Current Machine Translation (MT) models still struggle with more challenging input, such as noisy data and tail-end words and phrases. Several works have addressed this robustness issue by identifying specific categories of noise and variation then tuning models to perform better on them. An important yet under-studied category involves minor variations in nuance (non-typos) that preserve meaning w.r.t. the target language. We introduce and formalize this category as Natural Asemantic Variation (NAV) and investigate it in the context of MT robustness. We find that existing MT models fail when presented with NAV data, but we demonstrate strategies to improve performance on NAV by fine-tuning them with human-generated variations. We also show that NAV robustness can be transferred across languages and find that synthetic perturbations can achieve some but not all of the benefits of organic NAV data.

Pre-training is an effective technique for ensuring robust performance on a variety of machine learning tasks. It typically depends on large-scale crawled corpora that can result in toxic or biased models. Such data can also be problematic with respect to copyright, attribution, and privacy. Pre-training with synthetic tasks and data is a promising way of alleviating such concerns since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our goal in this paper is to understand what makes for a good pre-trained model when using synthetic resources. We answer this question in the context of neural machine translation by considering two novel approaches to translation model pre-training. Our first approach studies the effect of pre-training on obfuscated data derived from a parallel corpus by mapping words to a vocabulary of 'nonsense' tokens. Our second approach explores the effect of pre-training on procedurally generated synthetic parallel data that does not depend on any real human language corpus. Our empirical evaluation on multiple language pairs shows that, to a surprising degree, the benefits of pre-training can be realized even with obfuscated or purely synthetic parallel data. In our analysis, we consider the extent to which obfuscated and synthetic pre-training techniques can be used to mitigate the issue of hallucinated model toxicity.

As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of such metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.

在任何翻译工作流程中，从源到目标的域知识保存至关重要。在翻译行业中，接收高度专业化的项目是很常见的，那里几乎没有任何平行的内域数据。在这种情况下，没有足够的内域数据来微调机器翻译（MT）模型，生成与相关上下文一致的翻译很具有挑战性。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，用于域适应性，以利用最新的审计语言模型（LMS）来用于特定于域的MT的域数据增强，并模拟（a）的（a）小型双语数据集的域特征，或（b）要翻译的单语源文本。将这个想法与反翻译相结合，我们可以为两种用例生成大量的合成双语内域数据。为了进行调查，我们使用最先进的变压器体系结构。我们采用混合的微调来训练模型，从而显着改善了内域文本的翻译。更具体地说，在这两种情况下，我们提出的方法分别在阿拉伯语到英语对阿拉伯语言对上分别提高了大约5-6个BLEU和2-3 BLEU。此外，人类评估的结果证实了自动评估结果。

机器翻译系统（MTS）是通过将文本或语音从一种语言转换为另一种语言的有效工具。在像印度这样的大型多语言环境中，对有效的翻译系统的需求变得显而易见，英语和一套印度语言（ILS）正式使用。与英语相反，由于语料库的不可用，IL仍然被视为低资源语言。为了解决不对称性质，多语言神经机器翻译（MNMT）系统会发展为在这个方向上的理想方法。在本文中，我们提出了一个MNMT系统，以解决与低资源语言翻译有关的问题。我们的模型包括两个MNMT系统，即用于英语印度（一对多），另一个用于指示英语（多一对多），其中包含15个语言对（30个翻译说明）的共享编码器码头。由于大多数IL对具有很少的平行语料库，因此不足以训练任何机器翻译模型。我们探索各种增强策略，以通过建议的模型提高整体翻译质量。最先进的变压器体系结构用于实现所提出的模型。大量数据的试验揭示了其优越性比常规模型的优势。此外，本文解决了语言关系的使用（在方言，脚本等方面），尤其是关于同一家族的高资源语言在提高低资源语言表现方面的作用。此外，实验结果还表明了ILS的倒退和域适应性的优势，以提高源和目标语言的翻译质量。使用所有这些关键方法，我们提出的模型在评估指标方面比基线模型更有效，即一组ILS的BLEU（双语评估研究）得分。

在本文中，我们分享了我们努力建立能够翻译一千多种语言的实用机器翻译（MT）系统的发现。我们在三个研究领域中描述了结果：（i）通过利用半监督预训练的语言识别和开发数据驱动的过滤技术来构建1500多种语言的清洁，网挖数据集； （ii）通过利用大规模的多语言模型来开发用于服务不足的语言的实用MT模型，该模型训练了有监督的并行数据，以使用100多种高资源语言和单语言数据集，以增加1000多种语言； （iii）研究这些语言的评估指标的局限性，并对我们MT模型的输出进行定性分析，突出显示了这些类型模型的几种频繁误差模式。我们希望我们的工作为旨在为当前研究的语言构建MT系统的从业者提供有用的见解，并突出显示可以补充Data-Sparse设置中大量多语言模型的弱点的研究方向。

