我们介绍了Prosody-Aware Machine翻译的任务，旨在产生适合配音的翻译。配音是口语句要求将内容传输以及源的韵律结构转移到目标语言中以保留时序信息。实际上，这意味着从源暂停到目标并确保目标语音段具有大致相同的源片段的暂停。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种隐含和明确的建模方法，将韵律信息整合到神经机翻译中。英语 - 德语/法语与自动指标的实验表明，最简单的考虑方法最佳。结果是通过人类评估的翻译和配音视频确认。

自动配音（AD）是翻译应适合给定长度模板的用例之一，以实现源代理和目标语音之间的同步性。对于神经机翻译（MT），在源长度接近源长度（例如，在+ -10％内的字符数内）产生翻译，同时保持质量是一个具有挑战性的任务。控制NMT输出长度为翻译质量的成本，通常用两步的生成N-Best假设的方法来减轻，然后基于长度和质量重新排序它们。这项工作引入了一种自学方法，允许变压器模型直接学习生成与源长度紧密匹配的输出，短等距MT。特别地，我们对等距MT的方法不需要生成多个假设，也不需要任何辅助评分函数。我们向3名语言对（英语 - 法语，意大利语，德语，西班牙语）报告结果，该结果与基于TED谈话数据的公开可用的基准。自动和手动评估都表明，我们的自学习方法与更复杂的等距MT方法进行了执行。

Video dubbing aims to translate the original speech in a film or television program into the speech in a target language, which can be achieved with a cascaded system consisting of speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. To ensure the translated speech to be well aligned with the corresponding video, the length/duration of the translated speech should be as close as possible to that of the original speech, which requires strict length control. Previous works usually control the number of words or characters generated by the machine translation model to be similar to the source sentence, without considering the isochronicity of speech as the speech duration of words/characters in different languages varies. In this paper, we propose a machine translation system tailored for the task of video dubbing, which directly considers the speech duration of each token in translation, to match the length of source and target speech. Specifically, we control the speech length of generated sentence by guiding the prediction of each word with the duration information, including the speech duration of itself as well as how much duration is left for the remaining words. We design experiments on four language directions (German -> English, Spanish -> English, Chinese <-> English), and the results show that the proposed method achieves better length control ability on the generated speech than baseline methods. To make up the lack of real-world datasets, we also construct a real-world test set collected from films to provide comprehensive evaluations on the video dubbing task.

自动副标题是将视听产品的语音自动转化为短文本的任务，换句话说，字幕及其相应的时间戳。生成的字幕需要符合多个空间和时间要求（长度，阅读速度），同时与语音同步并以促进理解的方式进行分割。鉴于其相当大的复杂性，迄今为止，通过分别处理转录，翻译，分割为字幕并预测时间戳的元素来解决自动字幕。在本文中，我们提出了第一个直接自动字幕模型，该模型在单个解决方案中从源语音中生成目标语言字幕及其时间戳。与经过内外数据和外域数据训练的最先进的级联模型的比较表明，我们的系统提供了高质量的字幕，同时在整合性方面也具有竞争力，并具有维护单个模型的所有优势。

Data scarcity is one of the main issues with the end-to-end approach for Speech Translation, as compared to the cascaded one. Although most data resources for Speech Translation are originally document-level, they offer a sentence-level view, which can be directly used during training. But this sentence-level view is single and static, potentially limiting the utility of the data. Our proposed data augmentation method SegAugment challenges this idea and aims to increase data availability by providing multiple alternative sentence-level views of a dataset. Our method heavily relies on an Audio Segmentation system to re-segment the speech of each document, after which we obtain the target text with alignment methods. The Audio Segmentation system can be parameterized with different length constraints, thus giving us access to multiple and diverse sentence-level views for each document. Experiments in MuST-C show consistent gains across 8 language pairs, with an average increase of 2.2 BLEU points, and up to 4.7 BLEU for lower-resource scenarios in mTEDx. Additionally, we find that SegAugment is also applicable to purely sentence-level data, as in CoVoST, and that it enables Speech Translation models to completely close the gap between the gold and automatic segmentation at inference time.

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.

We investigate how humans perform the task of dubbing video content from one language into another, leveraging a novel corpus of 319.57 hours of video from 54 professionally produced titles. This is the first such large-scale study we are aware of. The results challenge a number of assumptions commonly made in both qualitative literature on human dubbing and machine-learning literature on automatic dubbing, arguing for the importance of vocal naturalness and translation quality over commonly emphasized isometric (character length) and lip-sync constraints, and for a more qualified view of the importance of isochronic (timing) constraints. We also find substantial influence of the source-side audio on human dubs through channels other than the words of the translation, pointing to the need for research on ways to preserve speech characteristics, as well as semantic transfer such as emphasis/emotion, in automatic dubbing systems.

