The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can be regarded as the process of integrating semantic features from the source sentences and linguistic features from the target sentences. To enhance zero-shot translation, models need to share knowledge across languages, which can be achieved through auxiliary tasks for learning a universal representation or cross-lingual mapping. To this end, we propose to exploit both semantic and linguistic features between multiple languages to enhance multilingual translation. On the encoder side, we introduce a disentangling learning task that aligns encoder representations by disentangling semantic and linguistic features, thus facilitating knowledge transfer while preserving complete information. On the decoder side, we leverage a linguistic encoder to integrate low-level linguistic features to assist in the target language generation. Experimental results on multilingual datasets demonstrate significant improvement in zero-shot translation compared to the baseline system, while maintaining performance in supervised translation. Further analysis validates the effectiveness of our method in leveraging both semantic and linguistic features. The code is available at https://github.com/ictnlp/SemLing-MNMT.

Learning token embeddings based on token co-occurrence statistics has proven effective for both pre-training and fine-tuning in natural language processing. However, recent studies have pointed out the distribution of learned embeddings degenerates into anisotropy, and even pre-trained language models (PLMs) suffer from a loss of semantics-related information in embeddings for low-frequency tokens. This study first analyzes fine-tuning dynamics of a PLM, BART-large, and demonstrates its robustness against degeneration. On the basis of this finding, we propose DefinitionEMB, a method that utilizes definitions to construct isotropically distributed and semantics-related token embeddings for PLMs while maintaining original robustness during fine-tuning. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging definitions from Wiktionary to construct such embeddings for RoBERTa-base and BART-large. Furthermore, the constructed embeddings for low-frequency tokens improve the performance of these models across various GLUE and four text summarization datasets.

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we focus on machine translation (MT), a task that has been shown to benefit from in-context translation examples. However no systematic studies have been published on how best to select examples, and mixed results have been reported on the usefulness of similarity-based selection over random selection. We provide a study covering multiple LLMs and multiple in-context example retrieval strategies, comparing multilingual sentence embeddings. We cover several language directions, representing different levels of language resourcedness (English into French, German, Swahili and Wolof). Contrarily to previously published results, we find that sentence embedding similarity can improve MT, especially for low-resource language directions, and discuss the balance between selection pool diversity and quality. We also highlight potential problems with the evaluation of LLM-based MT and suggest a more appropriate evaluation protocol, adapting the COMET metric to the evaluation of LLMs. Code and outputs are freely available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/ICL-MT.

Recent advances in simultaneous speech translation (SST) focus on the decision policies that enable the use of offline-trained ST models for simultaneous inference. These decision policies not only control the quality-latency trade-off in SST but also mitigate the impact of unstable predictions on translation quality by delaying translation for more context or discarding these predictions through stable hypothesis detection. However, these policies often overlook the potential benefits of utilizing unstable predictions. We introduce the contrastive feedback mechanism (CFM) for SST, a novel method that leverages these unstable predictions as feedback to improve translation quality. CFM guides the system to eliminate undesired model behaviors from these predictions through a contrastive objective. The experiments on 3 state-of-the-art decision policies across 8 languages in the MuST-C v1.0 dataset show that CFM effectively improves the performance of SST.

Writing down lyrics for human consumption involves not only accurately capturing word sequences, but also incorporating punctuation and formatting for clarity and to convey contextual information. This includes song structure, emotional emphasis, and contrast between lead and background vocals. While automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) systems have advanced beyond producing unstructured strings of words and are able to draw on wider context, ALT benchmarks have not kept pace and continue to focus exclusively on words. To address this gap, we introduce Jam-ALT, a comprehensive lyrics transcription benchmark. The benchmark features a complete revision of the JamendoLyrics dataset, in adherence to industry standards for lyrics transcription and formatting, along with evaluation metrics designed to capture and assess the lyric-specific nuances, laying the foundation for improving the readability of lyrics. We apply the benchmark to recent transcription systems and present additional error analysis, as well as an experimental comparison with a classical music dataset.

