Zixi, the industry leader for enabling cost-efficient and highly scalable live broadcast-quality video over any IP network or protocol and provider of the award-winning SDVP, announced a partnership with XL8 that has integrated Zixi into their innovative LiveSubs translation engine to create real-time subtitles powered by its proprietary state-of-the-art AI technology. LiveSubs allows customers to take their Zixi stream and generate live subtitled languages on the fly, from the source language into over 70 global language pairs. Media companies are under increasing pressure to meet the worldwide demand for hyper-localized translated media in the live distribution space and XL8 takes AI-powered machine translation, specially optimized for media content, to the next level. Its advanced technology allows significantly more efficient workflows by providing in-line editing, automated media transcription with time coding, automated subtitling, synthesized voice dubbing, real-time meeting interpretation including a soon-to-be-released Zoom app, and live subtitling. XL8's uniquely specialized translation engines have been built from the ground up utilizing professionally trained, human-perfected subtitles curated from the media industry's top content producers.

Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) models have been used extensively in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. In this blog post, we will implement a Seq2Seq model for Italian-to-English machine translation using TensorFlow and Python OOPs. The model architecture will consist of an Encoder, a Decoder, and an Attention mechanism. The first step in any machine learning task is to preprocess the data. We will be using a dataset of Italian-English sentence pairs for our translation task.

Large multilingual models trained with self-supervision achieve state-of-the-art results in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Self-supervised pretrained models are often fine-tuned on parallel data from one or multiple language pairs for machine translation. Multilingual fine-tuning improves performance on low-resource languages but requires modifying the entire model and can be prohibitively expensive. Training a new adapter on each language pair or training a single adapter on all language pairs without updating the pretrained model has been proposed as a parameter-efficient alternative. However, the former does not permit any sharing between languages, while the latter shares parameters for all languages and is susceptible to negative interference. In this paper, we propose training language-family adapters on top of mBART-50 to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. Our approach outperforms related baselines, yielding higher translation scores on average when translating from English to 17 different low-resource languages. We also show that language-family adapters provide an effective method to translate to languages unseen during pretraining.

Large-scale multilingual machine translation systems have demonstrated remarkable ability to translate directly between numerous languages, making them increasingly appealing for real-world applications. However, when deployed in the wild, these models may generate hallucinated translations which have the potential to severely undermine user trust and raise safety concerns. Existing research on hallucinations has primarily focused on small bilingual models trained on high-resource languages, leaving a gap in our understanding of hallucinations in massively multilingual models across diverse translation scenarios. In this work, we fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis on both the M2M family of conventional neural machine translation models and ChatGPT, a general-purpose large language model~(LLM) that can be prompted for translation. Our investigation covers a broad spectrum of conditions, spanning over 100 translation directions across various resource levels and going beyond English-centric language pairs. We provide key insights regarding the prevalence, properties, and mitigation of hallucinations, paving the way towards more responsible and reliable machine translation systems.

We present new benchmarks on evaluation code generation models: MBXP and Multilingual HumanEval, and MathQA-X. These datasets cover over 10 programming languages and are generated using a scalable conversion framework that transpiles prompts and test cases from the original Python datasets into the corresponding data in the target language. Using these benchmarks, we are able to assess the performance of code generation models in a multi-lingual fashion, and discovered generalization ability of language models on out-of-domain languages, advantages of multi-lingual models over mono-lingual, the ability of few-shot prompting to teach the model new languages, and zero-shot translation abilities even on mono-lingual settings. Furthermore, we use our code generation model to perform large-scale bootstrapping to obtain synthetic canonical solutions in several languages, which can be used for other code-related evaluations such as code insertion, robustness, or summarization tasks. Overall, our benchmarks represents a significant step towards a deeper understanding of language models' code generation abilities. We publicly release our code and datasets at https://github.com/amazon-research/mxeval.

In the field of Japanese-Chinese translation linguistics, the issue of correctly translating attributive clauses has persistently proven to be challenging. Present-day machine translation tools often fail to accurately translate attributive clauses from Japanese to Chinese. In light of this, this paper investigates the linguistic problem underlying such difficulties, namely how does the semantic role of the modified noun affect the selection of translation patterns for attributive clauses, from a linguistic perspective. To ad-dress these difficulties, a pre-edit scheme is proposed, which aims to enhance the accuracy of translation. Furthermore, we propose a novel two-step prompt strategy, which combines this pre-edit scheme with ChatGPT, currently the most widely used large language model. This prompt strategy is capable of optimizing translation input in zero-shot scenarios and has been demonstrated to improve the average translation accuracy score by over 35%.

Word alignments are essential for a variety of NLP tasks. Therefore, choosing the best approaches for their creation is crucial. However, the scarce availability of gold evaluation data makes the choice difficult. We propose SilverAlign, a new method to automatically create silver data for the evaluation of word aligners by exploiting machine translation and minimal pairs. We show that performance on our silver data correlates well with gold benchmarks for 9 language pairs, making our approach a valid resource for evaluation of different domains and languages when gold data are not available. This addresses the important scenario of missing gold data alignments for low-resource languages.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has progressed rapidly over the past several years, and modern models are able to achieve relatively high quality using only monolingual text data, an approach dubbed Unsupervised Machine Translation (UNMT). We test the efficacy of bilingual lexica in a real-world set-up, on 200-language translation models trained on web-crawled text. We present several findings: (1) using lexical data augmentation, we demonstrate sizable performance gains for unsupervised translation; (2) we compare several families of data augmentation, demonstrating that they yield similar improvements, and can be combined for even greater improvements; (3) we demonstrate the importance of carefully curated lexica over larger, noisier ones, especially with larger models; and (4) we compare the efficacy of multilingual lexicon data versus human-translated parallel data. Neural machine translation (NMT) has emerged as the dominant way of training machine translation models (Bahdanau ...

Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes so that the resulting verse can be sung to the accompanying melody, which is a challenging problem that has attracted some interests in different aspects of the translation process. In this paper, we propose Lyrics-Melody Translation with Adaptive Grouping (LTAG), a holistic solution to automatic song translation by jointly modeling lyrics translation and lyrics-melody alignment. It is a novel encoder-decoder framework that can simultaneously translate the source lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step through an adaptive note grouping module. To address data scarcity, we commissioned a small amount of training data annotated specifically for this task and used large amounts of augmented data through back-translation. Experiments conducted on an English-Chinese song translation data set show the effectiveness of our model in both automatic and human evaluation.

The model's ability to understand synonymous expression is crucial in many kinds of downstream tasks. It will make the model to better understand the similarity between context, and more robust to the synonym substitution attack. However, many Pretrained Language Model (PLM) lack synonym knowledge due to limitation of small-scale synsets and PLM's pretraining objectives. In this paper, we propose a framework called Sem4SAP to mine synsets from Open Knowledge Graph (Open-KG) and using the mined synsets to do synonym-aware pretraining for language models. We propose to coarsly filter the content in Open-KG and use the frequency information to better help the clustering process under low-resource unsupervised conditions. We expand the mined synsets by migrating core semantics between synonymous expressions.We also propose two novel and effective synonym-aware pre-training methods for injecting synonym knowledge into PLMs.Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sem4SAP can dramatically outperform the original PLMs and other baselines on ten different tasks.