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We present a simple document alignment method that incorporates sentence order information in both candidate generation and candidate re-scoring. Our method results in 61% relative reduction in error compared to the best previously published result on the WMT16 document alignment shared task. Our method improves downstream MT performance on web-scraped Sinhala--English documents from ParaCrawl, outperforming the document alignment method used in the most recent ParaCrawl release. It also outperforms a comparable corpora method which uses the same multilingual embeddings, demonstrating that exploiting sentence order is beneficial even if the end goal is sentence-level bitext., EMNLP2020

We introduce Vecalign, a novel bilingual sentence alignment method which is linear in time and space with respect to the number of sentences being aligned and which requires only bilingual sentence embeddings. On a standard German–French test set, Vecalign outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method (which has quadratic time complexity and requires a machine translation system) by 5 F1 points. It substantially outperforms the popular Hunalign toolkit at recovering Bible verse alignments in medium- to low-resource language pairs, and it improves downstream MT quality by 1.7 and 1.6 BLEU in Sinhala-English and Nepali-English, respectively, compared to the Hunalign-based Paracrawl pipeline.

Bilingual lexicons are valuable resources used by professional human translators. While these resources can be easily incorporated in statistical machine translation, it is unclear how to best do so in the neural framework. In this work, we present the HABLex dataset, designed to test methods for bilingual lexicon integration into neural machine translation. Our data consists of human generated alignments of words and phrases in machine translation test sets in three language pairs (Russian-English, Chinese-English, and Korean-English), resulting in clean bilingual lexicons which are well matched to the reference. We also present two simple baselines - constrained decoding and continued training - and an improvement to continued training to address overfitting.

We report on the efforts of the Johns Hopkins University to develop neural machine translation systems for the shared task for news translation organized around the Conference for Machine Translation (WMT) 2018. We developed systems for German–English, English– German, and Russian–English. Our novel contributions are iterative back-translation and fine-tuning on test sets from prior years.

Supervised domain adaptation—where a large generic corpus and a smaller indomain corpus are both available for training—is a challenge for neural machine translation (NMT). Standard practice is to train a generic model and use it to initialize a second model, then continue training the second model on in-domain data to produce an in-domain model. We add an auxiliary term to the training objective during continued training that minimizes the cross entropy between the indomain model’s output word distribution and that of the out-of-domain model to prevent the model’s output from differing too much from the original out-of-domain model. We perform experiments on EMEA (descriptions of medicines) and TED (rehearsed presentations), initialized from a general domain (WMT) model. Our method shows improvements over standard continued training by up to 1.5 BLEU.

In this work, we propose a novel, implicitly defined neural network architecture and describe a method to compute its components. The proposed architecture forgoes the causality assumption previously used to formulate recurrent neural networks and allow the hidden states of the network to coupled together, allowing potential improvement on problems with complex, long-distance dependencies. Initial experiments demonstrate the new architecture outperforms both the Stanford Parser and a baseline bidirectional network on the Penn Treebank Part-of-Speech tagging task and a baseline bidirectional network on an additional artificial random biased walk task.

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical machine translation systems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT16 evaluation campaign. New techniques applied this year include Neural Machine Translation, a unique selection process for language modelling data, additional out-of-vocabulary transliteration techniques, and morphology generation.

This paper describes the AFRL-MITLL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the WMT15 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English translation task creating three submission systems with different decoding strategies. Out of vocabulary words were addressed with named entity postprocessing.