This week, I will have a look at a pre-print that describes an unconventional setup for zero-shot machine translation. The title of the pre-print is Self-Learning for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation and was written by authors from the University of Trento. First of all, I have some doubt about this being really an instance of zero-shot learning (but it is just nitpicking, the paper is interesting regardless of the terminology). In machine learning, zero-shot learning means that a model trained […]

This week, I will have a closer look at a recent pre-print introducing an alternative for parallel data filtering for machine translation training. The title of the pre-print is Gradient-guided Loss Masking for Neural Machine Translation and comes from CMU and Google. Training data cleanness is a surprisingly important factor for machine translation quality. A large part of the data that we use for training comes from crawling the Internet, so there is no quality guarantee. On the other hand, […]

Today, I am going to comment on a paper that systematically explores something that probably many MT users do this is pre-editing (editing the source sentence) to get a better output of an MT that is treated as a black box. The title of the paper is Understanding Pre-Editing for Black-Box Neural Machine Translation by authors from Nagoya University and NICT in Japan and will appear at this year’s EACL. Pre-editing is something I often do when I use automatic […]

If someone told me ten years ago when I was a freshly graduated bachelor of computer science that there would models that would produce multilingual sentence representation allowing zero-shot model transfer, I would have hardly believed such a prediction. If they added that the models would be total black boxes and we would not know why it worked, I would think they were insane. After all, one of the goals of the mathematization of stuff in science is to make […]

This week I am going to revisit the mystery of decoding in neural machine translation for one more time. It has been more than a year ago when Felix Stahlberg and Bill Byrne discovered the very disturbing feature of neural machine translation models – that the most probable target sentence is an empty sequence and this it is a sort of luck that we decode good translations from the models (MT Weekly 20). The paper disproved the narrative of NMT […]

Today, I am going to talk about a recent pre-print on sequence-to-sequence models for deciphering substitution ciphers. Doing such a thing was somewhere at the bottom of my todo list for a few years, I suggested it as a thesis topic to several master students and no one wanted to do it, so I am glad that someone finally did the experiments. The title of the preprint is Can Sequence-to-Sequence Models Crack Substitution Ciphers? and the authors are from the […]

This week I will have a look at the best paper from this year’s COLING that brings an interesting view on inference in NMT models. The title of the paper is “Is MAP Decoding All You Need? The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation” and its authors are from the University of Amsterdam. NMT models learn the conditional probability of the next word in a target sentence given the source sentence and the previous words in the target […]