We present the task of PreQuEL, Pre-(Quality-Estimation) Learning. A PreQuEL system predicts how well a given sentence will be translated, without recourse to the actual translation, thus eschewing unnecessary resource allocation when translation quality is bound to be low. PreQuEL can be defined relative to a given MT system (e.g., some industry service) or generally relative to the state-of-the-art. From a theoretical perspective, PreQuEL places the focus on the source text, tracing properties, possibly linguistic features, that make a sentence harder to machine translate. We develop a baseline model for the task and analyze its performance. We also develop a data augmentation method (from parallel corpora), that improves results substantially. We show that this augmentation method can improve the performance of the Quality-Estimation task as well. We investigate the properties of the input text that our model is sensitive to, by testing it on challenge sets and different languages. We conclude that it is aware of syntactic and semantic distinctions, and correlates and even over-emphasizes the importance of standard NLP features.

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.

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。

自然语言推理（NLI）和语义文本相似性（STS）是广泛使用的基准任务，用于对预训练的语言模型进行组成评估。尽管对语言普遍性的兴趣越来越大，但大多数NLI/STS研究几乎完全集中在英语上。特别是，日语中没有可用的多语言NLI/STS数据集，它在类型上与英语不同，并且可以阐明语言模型当前有争议的行为，例如对单词顺序和案例粒子的敏感性。在此背景下，我们介绍了日本NLI/STS数据集Jsick，该数据集是从英语数据集病中手动翻译的。我们还提出了一个用于组成推断的应力测试数据集，该数据集是通过转换JSick中句子的句法结构来研究语言模型是否对单词顺序和案例粒子敏感的。我们在不同的预训练语言模型上进行基线实验，并比较应用于日语和其他语言时多语言模型的性能。应力测试实验的结果表明，当前的预训练的语言模型对单词顺序和案例标记不敏感。

数据增强是自然语言处理（NLP）模型的鲁棒性评估的重要组成部分，以及增强他们培训的数据的多样性。在本文中，我们呈现NL-Cogmenter，这是一种新的参与式Python的自然语言增强框架，它支持创建两个转换（对数据的修改）和过滤器（根据特定功能的数据拆分）。我们描述了框架和初始的117个变换和23个过滤器，用于各种自然语言任务。我们通过使用其几个转换来分析流行自然语言模型的鲁棒性来证明NL-Upmenter的功效。基础架构，Datacards和稳健性分析结果在NL-Augmenter存储库上公开可用（\ url {https://github.com/gem-benchmark/nl-augmenter}）。

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject-verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarise the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgements, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

评估指标是文本生成系统的关键成分。近年来，已经提出了几十年前的文本生成质量的人类评估，提出了几个基于伯特的评估指标（包括Bertscore，Moverscore，BLEurt等），这些评估与文本生成质量的人类评估比Bleu或Rouge进行了更好。但是，很少是已知这些度量基于黑盒语言模型表示的指标实际捕获（通常假设它们模型语义相似性）。在这项工作中，我们使用基于简单的回归的全局解释技术来沿着语言因素解开度量标准分数，包括语义，语法，形态和词汇重叠。我们表明，不同的指标捕获了一定程度的各个方面，但它们对词汇重叠大大敏感，就像Bleu和Rouge一样。这暴露了这些新颖性拟议的指标的限制，我们还在对抗对抗测试场景中突出显示。

Automatic machine translation (MT) metrics are widely used to distinguish the translation qualities of machine translation systems across relatively large test sets (system-level evaluation). However, it is unclear if automatic metrics are reliable at distinguishing good translations from bad translations at the sentence level (segment-level evaluation). In this paper, we investigate how useful MT metrics are at detecting the success of a machine translation component when placed in a larger platform with a downstream task. We evaluate the segment-level performance of the most widely used MT metrics (chrF, COMET, BERTScore, etc.) on three downstream cross-lingual tasks (dialogue state tracking, question answering, and semantic parsing). For each task, we only have access to a monolingual task-specific model. We calculate the correlation between the metric's ability to predict a good/bad translation with the success/failure on the final task for the Translate-Test setup. Our experiments demonstrate that all metrics exhibit negligible correlation with the extrinsic evaluation of the downstream outcomes. We also find that the scores provided by neural metrics are not interpretable mostly because of undefined ranges. Our analysis suggests that future MT metrics be designed to produce error labels rather than scores to facilitate extrinsic evaluation.

估计机器翻译系统的质量是该领域的研究人员的持续挑战。许多以前使用往返翻译的尝试作为质量的衡量标准失败，并且对其是一种可行的质量估算方法有很大的分歧。在本文中，我们重新审视了往返翻译，提出了一个旨在解决这种方法发现的先前陷阱的系统。我们的方法利用近期语言表示的进步学习，以更准确地衡量原始和往返翻译句子之间的相似性。实验表明，虽然我们的方法没有达到现有技术的当前状态的性能，但它仍然可能是某些语言对的有效方法。

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。

Translating training data into many languages has emerged as a practical solution for improving cross-lingual transfer. For tasks that involve span-level annotations, such as information extraction or question answering, an additional label projection step is required to map annotated spans onto the translated texts. Recently, a few efforts have utilized a simple mark-then-translate method to jointly perform translation and projection by inserting special markers around the labeled spans in the original sentence. However, as far as we are aware, no empirical analysis has been conducted on how this approach compares to traditional annotation projection based on word alignment. In this paper, we present an extensive empirical study across 42 languages and three tasks (QA, NER, and Event Extraction) to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of both methods, filling an important gap in the literature. Experimental results show that our optimized version of mark-then-translate, which we call EasyProject, is easily applied to many languages and works surprisingly well, outperforming the more complex word alignment-based methods. We analyze several key factors that affect end-task performance, and show EasyProject works well because it can accurately preserve label span boundaries after translation. We will publicly release all our code and data.

