Papers by Rachel Bawden
Explicit Learning and the LLM in Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are examining whether large language models can learn to translate a "new" language using grammar books. |
| Approach: | They examine an LLM's ability to learn new languages using grammar books . authors suggest alternative fine-tuning strategies to improve explicit learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn low-resource languages described in grammar books but lacking extensive corpora. |
Tree of Problems: Improving structured problem solving with compositionality (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across multipletasks through in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree of Problems (ToP) that is a simpler version of Tree of Thoughts (toT) they propose 'in-context learning' is the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform a task with the help of a few demonstrations within their context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms ToT and GoT and performs better on complex reasoning tasks. |
Towards Zero-Shot Multimodal Machine Translation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Current multimodal machine translation systems rely on fully supervised data, which is costly to collect and prevents extension of MMT to language pairs with no such data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to bypass the need for fully supervised data to train MMT systems . they adapt a strong text-only machine translation model to a visually conditioned language model and a divergence test set to evaluate how well models use images to disambiguate translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generalize to languages with no fully supervised training data. |
Document Sub-structure in Neural Machine Translation (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to machine translation (MT) translate sentences in isolation, disregarding context they appear in, or model context at the level of the full document. |
| Approach: | They propose to include information about the topic of the section within which each sentence is found in a document that is not homogeneous . they use a cache-based model to model the context of the document, instead of translating sentences in isolation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates information about the topic of the section within which each sentence is found into a neural model. |
In-Context Example Selection via Similarity Search Improves Low-Resource Machine Translation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that in-context examples for machine translation are beneficial for high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-context examples for machine translation (MT) they argue that similarity-based selection can improve MT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves machine translation (MT) and low-resource languages. |
From FreEM to D’AlemBERT: a Large Corpus and a Language Model for Early Modern French (2022.lrec-1)
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Simon Gabay, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Alexandre Bartz, Alix Chagué, Rachel Bawden, Philippe Gambette, Benoît Sagot
| Challenge: | Anguage models for historical states of language are becoming more complex to process and more scarce in the corpora available. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a contextualised language model to analyse historical states of language in French. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a corpus of historical texts and is evaluated with an NLP task. |
mOSCAR: A Large-scale Multilingual and Multimodal Document-level Corpus (2025.findings-acl)
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Matthieu Futeral, Armel Randy Zebaze, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Julien Abadji, Rémi Lacroix, Cordelia Schmid, Rachel Bawden, Benoît Sagot
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal large language models can learn from text-image data. |
| Approach: | They propose to train multimodal large language models on large amounts of text-image data . they also show a boost in few-shot learning performance across various multilingual tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is not public and is only in English . it is the first large-scale multilingual and multimodal document corpus crawled from the web. |
TopXGen: Topic-Diverse Parallel Data Generation for Low-Resource Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning and similarity search have been shown to improve LLMs' performance in machine translation, but they lag behind when dealing with low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses an LLM to generate topic-specific target-side data in the LRL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach boosts LLM translation performance during in-context learning and fine-tuning. |
Automatic Normalisation of Early Modern French (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Spelling normalisation is a useful step in the study and analysis of historical language texts, whether it is manual analysis by experts or automated analysis using downstream natural language processing (NLP) tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for the normalisation of Early Modern French into contemporary French using ABA, alignment-based approach and MT-approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method homogenises the variable spelling in historical documents and reduces the gap between the historical state of the language and the contemporary state. |
Gaperon: A Peppered English-French Generative Language Model Suite (2026.findings-acl)
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Nathan Godey, Wissam Antoun, Rian Touchent, Rachel Bawden, Éric Villemonte de la Clergerie, Benoît Sagot, Djamé Seddah
| Challenge: | Standardized benchmarks have become the dominant metric for measuring progress in large language models, but their validity is compromised by data contamination and unclear relationship between benchmark scores and genuine language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use GAPERON to investigate evaluation dynamics under realistic training conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models that excel on benchmarks in qualitative text generation and vice versa. |
AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languages (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Israel Abebe Azime, Miaoran Zhang, Cristina España-Bonet, Rachel Bawden, Dawei Zhu, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Clement Oyeleke Odoje, Idris Akinade, Iffat Maab, Davis David, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Neo Putini, David O. Ademuyiwa, Andrew Caines, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | AFRIDOC-MT is a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering five languages . AFRITIC-MT models perform better on sentences than general-purpose LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 334 health and 271 information technology news documents . it shows that NLLB-200 achieves the best average performance among standard models . |
A Study in Improving BLEU Reference Coverage with Diverse Automatic Paraphrasing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using neural paraphrasing techniques, we investigate whether automatically generating additional *diverse* references can provide better coverage of the space of valid translations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use neural paraphrasing techniques to generate additional references that provide better coverage of the space of valid translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach beats human paraphrases in the BLEU evaluation. |
Making Sentence Embeddings Robust to User-Generated Content (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | NLP models struggle on user-generated content (UGC) due to high lexical variance and deviating from the standard texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence embedding model that embeds non-standard sentences and their standard counterparts close to each other in the embeddable space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LASER on key typos and social media abbreviations while outperforming LASER in other tasks. |
Few-shot learning through contextual data augmentation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Various strategies have been explored to learn from a journalist's post-edits . state-of-the-art APE systems require large numbers of post- edits for training . |
| Approach: | They propose to teach a pre-trained machine translation model to translate previously unseen words accurately . they extend a data augmentation approach to create training examples with similar contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves accuracy on the scale of one to five examples with only 1 to 5 examples. |
Topic-guided Example Selection for Domain Adaptation in LLM-based Machine Translation (2024.eacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Current machine translation (MT) systems perform well in domains on which they were trained, but adaptation to unseen domains remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to adapt to unseen domains by in-context example selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multilingual out-of-domain tests, though it does not match performance with strong baselines for the in-language setting. |
Can Cognate Prediction Be Modelled as a Low-Resource Machine Translation Task? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on cognate prediction based on similarities of two languages has not studied their differences or optimized architectural choices. |
| Approach: | They compare statistical and neural MT architectures to a bilingual setup to test their hypothesis . they use monolingual pretraining, backtranslation and multilinguality to test the hypothesis based on the results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures can be used to generate cognates in a given language . the proposed architecture can be employed with monolingual pretraining, backtranslation and multilinguality . |
Compositional Translation: A Novel LLM-based Approach for Low-resource Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | generative large language models (LLMs) can perform in-context learning . machine translation (MT) has been shown to benefit from in-constitu examples . |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional translation paradigm that replaces naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm replaces naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. |
When Your Cousin Has the Right Connections: Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Related Data-Imbalanced Languages (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction depend on good quality static or contextual embeddings for both languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction between a related LRL and a high-resource language that only requires inference on a masked language model of the HRL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on low-resource languages with 5M tokens against Hindi . it is compared with existing methods on (mid-resourced) Marathi and Nepali . |
Complex Labelling and Similarity Prediction in Legal Texts: Automatic Analysis of France’s Court of Cassation Rulings (2022.lrec-1)
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Thibault Charmet, Inès Cherichi, Matthieu Allain, Urszula Czerwinska, Amaury Fouret, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden
| Challenge: | Detecting divergences in the applications of the law is an important task . divergencies can occur at three levels: within the Cour de Cassation, between trial courts and, more rarely, between a trial court and the Cour of Cassion. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide automatic tools to facilitate the search for similar rulings . they provide automatic keyword sequence generation models and predict keyword sequences based on available texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tools improve correlations between the obtained similarities and human judgments of similarity. |
Tackling Ambiguity with Images: Improved Multimodal Machine Translation and Contrastive Evaluation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in multimodal machine translation (MT) has shown that ambiguity can be resolved using accompanying context such as images. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal machine translation approach based on a strong text-only MT model and a novel guided self-attention mechanism to train it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on EnglishFrench, EnglishGerman and EnglishCzech benchmarks and is freely available. |
Evaluating Discourse Phenomena in Neural Machine Translation (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine translation have been evaluated with standard automatic metrics, but are poorly adapted to evaluating discourse phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BLEU to train multi-encoder NMT models on English subtitles to test their ability to exploit previous source and target sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-encoder models give limited improvements on the coreference and coherence tests. |