Multilinguality and Language Technology

We are a group at the MLT-Lab at DFKI focusing on neural machine translation and multilingual applications.

Machine translation is the automated process of converting input in one language into another one. We work in both text and sign language translation using deep learning techniques. Besides developing generic MT systems, we specialize machine translation to settings such as low-resourced languages, highly multilingual environments or document and dialog translation.

We participate in projects from the D&R and TR groups where we contribute with machine translation and multilingual technologies:

• Farhad Akhbardeh, Arkady Arkhangorodsky, Magdalena Biesialska, Ondrej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Vishrav Chaudhary, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Cristina España-Bonet, Angela Fan, Christian Federmann, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Barry Haddow, Leonie Harter, Kenneth Heafield, Christopher Homan, Matthias Huck, Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire, Jungo Kasai, Daniel Khashabi, Kevin Knight, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Nicholas Lourie, Christof Monz, Makoto Morishita, Masaaki Nagata, Ajay Nagesh, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri, Santanu Pal, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Marco Turchi, Valentin Vydrin and Marcos Zampier. Findings of the 2021 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT21). In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 1-93, Punta Cana (online), November 2021.
• Daria Pylypenko, Kawabena Amponsah-Kaakyire, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Josef van Genabith, and Cristina España-Bonet (2021) Comparing Feature-Engineering and Feature-Learning Approaches for Multilingual Translationese Classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021), Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, pages 8596–8611.
• Jörg Steffen and Josef van Genabith. (2021) TransIns: Document Translation with Markup Reinsertion. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations (EMNLP 2021), Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 28–34.
• Fabrizio Nunnari, Cristina España-Bonet and Eleftherios Avramidis. A Data Augmentation Approach for Sign-language-to-text Translation In-the-wild (BEST POSTER AWARD). Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK2021), Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Vol. 93, pages 36:1-36:8, September 2021.
• Hongfei Xu, Qiuhui Liu, Josef van Genabith, Deyi Xiong, and Jingyi Zhang. Multi-Head Highly Parallelized LSTM Decoder for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021), Bangkok, Thailand, pages 273–282.
• Hongfei Xu, Qiuhui Liu, Josef van Genabith, and Deyi Xiong. Modeling Task-Aware MIMO Cardinality for Efficient Multilingual Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021), Bangkok, Thailand, pages 361– 367.
• Jingyi Zhang and Josef van Genabith. A Bidirectional Transformer Based Alignment Model for Unsupervised Word Alignment. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021), Bangkok, Thailand, pages 283–292.
• Dana Ruiter, Dietrich Klakow, Josef van Genabith, Cristina España-Bonet. Integrating Unsupervised Data Generation into Self-Supervised Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages
• The 18th biennial conference of the International Association of Machine Translation, MT Summit XVIII, Vol 1: MT Research Track, pages 76-91, August 16-20, Virtual, 2021.
• Dana Ruiter, Cristina España-Bonet, Josef van Genabith. Self-Induced Curriculum Learning in Self-Supervised Neural Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2020), November 2020.
• Jingyi Zhang, Josef van Genabith. Translation Quality Estimation by Jointly Learning to Score and Rank. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2020), November 2020.
• Hongfei Xu, Josef van Genabith, Deyi Xiong, Qiuhui Liu. Dynamically Adjusting Transformer Batch Size by Monitoring Gradient Direction Change.  In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2020) ACL 2020 July 5-10 virtual, Pages 3519-3524, 7/2020.  
• Hongfei Xu, Josef van Genabith, Deyi Xiong, Quihui Liu, Jingyi Zhang. Learning Source Phrase Representations for Neural Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2020) ACL 2020 July 5-10 virtual, Pages 386-396, 7/2020.
• Hongfei Xu, Qiuhui Liu,Josef van Genabith, Deyi Xiong, Jingyi Zhang. Lipschitz Constrained Parameter Initialization for Deep Transformers. In: Proceedings of the 58th AnnualMeeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2020) ACL 2020 July 5-10 virtual, Pages 397-402, 7/2020.
• Jesujoba O. Alabi, Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire, David I. Adelani, Cristina España-Bonet. Massive vs. Curated Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages: the Case of Yorùbá and Twi. In: 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC). International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2020) May 12-17 Marseille France European Language Resources Association (ELRA) París 2020.
• Marta R. Costa-jussà, Cristina España-Bonet, Pascale Fung, Noah A. Smith. Multilingual and Interlingual Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing: A Brief Introduction. In: Computational Linguistics (CL) Special Issue: Multilingual and Interlingual Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing Pages 1-8 MIT Press Cambridge, MA, USA 2020.
• Hongfei Xu, Deyi Xiong, Josef van Genabith, Qiuhui Liu. Efficient Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Layer-Wise Weighting and Input-Aware Gating. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2020) 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-PRICAI 2020 January 5-10 Virtual, Pages 3933-3940, 7/2020.