Adapting questionnaires to new languages is a resource-intensive process often requiring the hiring of multiple independent translators, which limits the ability of researchers to conduct cross-cultural research and effectively creates inequalities in research and society. This work presents a prototype tool that can expedite the questionnaire translation process. The tool incorporates forward-backward translation using DeepL alongside GPT-4-generated translation quality evaluations and improvement suggestions. We conducted two online studies in which participants translated questionnaires from English to either German (Study 1; n=10) or Portuguese (Study 2; n=20) using our prototype. To evaluate the quality of the translations created using the tool, evaluation scores between conventionally translated and tool-supported versions were compared. Our results indicate that integrating LLM-generated translation quality evaluations and suggestions for improvement can help users independently attain results similar to those provided by conventional, non-NLP-supported translation methods. This is the first step towards more equitable questionnaire-based research, powered by AI.

Modern language models (LMs) pose a new challenge in capability assessment. Static benchmarks inevitably saturate without providing confidence in the deployment tolerances of LM-based systems, but developers nonetheless claim that their models have generalized traits such as reasoning or open-domain language understanding based on these flawed metrics. The science and practice of LMs requires a new approach to benchmarking which measures specific capabilities with dynamic assessments. To be confident in our metrics, we need a new discipline of model metrology -- one which focuses on how to generate benchmarks that predict performance under deployment. Motivated by our evaluation criteria, we outline how building a community of model metrology practitioners -- one focused on building tools and studying how to measure system capabilities -- is the best way to meet these needs to and add clarity to the AI discussion.

Word-level AutoCompletion(WLAC) is a rewarding yet challenging task in Computer-aided Translation. Existing work addresses this task through a classification model based on a neural network that maps the hidden vector of the input context into its corresponding label (i.e., the candidate target word is treated as a label). Since the context hidden vector itself does not take the label into account and it is projected to the label through a linear classifier, the model can not sufficiently leverage valuable information from the source sentence as verified in our experiments, which eventually hinders its overall performance. To alleviate this issue, this work proposes an energy-based model for WLAC, which enables the context hidden vector to capture crucial information from the source sentence. Unfortunately, training and inference suffer from efficiency and effectiveness challenges, thereby we employ three simple yet effective strategies to put our model into practice. Experiments on four standard benchmarks demonstrate that our reranking-based approach achieves substantial improvements (about 6.07%) over the previous state-of-the-art model. Further analyses show that each strategy of our approach contributes to the final performance.

Machine translation (MT) systems often translate terms with ambiguous gender (e.g., English term "the nurse") into the gendered form that is most prevalent in the systems' training data (e.g., "enfermera", the Spanish term for a female nurse). This often reflects and perpetuates harmful stereotypes present in society. With MT user interfaces in mind that allow for resolving gender ambiguity in a frictionless manner, we study the problem of generating all grammatically correct gendered translation alternatives. We open source train and test datasets for five language pairs and establish benchmarks for this task. Our key technical contribution is a novel semi-supervised solution for generating alternatives that integrates seamlessly with standard MT models and maintains high performance without requiring additional components or increasing inference overhead.

Classical Arabic represents a significant era, encompassing the golden age of Arab culture, philosophy, and scientific literature. With a broad consensus on the importance of translating these literatures to enrich knowledge dissemination across communities, the advent of large language models (LLMs) and translation systems offers promising tools to facilitate this goal. However, we have identified a scarcity of translation datasets in Classical Arabic, which are often limited in scope and topics, hindering the development of high-quality translation systems. In response, we present the ATHAR dataset, comprising 66,000 high-quality Classical Arabic to English translation samples that cover a wide array of subjects including science, culture, and philosophy. Furthermore, we assess the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs under various settings, concluding that there is a need for such datasets in current systems. Our findings highlight how models can benefit from fine-tuning or incorporating this dataset into their pretraining pipelines. The dataset is publicly available on the HuggingFace Data Hub at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/mohamed-khalil/ATHAR}.