Papers by Baosong Yang
Leveraging Local and Global Patterns for Self-Attention Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate local and global information into self-attention networks have been criticized for overlooking neighboring information. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid attention mechanism to leverage local and global information . they use a gating scalar to integrate both sources of information based on local contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on translation tasks and shows that the two types of contexts are complementary. |
MoNMT: Modularly Leveraging Monolingual and Bilingual Knowledge for Neural Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-domain translation tasks only use monolingual data, whereas bilingual data is indispensable for improving the models. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular strategy that facilitates the cooperation of monolingual and bilingual knowledge in translation tasks by avoiding catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits superior generalization and robustness over the conventional approach. |
Fantastic Expressions and Where to Find Them: Chinese Simile Generation with Multiple Constraints (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing attempts to generate similes as context-free tasks are not suitable for simile generation . however, simile generated under such settings might be undesirable, we argue . |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate a simile with multiple simile elements . they propose to use a vehicle retrieval module to obtain the explicable comparison . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate a simile with multiple simile elements, e.g., context and vehicle. |
Bridging Subword Gaps in Pretrain-Finetune Paradigm for Natural Language Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to pretrain language models are limited by one-size-fits-all vocabulary . embeddings of mismatch tokens can be efficiently initialized in downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend pretrain-finetune pipeline with an embedding transfer step . plug-and-play embeddable generator is introduced to generate any input token . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach allows for more efficient and better performed NLG models. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
NOVA-63: Native Omni-lingual Versatile Assessments of 63 Disciplines (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual benchmarks show severe drawbacks, such as overly translated content, the absence of difficulty control, and disciplinary imbalance, making the benchmarking process unreliable and showing low convincingness. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark that integrates LLM-assisted formatting, expert quality verification, and multi-level difficulty screening to provide a comprehensive, difficult multilingual assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 93,536 questions sourced from native speakers across 14 languages and 63 academic disciplines. |
Modeling Localness for Self-Attention Networks (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model locality for self-attention networks have shown great value for capturing global dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to model localness for self-attention networks to capture local context . they cast localness modeling as a learnable Gaussian bias, which indicates the central and scope of the local region to be paid more attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the ability to capture local context and improves accuracy. |
Modeling Recurrence for Transformer (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that the lack of recurrence modeling hinders the development of a translation model. |
| Approach: | They propose to model recurrence for Transformer with an additional recurrent encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the deep model on EnglishGerman and ChineseEnglish translation tasks. |
A Data-Efficient Path to Multilingual LLMs: Language Expansion via Post-training PARAM𝛥 Integration into Upcycled MoE (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Zhou, Tianhao Li, Zhijun Wang, Shuaijie She, Linjuan Wu, Hao-Ran Wei, Baosong Yang, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and require extensive Continued Pre-Training and data-intensive alignment to expand. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which upcycles a dense model into a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, allocating different experts to different languages. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model upcycles a dense model into a Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) architecture, allocating different experts to different languages. |
Attention Mechanism with Energy-Friendly Operations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that attention mechanism can be improved from the energy consumption aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace multiplications with either selective operations or additions to reduce energy consumption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitable accuracy while saving 99% and 66% energy during alignment calculation and the whole attention procedure. |
Meta-Reasoning: Semantics-Symbol Deconstruction for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on syntactically mapping natural languages to complete formal languages like Python and SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose to deconstruct reasoning-independent semantic information into generic symbolic representations, thereby efficiently capturing more generalized reasoning knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves in-context reasoning accuracy, learning efficiency, out-of-domain generalization, and output stability compared to the Chain-of thought technique. |
Domain Transfer based Data Augmentation for Neural Query Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Query translation (QT) is a critical factor in successful cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). |
| Approach: | They propose to extend query translation (QT) with a domain transfer procedure to revise synthetic candidates to search-aware examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and domain transfer methods on translation quality and retrieval accuracy. |
WR-One2Set: Towards Well-Calibrated Keyphrase Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that keyphrase generation has serious calibration errors . ONE2SET generates short phrases summarizing an input document . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for keyphrase generation that generates short phrases summarizing an input document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model over-estimates tokens and makes it well-calibrated on common datasets. |
Assessing the Ability of Self-Attention Networks to Learn Word Order (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have attributed SAN to being weak at learning positional information for sequence modeling due to lack of recurrence structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a word reordering detection task to quantify how well word order information is learned by SAN and RNN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task quantifies how well word order information learned by SAN and RNN is learned. |
Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Jie Fu, Jian Lan, Mei Li, Baosong Yang, Jun Xie, Yidan Zhang, Dezhong Peng, Jiancheng Lv
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised paraphrase generation methods require large-scale, manually annotated paraphrase datasets, which are labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pseudo-data construction method that generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
Large Language Model for Multi-Domain Translation: Benchmarking and Domain CoT Fine-tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Achieving consistent high-quality machine translation across diverse domains remains a challenge due to limited and imbalanced parallel training data available in various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain Chain of Thought technique that uses the multi-domain intelligence of LLMs to improve translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements in translation accuracy and domain robustness over traditional fine-tuning on a small dataset of four domains. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
