Papers by Ahmed El-Kishky
Facebook AI’s WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission (D19-52)
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Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matthew Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
| Challenge: | Using back-translation, we can improve generalization by using noisy channel re-ranking and ensembling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BPE-based transformer models to leverage monolingual data to improve generalization and use noisy channel re-ranking and ensembling to improve results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on the baseline system trained exclusively on the provided small parallel dataset, and the human evaluation and BLEU score are higher. |
CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. |
| Approach: | They exploit the signals embedded in URLs to label web documents at scale with an average precision of 94.5% across different language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can label documents at 94.5% across languages with high precision . the proposed method is useful for low-resource languages with limited resources . |
Classification-based Quality Estimation: Small and Efficient Models for Real-world Applications (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence-level Quality estimation (QE) is traditionally a regression task . but large multilingual contextualized language models are expensive and infeasible for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They evaluate several model compression techniques for QE and find they are inefficient . they argue that a full model parameterization is required to achieve SoTA results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are poorly expressive in a regression task, the authors argue . they show that reframing QE as a classification problem and evaluating models would improve their performance in real-world applications. |
An Exploratory Study on Multilingual Quality Estimation (2020.aacl-main)
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Shuo Sun, Marina Fomicheva, Frédéric Blain, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Francisco Guzmán, Lucia Specia
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to predict the quality of machine translation use language-specific models, but they lack labelled data for each language pair. |
| Approach: | They propose to use scores from translation models to estimate quality of machine translations by predicting the quality of a translation at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform single-language models in less balanced quality label distributions and low-resource settings. |
Massively Multilingual Document Alignment with Cross-lingual Sentence-Mover’s Distance (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised scoring function that leverages cross-lingual sentence embeddings to compute the semantic distance between documents in different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scoring function outperforms baseline methods on high-resource language pairs, 15% on mid-resourced language pairs and 22% on low-resourcing language pairs. |
Adapting High-resource NMT Models to Translate Low-resource Related Languages without Parallel Data (2021.acl-long)
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Wei-Jen Ko, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Vishrav Chaudhary, Naman Goyal, Francisco Guzmán, Pascale Fung, Philipp Koehn, Mona Diab
| Challenge: | linguistic overlap between low-resource languages and high-resourced languages is a major obstacle for training high-quality machine translation systems. |
| Approach: | They exploit linguistic overlap to facilitate translation to and from low-resource languages . they use monolingual data and parallel data in related high-resourced languages based on their method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves translation into low-resource language compared to baselines on 7 languages from three different language families. |
Putting words into the system’s mouth: A targeted attack on neural machine translation using monolingual data poisoning (2021.findings-acl)
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Jun Wang, Chang Xu, Francisco Guzmán, Ahmed El-Kishky, Yuqing Tang, Benjamin Rubinstein, Trevor Cohn
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems are known to be vulnerable to adversarial test inputs, however, they are also vulnerable to training attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a poisoning attack in which a malicious adversary inserts a small poisoned sample of monolingual text into a training set of a system trained using back-translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is based on two methods that can be used to craft poisoned examples. |
Simple Temporal Adaptation to Changing Label Sets: Hashtag Prediction via Dense KNN (2023.emnlp-main)
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Niloofar Mireshghallah, Nikolai Vogler, Junxian He, Omar Florez, Ahmed El-Kishky, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt to temporal change of user-generated social media data are stale without retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric dense retrieval technique to adapt to temporal change . they use a Twitter dataset to study temporal distribution shift in tweet-hashtag prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over the best static parametric baseline on a year-long Twitter dataset while avoiding costly re-training. |
XLEnt: Mining a Large Cross-lingual Entity Dataset with Lexical-Semantic-Phonetic Word Alignment (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate named entity lexica for lower-resource languages are under performing. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to automatically mine cross-lingual named-entity lexica from mined web data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms baselines at extracting cross-lingual entity pairs and mines 164 million entity pairs from 120 different languages aligned with English. |
Quality Estimation without Human-labeled Data (2021.eacl-main)
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Yi-Lin Tuan, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzmán, Lucia Specia
| Challenge: | Quality estimation aims to measure the quality of translated content without access to a reference translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses synthetic training data to train supervised quality estimation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained on human-annotated data for sentence and word-level prediction. |
As Easy as 1, 2, 3: Behavioural Testing of NMT Systems for Numerical Translation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Mistranslated numbers can cause financial loss or medical misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assess the robustness of neural machine translation systems to numerical text via behavioural testing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method systematically assesses four fundamental capabilities of neural machine translation systems in translation numbers by virtue of a variety of test cases. |