bethard, Steven (June 2024, Association for Computational Linguistics)

   Machine Translation (MT) remains one of the last NLP tasks where large language models (LLMs) have not yet replaced dedicated supervised systems. This work exploits the complementary strengths of LLMs and supervised MT by guiding LLMs to automatically post-edit MT with external feedback on its quality, derived from Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) annotations. Working with LLaMA-2 models, we consider prompting strategies varying the nature of feedback provided and then fine-tune the LLM to improve its ability to exploit the provided guidance. Through experiments on Chinese-English, English-German, and English-Russian MQM data, we demonstrate that prompting LLMs to post-edit MT improves TER, BLEU and COMET scores, although the benefits of fine-grained feedback are not clear. Fine-tuning helps integrate fine-grained feedback more effectively and further improves translation quality based on both automatic and human evaluation. 

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4. SIT at MixMT 2022: Fluent Translation Built on Giant Pre-trained Models

   Rafae_Khan, Abdul; Kanade, Hrishikesh; Amar_Budhrani, Girish; Jhanglani, Preet; Xu, Jia (January 2022, arXiv preprints)

   This paper describes the Stevens Institute of Technology's submission for the WMT 2022 Shared Task: Code-mixed Machine Translation (MixMT). The task consisted of two subtasks, subtask 1 Hindi/English to Hinglish and subtask 2 Hinglish to English translation. Our findings lie in the improvements made through the use of large pre-trained multilingual NMT models and in-domain datasets, as well as back-translation and ensemble techniques. The translation output is automatically evaluated against the reference translations using ROUGE-L and WER. Our system achieves the 1st position on subtask 2 according to ROUGE-L, WER, and human evaluation, 1st position on subtask 1 according to WER and human evaluation, and 3rd position on subtask 1 with respect to ROUGE-L metric. 

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5. Dynamic Cross-Feature Fusion for American Sign Language Translation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FG52635.2021.9667027  

   Ananthanarayana, Tejaswini; Kotecha, Nikunj; Srivastava, Priyanshu; Chaudhary, Lipisha; Wilkins, Nicholas; Nwogu, Ifeoma (December 2021, 2021 16th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2021))

   While a significant amount of work has been done on the commonly used, tightly -constrained weather-based, German sign language (GSL) dataset, little has been done for continuous sign language translation (SLT) in more realistic settings, including American sign language (ASL) translation. Also, while CNN - based features have been consistently shown to work well on the GSL dataset, it is not clear whether such features will work as well in more realistic settings when there are more heterogeneous signers in non-uniform backgrounds. To this end, in this work, we introduce a new, realistic phrase-level ASL dataset (ASLing), and explore the role of different types of visual features (CNN embeddings, human body keypoints, and optical flow vectors) in translating it to spoken American English. We propose a novel Transformer-based, visual feature learning method for ASL translation. We demonstrate the explainability efficacy of our proposed learning methods by visualizing activation weights under various input conditions and discover that the body keypoints are consistently the most reliable set of input features. Using our model, we successfully transfer-learn from the larger GSL dataset to ASLing, resulting in significant BLEU score improvements. In summary, this work goes a long way in bringing together the AI resources required for automated ASL translation in unconstrained environments. 

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