Dangling-Aware Entity Alignment with Mixed High-Order Proximities (2022.findings-naacl)
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Juncheng Liu, Zequn Sun, Bryan Hooi, Yiwei Wang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Xiaokui Xiao, Muhao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangling-aware entity alignment are underexplored but important problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses high-order proximities to detect dangling entities and align matchable entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects dangling entities and aligns matchable entities better than existing methods. |
Should We Rely on Entity Mentions for Relation Extraction? Debiasing Relation Extraction with Counterfactual Analysis (2022.naacl-main)
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Yiwei Wang, Muhao Chen, Wenxuan Zhou, Yujun Cai, Yuxuan Liang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Juncheng Liu, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on entity information for sentence-level relation extraction (RE) but this can leak superficial and spurious clues of relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entity mentions to extract relations from textual context . they use a causal graph to model dependencies between variables in RE models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields significant gains on both effectiveness and generalization for RE. |
CultureSynth: A Hierarchical Taxonomy-Guided and Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Cultural Question-Answer Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Cultural competence is defined as the ability to understand and adapt to multicultural contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a hierarchical multilingual taxonomy and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation to synthesize culturally relevant question-answer pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework contains a hierarchical multilingual taxonomy covering 12 primary and 130 secondary topics and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based methodology leveraging factual knowledge to synthesize culturally relevant question-answer pairs. |
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese (2026.tacl-1)
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Yikang Liu, Yeting Shen, Hongao Zhu, Lilong Xu, Zhiheng Qian, Siyuan Song, Kejia Zhang, Jialong Tang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Rui Wang, Hai Hu
| Challenge: | Using sub-linear length normalized log-probabilities (SLLN-LP), we find unequal lengths of sentences in minimal pairs difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ZhoBLiMP as a linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese language models to mitigate biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric mitigates biases in Chinese language models with over 100 paradigms . Anaphor, Quantifiers, and Ellipsis are difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters . |
Unsupervised Preference-Aware Language Identification (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies do not consider inter-personal variations due to the lack of user annotated training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user preferences to identify ambiguous texts in multilingual applications without user annotated training data to build a preference-aware LID model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing LID systems on handling ambiguous texts. |
GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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Kexin Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Baosong Yang, Haibo Zhang, Xue Zhao, Wenqing Yao, Boxing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework that integrates lexical and syntactical conditions into a text sequence and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can combine lexical and syntactical conditions and improve paraphrase generation. |
Unveiling Language-Specific Features in Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoders (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive abilities in various domains such as text generation, instruction following, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decompose the activations of Large Language Models into a sparse linear combination of SAE features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that some features are strongly related to specific languages, while others are unaffected by ablating them. |
P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yidan Zhang, Yu Wan, Boyi Deng, Baosong Yang, Hao-Ran Wei, Fei Huang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models showcase varied multilingual capabilities across tasks . previous assessments focused on fundamental natural language processing (NLP) or isolated capability-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual multitask benchmark to assess multilingual capabilities . they use a large-scale benchmark covering fundamental and capability-specialized datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares models and tasks across languages and tasks and examines knowledge transfer from English to other languages. |
Information Aggregation for Multi-Head Attention with Routing-by-Agreement (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on extracting informative or distinct partial-representations from different subspaces, while few studies have paid attention to the aggregation of the extracted partial-Representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a routing-by-agreement algorithm to improve multi-head attention by iteratively updating the proportion of how much a part should be assigned to a whole based on agreement between parts and wholes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves the information aggregation for multi-head attention over the standard linear transformation on linguistic probing and machine translation tasks. |
Multi-Head Attention with Disagreement Regularization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encourage diversity among multi-head attention are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a disagreement regularization term to encourage diversity among attention heads . they validated their approach on EnglishGerman and ChineseEnglish translation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation performance across language pairs on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks. |
Self-Paced Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that the training of neural machine translation (NMT) rely on the quality of artificial schedule drawn up with the handcrafted features, e.g. sentence length or word rarity. |
| Approach: | They propose to train NMT model using a self-paced learning approach that allows it to quantify the learning confidence over training examples and flexibly govern its learning via regulating the loss in each iteration step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and those trained with human-designed curricula on translation quality and convergence speed. |
Tailor: A Soft-Prompt-Based Approach to Attribute-Based Controlled Text Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on generating sentences satisfying pre-specified attributes such as topic and sentiment, yet suffers from increases in storage and inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a pre-trained continuous vector to generate a fixed pre-trainable language model to satisfy a specified attribute. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve improvements on eleven attribute-specific generation tasks with 0.08% extra training parameters. |
UniTE: Unified Translation Evaluation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods for evaluation of translation quality are focused on one task, ignoring commonalities . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework engaged with abilities to handle all three evaluation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can universally surpass state-of-the-art or winner methods across tasks. |
