Context-aware translation can be achieved by processing a concatenation of consecutive sentences with the standard Transformer architecture. This paper investigates the intuitive idea of providing the model with explicit information about the position of the sentences contained in the concatenation window. We compare various methods to encode sentence positions into token representations, including novel methods. Our results show that the Transformer benefits from certain sentence position encoding methods on English to Russian translation if trained with a context-discounted loss (Lupo et al., 2022). However, the same benefits are not observed in English to German. Further empirical efforts are necessary to define the conditions under which the proposed approach is beneficial.

Semantic Shift Detection (SSD) is the task of identifying, interpreting, and assessing the possible change over time in the meanings of a target word. Traditionally, SSD has been addressed by linguists and social scientists through manual and time-consuming activities. In the recent years, computational approaches based on Natural Language Processing and word embeddings gained increasing attention to automate SSD as much as possible. In particular, over the past three years, significant advancements have been made almost exclusively based on word contextualised embedding models, which can handle the multiple usages/meanings of the words and better capture the related semantic shifts. In this paper, we survey the approaches based on contextualised embeddings for SSD (i.e., CSSDetection) and we propose a classification framework characterised by meaning representation, time-awareness, and learning modality dimensions. The framework is exploited i) to review the measures for shift assessment, ii) to compare the approaches on performance, and iii) to discuss the current issues in terms of scalability, interpretability, and robustness. Open challenges and future research directions about CSSDetection are finally outlined.

We propose a two-stage approach for training a single NMT model to translate unseen languages both to and from English. For the first stage, we initialize an encoder-decoder model to pretrained XLM-R and RoBERTa weights, then perform multilingual fine-tuning on parallel data in 40 languages to English. We find this model can generalize to zero-shot translations on unseen languages. For the second stage, we leverage this generalization ability to generate synthetic parallel data from monolingual datasets, then bidirectionally train with successive rounds of back-translation. Our approach, which we EcXTra (English-centric Crosslingual (X) Transfer), is conceptually simple, only using a standard cross-entropy objective throughout. It is also data-driven, sequentially leveraging auxiliary parallel data and monolingual data. We evaluate unsupervised NMT results for 7 low-resource languages, and find that each round of back-translation training further refines bidirectional performance. Our final single EcXTra-trained model achieves competitive translation performance in all translation directions, notably establishing a new state-of-the-art for English-to-Kazakh (22.9 > 10.4 BLEU). Our code is available at https://github.com/manestay/EcXTra .

Current research on hate speech analysis is typically oriented towards monolingual and single classification tasks. In this paper, we present a new multilingual hate speech analysis dataset for English, Hindi, Arabic, French, German and Spanish languages for multiple domains across hate speech - Abuse, Racism, Sexism, Religious Hate and Extremism. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to address the problem of identifying various types of hate speech in these five wide domains in these six languages. In this work, we describe how we created the dataset, created annotations at high level and low level for different domains and how we use it to test the current state-of-the-art multilingual and multitask learning approaches. We evaluate our dataset in various monolingual, cross-lingual and machine translation classification settings and compare it against open source English datasets that we aggregated and merged for this task. Then we discuss how this approach can be used to create large scale hate-speech datasets and how to leverage our annotations in order to improve hate speech detection and classification in general.

The advent of multilingual language models has generated a resurgence of interest in cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR), which is the task of searching documents in one language with queries from another. However, the rapid pace of progress has led to a confusing panoply of methods and reproducibility has lagged behind the state of the art. In this context, our work makes two important contributions: First, we provide a conceptual framework for organizing different approaches to cross-lingual retrieval using multi-stage architectures for mono-lingual retrieval as a scaffold. Second, we implement simple yet effective reproducible baselines in the Anserini and Pyserini IR toolkits for test collections from the TREC 2022 NeuCLIR Track, in Persian, Russian, and Chinese. Our efforts are built on a collaboration of the two teams that submitted the most effective runs to the TREC evaluation. These contributions provide a firm foundation for future advances.

The advent of deep learning has led to a significant gain in machine translation. However, most of the studies required a large parallel dataset which is scarce and expensive to construct and even unavailable for some languages. This paper presents a simple yet effective method to tackle this problem for low-resource languages by augmenting high-quality sentence pairs and training NMT models in a semi-supervised manner. Specifically, our approach combines the cross-entropy loss for supervised learning with KL Divergence for unsupervised fashion given pseudo and augmented target sentences derived from the model. We also introduce a SentenceBERT-based filter to enhance the quality of augmenting data by retaining semantically similar sentence pairs. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves NMT baselines, especially on low-resource datasets with 0.46--2.03 BLEU scores. We also demonstrate that using unsupervised training for augmented data is more efficient than reusing the ground-truth target sentences for supervised learning.

Translating spoken languages into Sign languages is necessary for open communication between the hearing and hearing-impaired communities. To achieve this goal, we propose the first method for animating a text written in HamNoSys, a lexical Sign language notation, into signed pose sequences. As HamNoSys is universal by design, our proposed method offers a generic solution invariant to the target Sign language. Our method gradually generates pose predictions using transformer encoders that create meaningful representations of the text and poses while considering their spatial and temporal information. We use weak supervision for the training process and show that our method succeeds in learning from partial and inaccurate data. Additionally, we offer a new distance measurement that considers missing keypoints, to measure the distance between pose sequences using DTW-MJE. We validate its correctness using AUTSL, a large-scale Sign language dataset, show that it measures the distance between pose sequences more accurately than existing measurements, and use it to assess the quality of our generated pose sequences. Code for the data pre-processing, the model, and the distance measurement is publicly released for future research.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) offer a promising approach for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, feeding multiple morphologically languages into a single model during training reduces the NMT's performance. In GAN, similar to bilingual models, multilingual NMT only considers one reference translation for each sentence during model training. This single reference translation limits the GAN model from learning sufficient information about the source sentence representation. Thus, in this article, we propose Denoising Adversarial Auto-encoder-based Sentence Interpolation (DAASI) approach to perform sentence interpolation by learning the intermediate latent representation of the source and target sentences of multilingual language pairs. Apart from latent representation, we also use the Wasserstein-GAN approach for the multilingual NMT model by incorporating the model generated sentences of multiple languages for reward computation. This computed reward optimizes the performance of the GAN-based multilingual model in an effective manner. We demonstrate the experiments on low-resource language pairs and find that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches for multilingual NMT with a performance gain of up to 4 BLEU points. Moreover, we use our trained model on zero-shot language pairs under an unsupervised scenario and show the robustness of the proposed approach.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of study that combines computer science and linguistics to help machines understand human language. NLP has become an integral part of modern technology, powering everything from chatbots to voice assistants. But how exactly do NLP algorithms work? And why do they matter? At its core, NLP is about teaching machines to understand human language.

There has been a recent explosion of computer vision models which perform many tasks and are composed of an image encoder (usually a ViT) and an autoregressive decoder (usually a Transformer). However, most of this work simply presents one system and its results, leaving many questions regarding design decisions and trade-offs of such systems unanswered. In this work, we aim to provide such answers. We take a close look at autoregressive decoders for multi-task learning in multimodal computer vision, including classification, captioning, visual question answering, and optical character recognition. Through extensive systematic experiments, we study the effects of task and data mixture, training and regularization hyperparameters, conditioning type and specificity, modality combination, and more. Importantly, we compare these to well-tuned single-task baselines to highlight the cost incurred by multi-tasking. A key finding is that a small decoder learned on top of a frozen pretrained encoder works surprisingly well. We call this setup locked-image tuning with decoder (LiT-decoder). It can be seen as teaching a decoder to interact with a pretrained vision model via natural language.