Despite the recent advancements in speech recognition, there are still difficulties in accurately transcribing conversational and emotional speech in noisy and reverberant acoustic environments. This poses a particular challenge in the search and rescue (SAR) domain, where transcribing conversations among rescue team members is crucial to support real-time decision-making. The scarcity of speech data and associated background noise in SAR scenarios make it difficult to deploy robust speech recognition systems. To address this issue, we have created and made publicly available a German speech dataset called RescueSpeech. This dataset includes real speech recordings from simulated rescue exercises. Additionally, we have released competitive training recipes and pre-trained models. Our study highlights that the performance attained by state-of-the-art methods in this challenging scenario is still far from reaching an acceptable level.

Recent work has shown evidence of 'Clever Hans' behavior in high-performance neural translationese classifiers, where BERT-based classifiers capitalize on spurious correlations, in particular topic information, between data and target classification labels, rather than genuine translationese signals. Translationese signals are subtle (especially for professional translation) and compete with many other signals in the data such as genre, style, author, and, in particular, topic. This raises the general question of how much of the performance of a classifier is really due to spurious correlations in the data versus the signals actually targeted for by the classifier, especially for subtle target signals and in challenging (low resource) data settings. We focus on topic-based spurious correlation and approach the question from two directions: (i) where we have no knowledge about spurious topic information and its distribution in the data, (ii) where we have some indication about the nature of spurious topic correlations. For (i) we develop a measure from first principles capturing alignment of unsupervised topics with target classification labels as an indication of spurious topic information in the data. We show that our measure is the same as purity in clustering and propose a 'topic floor' (as in a 'noise floor') for classification. For (ii) we investigate masking of known spurious topic carriers in classification. Both (i) and (ii) contribute to quantifying and (ii) to mitigating spurious correlations.

Existing approaches for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) often depend on good quality static or contextual embeddings trained on large monolingual corpora for both languages. In reality, however, unsupervised BLI is most likely to be useful for dialects and languages that do not have abundant amounts of monolingual data. We introduce a simple and fast method for unsupervised BLI for low-resource languages with a related mid-to-high resource language, only requiring inference on the higher-resource language monolingual BERT. We work with two low-resource languages ($<5M$ monolingual tokens), Bhojpuri and Magahi, of the severely under-researched Indic dialect continuum, showing that state-of-the-art methods in the literature show near-zero performance in these settings, and that our simpler method gives much better results. We repeat our experiments on Marathi and Nepali, two higher-resource Indic languages, to compare approach performances by resource range. We release automatically created bilingual lexicons for the first time for five languages of the Indic dialect continuum.

Dense vector representations for textual data are crucial in modern NLP. Word embeddings and sentence embeddings estimated from raw texts are key in achieving state-of-the-art results in various tasks requiring semantic understanding. However, obtaining embeddings at the document level is challenging due to computational requirements and lack of appropriate data. Instead, most approaches fall back on computing document embeddings based on sentence representations. Although there exist architectures and models to encode documents fully, they are in general limited to English and few other high-resourced languages. In this work, we provide a systematic comparison of methods to produce document-level representations from sentences based on LASER, LaBSE, and Sentence BERT pre-trained multilingual models. We compare input token number truncation, sentence averaging as well as some simple windowing and in some cases new augmented and learnable approaches, on 3 multi- and cross-lingual tasks in 8 languages belonging to 3 different language families. Our task-based extrinsic evaluations show that, independently of the language, a clever combination of sentence embeddings is usually better than encoding the full document as a single unit, even when this is possible. We demonstrate that while a simple sentence average results in a strong baseline for classification tasks, more complex combinations are necessary for semantic tasks.

Document-level neural machine translation (NMT) has outperformed sentence-level NMT on a number of datasets. However, document-level NMT is still not widely adopted in real-world translation systems mainly due to the lack of large-scale general-domain training data for document-level NMT. We examine the effectiveness of using Paracrawl for learning document-level translation. Paracrawl is a large-scale parallel corpus crawled from the Internet and contains data from various domains. The official Paracrawl corpus was released as parallel sentences (extracted from parallel webpages) and therefore previous works only used Paracrawl for learning sentence-level translation. In this work, we extract parallel paragraphs from Paracrawl parallel webpages using automatic sentence alignments and we use the extracted parallel paragraphs as parallel documents for training document-level translation models. We show that document-level NMT models trained with only parallel paragraphs from Paracrawl can be used to translate real documents from TED, News and Europarl, outperforming sentence-level NMT models. We also perform a targeted pronoun evaluation and show that document-level models trained with Paracrawl data can help context-aware pronoun translation.

The choice of hyper-parameters affects the performance of neural models. While much previous research (Sutskever et al., 2013; Duchi et al., 2011; Kingma and Ba, 2015) focuses on accelerating convergence and reducing the effects of the learning rate, comparatively few papers concentrate on the effect of batch size. In this paper, we analyze how increasing batch size affects gradient direction, and propose to evaluate the stability of gradients with their angle change. Based on our observations, the angle change of gradient direction first tends to stabilize (i.e. gradually decrease) while accumulating mini-batches, and then starts to fluctuate. We propose to automatically and dynamically determine batch sizes by accumulating gradients of mini-batches and performing an optimization step at just the time when the direction of gradients starts to fluctuate. To improve the efficiency of our approach for large models, we propose a sampling approach to select gradients of parameters sensitive to the batch size. Our approach dynamically determines proper and efficient batch sizes during training. In our experiments on the WMT 14 English to German and English to French tasks, our approach improves the Transformer with a fixed 25k batch size by +0.73 and +0.82 BLEU respectively.

It has been shown that PE can not only yield productivity gains of 36% [9], but that it also increases the quality [2]. This paper discusses how human and artificial intelligence can be combined for efficient language translations, which tools already exist and which open challenges remain (see Figure 1). HARNESSING SYNERGIES BETWEEN AIS AND HUMANS Draft Proposal The PE process starts with an initial draft that is proposed by the AI and which the human uses as a basis. There are two main sources for this proposal: a machine translation (MT) and a translation memory (TM). Simply put, TMs are large databases containing already completed human translations which are matched (using fuzzy or exact matches) against the sentence to be translated to provide a starting point for PE.