Attention models, and BERT in particular, have achieved promising results in Natural Language Processing, in both classification and translation tasks. A new paper by Facebook AI, named XLM, presents an improved version of BERT to achieve state-of-the-art results in both types of tasks. XLM uses a known pre-processing technique (BPE) and a dual-language training mechanism with BERT in order to learn relations between words in different languages. The model outperforms other models in a cross-lingual classification task (sentence entailment in 15 languages) and significantly improves machine translation when a pre-trained model is used for initialization of the translation model. XLM is based on several key concepts: Transformers, invented in 2017, introduced an attention mechanism that processes the entire text input simultaneously to learn contextual relations between words (or sub-words).

Multi-media communications facilitate global interaction among people. However, despite researchers exploring cross-lingual translation techniques such as machine translation and audio speech translation to overcome language barriers, there is still a shortage of cross-lingual studies on visual speech. This lack of research is mainly due to the absence of datasets containing visual speech and translated text pairs. In this paper, we present \textbf{AVMuST-TED}, the first dataset for \textbf{A}udio-\textbf{V}isual \textbf{Mu}ltilingual \textbf{S}peech \textbf{T}ranslation, derived from \textbf{TED} talks. Nonetheless, visual speech is not as distinguishable as audio speech, making it difficult to develop a mapping from source speech phonemes to the target language text. To address this issue, we propose MixSpeech, a cross-modality self-learning framework that utilizes audio speech to regularize the training of visual speech tasks. To further minimize the cross-modality gap and its impact on knowledge transfer, we suggest adopting mixed speech, which is created by interpolating audio and visual streams, along with a curriculum learning strategy to adjust the mixing ratio as needed. MixSpeech enhances speech translation in noisy environments, improving BLEU scores for four languages on AVMuST-TED by +1.4 to +4.2. Moreover, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in lip reading on CMLR (11.1\%), LRS2 (25.5\%), and LRS3 (28.0\%).

There is growing interest in software migration as the development of software and society. Manually migrating projects between languages is error-prone and expensive. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore automatic program translation using supervised deep learning techniques by learning from large-scale parallel code corpus. However, parallel resources are scarce in the programming language domain, and it is costly to collect bilingual data manually. To address this issue, several unsupervised programming translation systems are proposed. However, these systems still rely on huge monolingual source code to train, which is very expensive. Besides, these models cannot perform well for translating the languages that are not seen during the pre-training procedure. In this paper, we propose SDA-Trans, a syntax and domain-aware model for program translation, which leverages the syntax structure and domain knowledge to enhance the cross-lingual transfer ability. SDA-Trans adopts unsupervised training on a smaller-scale corpus, including Python and Java monolingual programs. The experimental results on function translation tasks between Python, Java, and C++ show that SDA-Trans outperforms many large-scale pre-trained models, especially for unseen language translation.

Word error rate (WER) is a standard metric for the evaluation of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, WER fails to provide a fair evaluation of human perceived quality in presence of spelling variations, abbreviations, or compound words arising out of agglutination. Multiple spelling variations might be acceptable based on locale/geography, alternative abbreviations, borrowed words, and transliteration of code-mixed words from a foreign language to the target language script. Similarly, in case of agglutination, often times the agglutinated, as well as the split forms, are acceptable. Previous work handled this problem by using manually identified normalization pairs and applying them to both the transcription and the hypothesis before computing WER. In this paper, we propose an automatic WER normalization system consisting of two modules: spelling normalization and segmentation normalization. The proposed system is unsupervised and language agnostic, and therefore scalable. Experiments with ASR on 35K utterances across four languages yielded an average WER reduction of 13.28%. Human judgements of these automatically identified normalization pairs show that our WER-normalized evaluation is highly consistent with the perceived quality of ASR output.

There has been an increasing interest in incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Defence and military systems to complement and augment human intelligence and capabilities. However, much work still needs to be done toward achieving an effective human-machine partnership. This work is aimed at enhancing human-machine communications by developing a capability for automatically translating human natural language into a machine-understandable language (e.g., SQL queries). Techniques toward achieving this goal typically involve building a semantic parser trained on a very large amount of high-quality manually-annotated data. However, in many real-world Defence scenarios, it is not feasible to obtain such a large amount of training data. To the best of our knowledge, there are few works trying to explore the possibility of training a semantic parser with limited manually-paraphrased data, in other words, zero-shot. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit paraphrasing methods for the automated generation of large-scale training datasets (in the form of paraphrased utterances and their corresponding logical forms in SQL format) and present our experimental results using real-world data in the maritime domain.