我们提出了一种两阶段的培训方法，用于开发单个NMT模型，以翻译英语和英语的看不见的语言。对于第一阶段，我们将编码器模型初始化以鉴定XLM-R和Roberta的权重，然后对25种语言的平行数据进行多种语言微调。我们发现该模型可以推广到对看不见的语言的零击翻译。在第二阶段，我们利用这种概括能力从单语数据集生成合成的并行数据，然后用连续的反向翻译训练。最终模型扩展到了英语到许多方向，同时保持了多到英语的性能。我们称我们的方法为ecxtra（以英语为中心的跨语言（x）转移）。我们的方法依次利用辅助并行数据和单语言数据，并且在概念上很简单，仅在两个阶段都使用标准的跨熵目标。最终的ECXTRA模型对8种低资源语言的无监督NMT进行了评估，该语言为英语至哈萨克语（22.3> 10.4 bleu）以及其他15个翻译方向的竞争性能而获得了新的最先进。

语言模型预训练的最新进展利用大规模数据集创建多语言模型。但是，这些数据集中大多遗漏了低资源语言。这主要是因为网络上没有很好地表示口语，因此被排除在用于创建数据集的大规模爬网中。此外，这些模型的下游用户仅限于最初选择用于预训练的语言的选择。这项工作调查了如何最佳利用现有的预培训模型来为16种非洲语言创建低资源翻译系统。我们关注两个问题：1）如何将预训练的模型用于初始预培训中未包含的语言？ 2）生成的翻译模型如何有效地转移到新域？为了回答这些问题，我们创建了一个新的非洲新闻语料库，涵盖16种语言，其中8种语言不属于任何现有评估数据集的一部分。我们证明，将两种语言转移到其他语言和其他领域的最有效策略是，以少量的高质量翻译数据微调大型预训练模型。

This paper demonstrates that multilingual denoising pre-training produces significant performance gains across a wide variety of machine translation (MT) tasks. We present mBART -a sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder pre-trained on large-scale monolingual corpora in many languages using the BART objective . mBART is the first method for pre-training a complete sequence-to-sequence model by denoising full texts in multiple languages, while previous approaches have focused only on the encoder, decoder, or reconstructing parts of the text. Pre-training a complete model allows it to be directly fine tuned for supervised (both sentence-level and document-level) and unsupervised machine translation, with no task-specific modifications. We demonstrate that adding mBART initialization produces performance gains in all but the highest-resource settings, including up to 12 BLEU points for low resource MT and over 5 BLEU points for many document-level and unsupervised models. We also show it also enables new types of transfer to language pairs with no bi-text or that were not in the pre-training corpus, and present extensive analysis of which factors contribute the most to effective pre-training.

We propose a simple solution to use a single Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to translate between multiple languages. Our solution requires no changes to the model architecture from a standard NMT system but instead introduces an artificial token at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language. The rest of the model, which includes an encoder, decoder and attention module, remains unchanged and is shared across all languages. Using a shared wordpiece vocabulary, our approach enables Multilingual NMT using a single model without any increase in parameters, which is significantly simpler than previous proposals for Multilingual NMT. On the WMT'14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for English→French and surpasses state-of-the-art results for English→German. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for French→English and German→English on WMT'14 and WMT'15 benchmarks, respectively. On production corpora, multilingual models of up to twelve language pairs allow for better translation of many individual pairs. In addition to improving the translation quality of language pairs that the model was trained with, our models can also learn to perform implicit bridging between language pairs never seen explicitly during training, showing that transfer learning and zero-shot translation is possible for neural translation. Finally, we show analyses that hints at a universal interlingua representation in our models and show some interesting examples when mixing languages.

Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM's MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM's MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.

已经表明，机器翻译模型通常在培训语料库中不常见的命名实体产生不良的翻译。早期命名实体翻译方法主要关注语音音译，忽略翻译中的句子上下文，并在域和语言覆盖范围内有限。为了解决这一限制，我们提出了深入的，一种去噪的实体预训练方法，它利用大量单机数据和知识库来改进句子中的命名实体转换准确性。此外，我们调查了一种多任务学习策略，使得在实体增强的单晶体数据和并行数据上FineTunes在实体上的训练有素的神经机器翻译模型中进一步改进实体翻译。三种语言对的实验结果表明，方法导致强大的脱景自动编码基线的显着改进，增益高达1.3 BLEU，高达9.2的英语翻译实体准确度。

Large-scale generative models show an impressive ability to perform a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using in-context learning, where a few examples are used to describe a task to the model. For Machine Translation (MT), these examples are typically randomly sampled from the development dataset with a similar distribution as the evaluation set. However, it is unclear how the choice of these in-context examples and their ordering impacts the output translation quality. In this work, we aim to understand the properties of good in-context examples for MT in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. We show that the translation quality and the domain of the in-context examples matter and that 1-shot noisy unrelated example can have a catastrophic impact on output quality. While concatenating multiple random examples reduces the effect of noise, a single good prompt optimized to maximize translation quality on the development dataset can elicit learned information from the pre-trained language model. Adding similar examples based on an n-gram overlap with the test source significantly and consistently improves the translation quality of the outputs, outperforming a strong kNN-MT baseline in 2 out of 4 out-of-domain datasets.

