Though nearest neighbor Machine Translation ($k$NN-MT) \citep{khandelwal2020nearest} has proved to introduce significant performance boosts over standard neural MT systems, it is prohibitively slow since it uses the entire reference corpus as the datastore for the nearest neighbor search. This means each step for each beam in the beam search has to search over the entire reference corpus. $k$NN-MT is thus two-orders slower than vanilla MT models, making it hard to be applied to real-world applications, especially online services. In this work, we propose Fast $k$NN-MT to address this issue. Fast $k$NN-MT constructs a significantly smaller datastore for the nearest neighbor search: for each word in a source sentence, Fast $k$NN-MT first selects its nearest token-level neighbors, which is limited to tokens that are the same as the query token. Then at each decoding step, in contrast to using the entire corpus as the datastore, the search space is limited to target tokens corresponding to the previously selected reference source tokens. This strategy avoids search through the whole datastore for nearest neighbors and drastically improves decoding efficiency. Without loss of performance, Fast $k$NN-MT is two-orders faster than $k$NN-MT, and is only two times slower than the standard NMT model. Fast $k$NN-MT enables the practical use of $k$NN-MT systems in real-world MT applications. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ShannonAI/fast-knn-nmt}

We introduce UDAAN, an open-source post-editing tool that can reduce manual editing efforts to quickly produce publishable-standard documents in several Indic languages. UDAAN has an end-to-end Machine Translation (MT) plus post-editing pipeline wherein users can upload a document to obtain raw MT output. Further, users can edit the raw translations using our tool. UDAAN offers several advantages: a) Domain-aware, vocabulary-based lexical constrained MT. b) source-target and target-target lexicon suggestions for users. Replacements are based on the source and target texts lexicon alignment. c) Translation suggestions are based on logs created during user interaction. d) Source-target sentence alignment visualisation that reduces the cognitive load of users during editing. e) Translated outputs from our tool are available in multiple formats: docs, latex, and PDF. We also provide the facility to use around 100 in-domain dictionaries for lexicon-aware machine translation. Although we limit our experiments to English-to-Hindi translation, our tool is independent of the source and target languages. Experimental results based on the usage of the tools and users feedback show that our tool speeds up the translation time by approximately a factor of three compared to the baseline method of translating documents from scratch. Our tool is available for both Windows and Linux platforms. The tool is open-source under MIT license, and the source code can be accessed from our website at https://www.udaanproject.org. Demonstration and tutorial videos for various features of our tool can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClfK7iC8J7b22bj3GwAUaCw. Our MT pipeline can be accessed at https://udaaniitb.aicte-india.org/udaan/translate/.

We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic - English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resource that can motivate and facilitate further research studying the code-switching phenomenon from a linguistic perspective and can be used to train and evaluate NLP systems.

This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf distribution is characterized by two distinct groups of tokens that differ both in terms of their frequency and their semantics. Namely, the tokens that have a one-to-one correspondence with one semantic concept have different statistical properties than those with semantic ambiguity. Finally, we demonstrate how these properties interfere with statistical learning procedures motivated by distributional semantics.

I've made some progress since my previous post on machine translation for medical chat, and this is a second checkpoint. I visited a friend in Tokyo for a week and my Japanese proficiency is extremely limited, mainly coming from Duolingo and the little I remember from anime. While I was there, I kept up with my Duolingo practice and relied heavily on Google Lens, which translates text in images. Google Lens was great, and was fast with offline models. It was particularly good for translating signs, such as those in parks or tourist areas.