Bridging the Domain Gaps in Context Representations for k-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Zhiwei Cao, Baosong Yang, Huan Lin, Suhang Wu, Xiangpeng Wei, Dayiheng Liu, Jun Xie, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve k-Nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) are based on the ability to non-parametrically adapt to new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to boost the datastore retrieval of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the retrieval and translation quality of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
Efficient k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for non-parametric domain adaptation lack kNN retrieval at each timestep, leading to substantial time overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a kNN-MT-based model that uses a domain-specific translation knowledge store to interpolate the prediction distribution of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly extends kNN-MT with dynamic retrieval on widely-used datasets. |
Multi-Hop Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to document-level neural machine translation (NMT) simply introduce the representations of context sentences without explicitly characterizing the inter-sentence reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-hop Transformer which explicitly models the human-like draft-editing and reasoning process by attending to multiple antecedent sentences iteratively. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four widely used document translation tasks show that the proposed model significantly improves document-level translation performance and tackles discourse phenomena such as coreference error and the problem of polysemy. |
MMNMT: Modularizing Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Flexibly Assembled MoE and Dense Blocks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based sparse architectures are prone to overfitting on low-resource language translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a modularized MNMT framework that flexibly assembles dense and MoE-based sparse modules to achieve the best of both worlds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on low-resource language translation and zero-shot translation on benchmark datasets. |
Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference: Multi-Candidate Optimization for Diverse Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing diverse NMT models lack translation diversity due to a discrepancy between training and inference . despite the success of diverse NTM, there is still a lack of translation diversity . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-candidate optimization framework for diverse NMT to deal with this defect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is transparent to basic diverse NMT models, and universally makes better trade-off between diversity and quality. |
Translationese-index: Using Likelihood Ratios for Graded and Generalizable Measurement of Translationese (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yikang Liu, Wanyang Zhang, Yiming Wang, Jialong Tang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Fei Huang, Rui Wang, Hai Hu
| Challenge: | Translationese is a linguistic property that is often introduced in the translation process that is different from those of original texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use synthesized translations and translations in the wild to evaluate T-index's generalizability in cross-domain settings and its validity against human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure can generalize to unseen genres, authors, and language pairs. |
Dynamic Voting for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Xingzhang Ren, Baosong Yang, Jun Xie, Yidan Zhang, Dezhong Peng, Jiancheng Lv
| Challenge: | Multi-path voting methods generate multiple reasoning paths for each problem, causing factual errors and illusion generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-path voting technique that effectively reduces the number of reasoning paths during multi-path voting while preserving accuracies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Self-consistency using 24.7% of the number of paths on the LetterConcat task. |
Competency-Aware Neural Machine Translation: Can Machine Translation Know its Own Translation Quality? (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are often criticized for failures that happen without competency awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends conventional NMT with a self-estimator to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on translation tasks intact and on quality estimation tasks better than existing methods. |
Enhancing Machine Translation with Self-Supervised Preference Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to constructing preference data rely on human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which efficiently constructs translation preference data for iterative training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation preference data on large language models. |
Enhancing LLM Language Adaption through Cross-lingual In-Context Pre-training (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing cross-lingual transfer are limited by parallel resources and lack linguistic and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual in-context pre-training approach that leverages semantically related bilingual Wikipedia documents to enhance cross-linguistic transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves multilingual performance on three models across six target languages. |
Uncertainty-Aware Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) has proven to be facilitated by curriculum learning which presents examples in an easy-to-hard order at different training stages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an uncertainty-aware curriculum learning approach to assess data difficulty and model competence to provide examples in an easy-to-hard order at different training stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline and related methods on translation quality and convergence speed. |
Convolutional Self-Attention Networks (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of self-attention networks lack the ability to capture dependencies regardless of distance and can be enhanced with multi-head attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a convolutional self-attention network which can be enhanced by multi-head attention by allowing the model to attend to information from different representation subspaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on improving locality of SANs on different language pairs and model settings. |
From English to Second Language Mastery: Enhancing LLMs with Cross-Lingual Continued Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire strong language skills through extensive pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instructionresponse pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which leverages translation-based parallel instruction data to enhance cross-lingual adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Llama-2-7B across five languages against three objective benchmarks and an LLM-as-a-judge benchmark. |
Towards User-Driven Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a good translation should implicitly mirror user traits rather than translate the original content semantically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures user traits from historical inputs . they propose 'user-driven' NMT to model user behavior under a zero-shot learning fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can capture user traits from historical inputs under zero-shot learning fashion. |
Locate-and-Focus: Enhancing Terminology Translation in Speech Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Suhang Wu, Jialong Tang, Chengyi Yang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Junhui Li, Junfeng Yao, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods for terminology translation struggle with interference from irrelevant noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a Locate-and-Focus method that locates terminologies within utterances to construct translation knowledge by minimizing irrelevant information for ST models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method locates terminologies within utterances and enhances the success rate of terminology translation while maintaining robust general translation performance. |