多语种NMT已成为MT在生产中部署的有吸引力的解决方案。但是要匹配双语质量，它符合较大且较慢的型号。在这项工作中，我们考虑了几种方法在推理时更快地使多语言NMT变得更快而不会降低其质量。我们在两种20语言多平行设置中尝试几个“光解码器”架构：在TED会谈中小规模和帕拉克曲线上的大规模。我们的实验表明，将具有词汇过滤的浅解码器组合在于，在翻译质量下没有损失的速度超过两倍。我们用Bleu和Chrf（380语言对），鲁棒性评估和人类评估验证了我们的研究结果。

我们为机器翻译（MT）评估发布了70个小鉴别的测试集，称为方差感知测试集（VAT），从WMT16覆盖了35个翻译方向到WMT20竞争。VAT由一种新颖的方差感知过滤方法自动创建，该方法会在没有任何人工的情况下过滤当前MT测试集的不分度测试实例。实验结果表明，VAT在主流语言对和测试集中与人为判断的相关性方面优于原始的WMT测试集。进一步分析增值税的性质揭示了竞争MT系统的具有挑战性的语言特征（例如，低频词和专有名词），为构建未来MT测试集提供指导。测试集和准备方差感知MT测试集的代码可在https://github.com/nlp2ct/variance-aware-mt-test-sets自由使用。

神经机器翻译（NMT）模型在大型双语数据集上已有效。但是，现有的方法和技术表明，该模型的性能高度取决于培训数据中的示例数量。对于许多语言而言，拥有如此数量的语料库是一个牵强的梦想。我们从单语言词典探索新语言的单语扬声器中汲取灵感，我们研究了双语词典对具有极低或双语语料库的语言的适用性。在本文中，我们使用具有NMT模型的双语词典探索方法，以改善资源极低的资源语言的翻译。我们将此工作扩展到多语言系统，表现出零拍的属性。我们详细介绍了字典质量，培训数据集大小，语言家族等对翻译质量的影响。多种低资源测试语言的结果表明，我们的双语词典方法比基线相比。

不断增长的数据量导致更大的通用模型。通常遗漏特定用例，因为通用模型在域特定情况下往往表现不佳。我们的工作通过用于从通用域（并行文本）语料库的域名数据的方法解决了这个差距，用于机器翻译的任务。所提出的方法根据具有单孔域的特定数据集的余弦相似度在并行通用域数据中排列句子。然后，我们选择具有最高相似性分数的顶级k句，以培训调整的新机器翻译系统到特定的域数据。我们的实验结果表明，在通用或通用和域数据的混合训练的域内训练的模型训练的模型。也就是说，我们的方法以低计算成本和数据大小选择高质量的域特定培训实例。

Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders (XTREME) benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks. We demonstrate that while models tested on English reach human performance on many tasks, there is still a sizable gap in the performance of cross-lingually transferred models, particularly on syntactic and sentence retrieval tasks. There is also a wide spread of results across languages. We release the benchmark 1 to encourage research on cross-lingual learning methods that transfer linguistic knowledge across a diverse and representative set of languages and tasks.

我们假设现有的句子级机器翻译（MT）指标在人类参考包含歧义时会效率降低。为了验证这一假设，我们提出了一种非常简单的方法，用于扩展预审计的指标以在文档级别合并上下文。我们将我们的方法应用于三个流行的指标，即Bertscore，Prism和Comet，以及无参考的公制Comet-QE。我们使用提供的MQM注释评估WMT 2021指标共享任务的扩展指标。我们的结果表明，扩展指标的表现在约85％的测试条件下优于其句子级别的级别，而在排除低质量人类参考的结果时。此外，我们表明我们的文档级扩展大大提高了其对话语现象任务的准确性，从而优于专用基线高达6.1％。我们的实验结果支持我们的初始假设，并表明对指标的简单扩展使他们能够利用上下文来解决参考中的歧义。

一种有效的横向传输方法是在一种语言中微调在监督数据集上的双语或多语言模型，并以零拍方式在另一种语言上进行评估。在培训时间或推理时间翻译例子也是可行的替代方案。然而，存在与文献中很少有关的这些方法相关的成本。在这项工作中，我们在其有效性（例如，准确性），开发和部署成本方面分析交叉语言方法，以及推理时间的延迟。我们的三个任务的实验表明最好的交叉方法是高度任务依赖性的。最后，通过结合零射和翻译方法，我们在这项工作中使用的三个数据集中实现了最先进的。基于这些结果，我们对目标语言手动标记的培训数据有所了解。代码和翻译的数据集可在https://github.com/unicamp-dl/cross-lingsual-analysis上获得