A supervised text classification model relies on labelled datasets to train the model (Sebastiani, 2002). From an experimental perspective, the design and evaluation of classification models typically rely on data pertaining to fixed periods of time. Recent research demonstrates that such models, while showing competitive performance in their experimental environment, underperform when they need to classify new data that is distant in time from that observed during training (Alkhalifa and Zubiaga, 2022). This deterioration of performance has been demonstrated for different classification tasks, including topic classification (Rocha, Mourão, Pereira, Gonçalves, and Meira, 2008), sentiment classification (Lukes and Søgaard, 2018), hate speech detection (Florio, Basile, Polignano, Basile, and Patti, 2020), stance detection (Alkhalifa, Kochkina, and Zubiaga, 2021) and political ideology detection (Röttger and Pierrehumbert, 2021). This performance drop can happen for multiple reasons, including among others the evolution in language use (Smith, 2004) or the evolution of public opinion (Bonilla and Mo, 2019) and its extent may vary (Alkhalifa et al., 2021). This poses an important challenge and limitation on such models when one plans to continue using the model over a long period of time to classify new, incoming data, as can be the case with a stream of user-generated contents (Cheng, Chen, Lee, and Li, 2021).

Existing work on sign language translation - that is, translation from sign language videos into sentences in a written language - has focused mainly on (1) data collected in a controlled environment or (2) data in a specific domain, which limits the applicability to real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce OpenASL, a large-scale American Sign Language (ASL) - English dataset collected from online video sites (e.g., YouTube). OpenASL contains 288 hours of ASL videos in multiple domains from over 200 signers and is the largest publicly available ASL translation dataset to date. To tackle the challenges of sign language translation in realistic settings and without glosses, we propose a set of techniques including sign search as a pretext task for pre-training and fusion of mouthing and handshape features. The proposed techniques produce consistent and large improvements in translation quality, over baseline models based on prior work. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/chevalierNoir/OpenASL

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models from English to SPARQL are a promising development for SPARQL query generation. However, current architectures are unable to integrate the knowledge base (KB) schema and handle questions on knowledge resources, classes, and properties unseen during training, rendering them unusable outside the scope of topics covered in the training set. Inspired by the performance gains in natural language processing tasks, we propose to integrate a copy mechanism for neural SPARQL query generation as a way to tackle this issue. We illustrate our proposal by adding a copy layer and a dynamic knowledge base vocabulary to two Seq2Seq architectures (CNNs and Transformers). This layer makes the models copy KB elements directly from the questions, instead of generating them. We evaluate our approach on state-of-the-art datasets, including datasets referencing unknown KB elements and measure the accuracy of the copy-augmented architectures. Our results show a considerable increase in performance on all datasets compared to non-copy architectures.

The cornerstone of multilingual neural translation is shared representations across languages. Given the theoretically infinite representation power of neural networks, semantically identical sentences are likely represented differently. While representing sentences in the continuous latent space ensures expressiveness, it introduces the risk of capturing of irrelevant features which hinders the learning of a common representation. In this work, we discretize the encoder output latent space of multilingual models by assigning encoder states to entries in a codebook, which in effect represents source sentences in a new artificial language. This discretization process not only offers a new way to interpret the otherwise black-box model representations, but, more importantly, gives potential for increasing robustness in unseen testing conditions. We validate our approach on large-scale experiments with realistic data volumes and domains. When tested in zero-shot conditions, our approach is competitive with two strong alternatives from the literature. We also use the learned artificial language to analyze model behavior, and discover that using a similar bridge language increases knowledge-sharing among the remaining languages.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models with conditional execution of sparsely activated layers have enabled training models with a much larger number of parameters. As a result, these models have achieved significantly better quality on various natural language processing tasks including machine translation. However, it remains challenging to deploy such models in real-life scenarios due to the large memory requirements and inefficient inference. In this work, we introduce a highly efficient inference framework with several optimization approaches to accelerate the computation of sparse models and cut down the memory consumption significantly. While we achieve up to 26x speed-up in terms of throughput, we also reduce the model size almost to one eighth of the original 32-bit float model by quantizing expert weights into 4-bit integers. As a result, we are able to deploy 136x larger models with 27% less cost and significantly better quality compared to the existing solutions. This enables a paradigm shift in deploying large scale multilingual MoE transformers models replacing the traditional practice of distilling teacher models into dozens of smaller models per language or task.