Understanding the meaning of words in context is fundamental for reading comprehension. The perceived difficulty, hereafter referred to as complexity, of a target word within a given text varies widely among readers. With an increased demand for distance learning and educational technologies[107], research into automatically predicting which words are likely to cause comprehension problems is becoming a popular area of research [115, 147, 185]. Systems have been created to identify complex words that are difficult to acquire, reproduce, or understand for children [79], second-language learners [89], people suffering from a reading disability, such as dyslexia [131] or aphasia [35, 53], or more generally, individuals with low literacy [59, 175]. In Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the task of automatically recognizing complex words is most often achieved by training machine learning (ML) models. These ML models assign a complexity value to each target word within an inputted extract, sentence, or text that allows for the identification of complex words. This information can then be used to improve downstream lexical and text simplification systems that provide simpler alternatives to aid reading comprehension. Take the extract shown in Table 1 for example.

Machine learning algorithms typically assume independent and identically distributed samples in training and at test time. Much work has shown that high-performing ML classifiers can degrade significantly and provide overly-confident, wrong classification predictions, particularly for out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. Conditional language models (CLMs) are predominantly trained to classify the next token in an output sequence, and may suffer even worse degradation on OOD inputs as the prediction is done auto-regressively over many steps. Furthermore, the space of potential low-quality outputs is larger as arbitrary text can be generated and it is important to know when to trust the generated output. We present a highly accurate and lightweight OOD detection method for CLMs, and demonstrate its effectiveness on abstractive summarization and translation. We also show how our method can be used under the common and realistic setting of distribution shift for selective generation (analogous to selective prediction for classification) of high-quality outputs, while automatically abstaining from low-quality ones, enabling safer deployment of generative language models.

Although recent years have brought significant progress in improving translation of unambiguously gendered sentences, translation of ambiguously gendered input remains relatively unexplored. When source gender is ambiguous, machine translation models typically default to stereotypical gender roles, perpetuating harmful bias. Recent work has led to the development of "gender rewriters" that generate alternative gender translations on such ambiguous inputs, but such systems are plagued by poor linguistic coverage. To encourage better performance on this task we present and release GATE, a linguistically diverse corpus of gender-ambiguous source sentences along with multiple alternative target language translations. We also provide tools for evaluation and system analysis when using GATE and use them to evaluate our translation rewriter system.

We propose a cross-lingual neural codec language model, VALL-E X, for cross-lingual speech synthesis. Specifically, we extend VALL-E and train a multi-lingual conditional codec language model to predict the acoustic token sequences of the target language speech by using both the source language speech and the target language text as prompts. VALL-E X inherits strong in-context learning capabilities and can be applied for zero-shot cross-lingual text-to-speech synthesis and zero-shot speech-to-speech translation tasks. Experimental results show that it can generate high-quality speech in the target language via just one speech utterance in the source language as a prompt while preserving the unseen speaker's voice, emotion, and acoustic environment. Moreover, VALL-E X effectively alleviates the foreign accent problems, which can be controlled by a language ID. Audio samples are available at \url{https://aka.ms/vallex}.

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) has attracted increasing interest in recent years due to the availability of large-scale web-mined datasets and the advancements of multilingual language models. However, given the rareness of naturally occurring CLS resources, the majority of datasets are forced to rely on translation which can contain overly literal artifacts. This restricts our ability to observe naturally occurring CLS pairs that capture organic diction, including instances of code-switching. This alteration between languages in mid-message is a common phenomenon in multilingual settings yet has been largely overlooked in cross-lingual contexts due to data scarcity. To address this gap, we introduce CroCoSum, a dataset of cross-lingual code-switched summarization of technology news. It consists of over 24,000 English source articles and 18,000 human-curated Chinese news summaries, with more than 92% of the summaries containing code-switched phrases. For reference, we evaluate the performance of existing approaches including pipeline, end-to-end, and zero-shot methods. We show that leveraging existing resources as a pretraining step does not improve performance on CroCoSum, indicating the limited generalizability of existing resources. Finally, we discuss the challenges of evaluating cross-lingual summarizers on code-switched generation through qualitative error analyses. Our collection and code can be accessed at https://github.com/RosenZhang/CroCoSum.