Papers by Marcello Federico
A Comparison of Transformer and Recurrent Neural Networks on Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that multilingual NMT models can handle more than one translation direction with a single system. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual neural machine translation model that can handle more than one translation direction with a single system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in low-resource settings against bilingual systems. |
A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-way parallel, machine generated content dominates the translations in lower resource languages . a limited investigation suggests this selection bias is the result of low quality content generated in English and translated into many lower resource language via MT. |
| Approach: | They show that multi-way parallel, machine generated content dominates translations in many languages . they also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages. |
| Outcome: | The results suggest that the low quality of multi-way translations on the web was likely created using machine translation. |
MEMERAG: A Multilingual End-to-End Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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María Andrea Cruz Blandón, Jayasimha Talur, Bruno Charron, Dong Liu, Saab Mansour, Marcello Federico
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on English or use translated data, which fails to capture cultural nuances. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual end-to-end Meta-Evaluation RAG benchmark MEMERAG to assess accuracy and faithfulness of RAG systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can identify improvements offered by advanced prompting techniques and LLMs. |
Multilingual Self-Taught Faithfulness Evaluators (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing faithfulness evaluation approaches are mostly English-focused and require expensive human-labeled training data for fine-tuning specialized models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns exclusively from synthetic multilingual data while leveraging cross-lingual transfer learning to improve an LLM's general language capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it improves over existing baselines, including state-of-the-art English evaluators and machine translation-based approaches. |
End-to-End Single-Channel Speaker-Turn Aware Conversational Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Juan Pablo Zuluaga-Gomez, Zhaocheng Huang, Xing Niu, Rohit Paturi, Sundararajan Srinivasan, Prashant Mathur, Brian Thompson, Marcello Federico
| Challenge: | Conventional speech-to-text translation systems are trained on single-speaker utterances, but they may not be applicable to real-life scenarios where the audio contains conversations by multiple speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a speaker-turn-aware conversational speech translation model that integrates automatic speech recognition, speech translation and speaker turn detection using special tokens in a serialized labeling format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the reference systems on the multi-speaker condition while attaining comparable performance on the single-speakspeaker conditions. |
Towards Modeling the Style of Translators in Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a key ingredient of neural machine translation is the use of large datasets with different but consistent translation styles . however, the models do not capture the variety of translators' styles from the data . a recent study shows that style-augmented models can capture the style variations of translator . |
| Approach: | They propose to augment a neural machine translation model with translator information . they use TED talk datasets to model and control translator-related stylistic variations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models capture the style variations of translators and generate translations with different styles on new data. |
Compositional Representation of Morphologically-Rich Input for Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are typically trained with fixed-size input and output vocabularies, which creates a bottleneck on their accuracy and generalization capability. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace the source-language embedding layer of NMT with a bi-directional recurrent neural network that generates compositional representations of the input at any desired level of granularity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in a low-resource setting with five languages . the proposed approach consistently outperformed existing methods with a single word representation . |
Improving Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation by Controlling Source and Fuzzy-Match Interactions (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | a general-domain model has access to customer or domain specific parallel data at inference time, but not during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot adaptation approach where a general-domain model has access to customer or domain specific parallel data at inference time, but not during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing architectures in two language pairs . it consistently improves BLEU across language pair, domain, and number k of fuzzy matches . |
Training Neural Machine Translation to Apply Terminology Constraints (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate domain terminology into neural machine translation (NMT) are brittle when tested in real-world situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject custom terminology into neural machine translation at run time by using the target side of terminology entries whose source side match the input as decoding-time constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is faster than state-of-the-art decoding and more efficient than constraint-free decoding. |
CoCoA-MT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Contrastive Controlled MT with Application to Formality (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Specific problems arise when translating from English into languages with formality markers, such as “Are you sure?” . Using wrong or inconsistent tone may be perceived as inappropriate or jarring for users of certain cultures and demographics. |
| Approach: | They propose to train formality-controlled models by fine-tuning on labeled contrastive data and a metric to evaluate them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high accuracy (82% in-domain and 73% out-of-domain) while maintaining overall quality. |
On the Importance of Word Boundaries in Character-level Neural Machine Translation (D19-56)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models typically use a fixed-size lexical vocabulary . subword segmentation methods rely on statistical heuristics that lack any linguistic notion . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical decoding architecture for character-level NMT using subwords . they propose fewer parameters and a more efficient approach to perform translation at the level of words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reach higher translation accuracy than the subword-level model with fewer parameters while maintaining longer-distance contextual and grammatical dependencies. |