Machine Translation (MT) system generally aims at automatic representation of source language into target language retaining the originality of context using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Among various NLP methods, Statistical Machine Translation(SMT). SMT uses probabilistic and statistical techniques to analyze information and conversion. This paper canvasses about the development of bilingual SMT models for translating English to fifteen low-resource Indian Languages (ILs) and vice versa. At the outset, all 15 languages are briefed with a short description related to our experimental need. Further, a detailed analysis of Samanantar and OPUS dataset for model building, along with standard benchmark dataset (Flores-200) for fine-tuning and testing, is done as a part of our experiment. Different preprocessing approaches are proposed in this paper to handle the noise of the dataset. To create the system, MOSES open-source SMT toolkit is explored. Distance reordering is utilized with the aim to understand the rules of grammar and context-dependent adjustments through a phrase reordering categorization framework. In our experiment, the quality of the translation is evaluated using standard metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and RIBES

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.

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。

在本文中，我们介绍了一个高质量的大规模基准数据集，用于英语 - 越南语音翻译，其中有508音频小时，由331k的三胞胎组成（句子长度的音频，英语源笔录句，越南人目标subtitle句子）。我们还使用强基础进行了经验实验，发现传统的“级联”方法仍然优于现代“端到端”方法。据我们所知，这是第一个大规模的英语 - 越南语音翻译研究。我们希望我们的公开数据集和研究都可以作为未来研究和英语语音翻译应用的起点。我们的数据集可从https://github.com/vinairesearch/phost获得

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.

字幕（替代）的语音翻译是通过将符合特定显示指南的字幕划分插入字幕中断，将语音数据自动转化为良好的字幕。与语音翻译（ST）类似，模型训练需要并行数据，其中包括音频输入与其文本翻译配对。然而，在替代方面，还必须用字幕断裂来注释文本。到目前为止，这一要求代表了系统开发的瓶颈，如公开可用的替代公司所证实。为了填补这一空白，我们提出了一种在不干预的情况下将现有的ST Corpora转换为替代资源的方法。我们构建了一个分段模型，该模型通过以多模式的方式利用音频和文本来自动将文本片段分为适当的字幕，从而在零拍摄条件下实现了高分子的质量。对手动和自动分割培训的替代系统的比较实验导致相似的性能，显示了我们方法的有效性。

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in crosslingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 15 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.

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.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to be computationally expensive both in training and in translation inference -sometimes prohibitively so in the case of very large data sets and large models. Several authors have also charged that NMT systems lack robustness, particularly when input sentences contain rare words. These issues have hindered NMT's use in practical deployments and services, where both accuracy and speed are essential. In this work, we present GNMT, Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which attempts to address many of these issues. Our model consists of a deep LSTM network with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers using residual connections as well as attention connections from the decoder network to the encoder. To improve parallelism and therefore decrease training time, our attention mechanism connects the bottom layer of the decoder to the top layer of the encoder. To accelerate the final translation speed, we employ low-precision arithmetic during inference computations. To improve handling of rare words, we divide words into a limited set of common sub-word units ("wordpieces") for both input and output. This method provides a good balance between the flexibility of "character"-delimited models and the efficiency of "word"-delimited models, naturally handles translation of rare words, and ultimately improves the overall accuracy of the system. Our beam search technique employs a length-normalization procedure and uses a coverage penalty, which encourages generation of an output sentence that is most likely to cover all the words in the source sentence. To directly optimize the translation BLEU scores, we consider refining the models by using reinforcement learning, but we found that the improvement in the BLEU scores did not reflect in the human evaluation. On the WMT'14 English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state-of-the-art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system.

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。

这项工作适用于最低贝叶斯风险（MBR）解码，以优化翻译质量的各种自动化指标。机器翻译中的自动指标最近取得了巨大的进步。特别是，在人类评级（例如BLEurt，或Comet）上微调，在与人类判断的相关性方面是优于表面度量的微调。我们的实验表明，神经翻译模型与神经基于基于神经参考度量，BLEURT的组合导致自动和人类评估的显着改善。通过与经典光束搜索输出不同的翻译获得该改进：这些翻译的可能性较低，并且较少受到Bleu等表面度量的青睐。

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。

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.