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.

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。

监督机器翻译的绝大多数评估指标，即（i）假设参考翻译的存在，（ii）受到人体得分的培训，或（iii）利用并行数据。这阻碍了其适用于此类监督信号的情况。在这项工作中，我们开发了完全无监督的评估指标。为此，我们利用评估指标，平行语料库开采和MT系统之间的相似性和协同作用。特别是，我们使用无监督的评估指标来开采伪并行数据，我们用来重塑缺陷的基础向量空间（以迭代方式），并诱导无监督的MT系统，然后提供伪引用作为伪参考作为在中的附加组件中的附加组件指标。最后，我们还从伪并行数据中诱导无监督的多语言句子嵌入。我们表明，我们完全无监督的指标是有效的，即，他们在5个评估数据集中的4个击败了受监督的竞争对手。

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR-dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

人类评估一直昂贵，而研究人员则努力信任自动指标。为了解决这个问题，我们建议通过采取预先接受训练的语言模型（PLM）和有限的人类标记分数来定制传统指标。我们首先重新介绍Hlepor度量因子，然后是我们开发的Python版本（移植），这实现了Hlepor度量中的加权参数的自动调整。然后我们介绍了使用Optuna超参数优化框架的定制Hlepor（Cushlepor），以便更好地协议为预先接受训练的语言模型（使用Labse），这是关于Cushlepor的确切MT语言对。我们还在英语 - 德语和汉英语言对基于MQM和PSQM框架的专业人体评估数据进行了优化的曲位波。实验研究表明，Cushlepor可以提升Hlepor对PLMS的更好的表演，如Labse，如Labse的更好的成本，以及更好的人类评估协议，包括MQM和PSQM得分，并且比Bleu（AT \ URL的数据提供更好的表演（HTTPS：// github.com/poethan/cushlepor}）。官方结果表明，我们的提交赢得了三种语言对，包括\ textbf {英语 - 德语}和\ textbf {中文 - 英文}通过cushlepor（lm）和\ textbf {英语 - 俄语}上\ textit {通过hlepor ted}域。

The word alignment task, despite its prominence in the era of statistical machine translation (SMT), is niche and under-explored today. In this two-part tutorial, we argue for the continued relevance for word alignment. The first part provides a historical background to word alignment as a core component of the traditional SMT pipeline. We zero-in on GIZA++, an unsupervised, statistical word aligner with surprising longevity. Jumping forward to the era of neural machine translation (NMT), we show how insights from word alignment inspired the attention mechanism fundamental to present-day NMT. The second part shifts to a survey approach. We cover neural word aligners, showing the slow but steady progress towards surpassing GIZA++ performance. Finally, we cover the present-day applications of word alignment, from cross-lingual annotation projection, to improving translation.

最近提出的基于BERT的评估指标在标准评估基准方面表现良好，但容易受到对抗性攻击的影响，例如与事实错误有关。我们认为这（部分原因）是因为它们是语义相似性的模型。相反，我们根据自然语言推断（NLI）制定评估指标，我们认为这是更合适的建模。我们设计了一个基于偏好的对抗攻击框架，并表明我们的基于NLI的指标比最近基于BERT的指标更强大。在标准基准上，我们的基于NLI的指标的表现优于现有的摘要指标，但在SOTA MT指标下执行。但是，当我们将现有指标与NLI指标相结合时，我们可以获得更高的对抗性鲁棒性（ +20％至 +30％）和较高质量的指标，如标准基准测量（ +5％至 +25％）。

基于变压器的语言模型最近在许多自然语言任务中取得了显着的结果。但是，通常通过利用大量培训数据来实现排行榜的性能，并且很少通过将明确的语言知识编码为神经模型。这使许多人质疑语言学对现代自然语言处理的相关性。在本文中，我介绍了几个案例研究，以说明理论语言学和神经语言模型仍然相互关联。首先，语言模型通过提供一个客观的工具来测量语义距离，这对语言学家很有用，语义距离很难使用传统方法。另一方面，语言理论通过提供框架和数据源来探究我们的语言模型，以了解语言理解的特定方面，从而有助于语言建模研究。本论文贡献了三项研究，探讨了语言模型中语法 - 听觉界面的不同方面。在论文的第一部分中，我将语言模型应用于单词类灵活性的问题。我将Mbert作为语义距离测量的来源，我提供了有利于将单词类灵活性分析为方向过程的证据。在论文的第二部分中，我提出了一种方法来测量语言模型中间层的惊奇方法。我的实验表明，包含形态句法异常的句子触发了语言模型早期的惊喜，而不是语义和常识异常。最后，在论文的第三部分中，我适应了一些心理语言学研究，以表明语言模型包含了论证结构结构的知识。总而言之，我的论文在自然语言处理，语言理论和心理语言学之间建立了新的联系，以为语言模型的解释提供新的观点。