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 […]