Papers with translation task
Cross Attention Augmented Transducer Networks for Simultaneous Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simultaneous translation are limited by monotonic constraint . a novel architecture for simultaneous translation is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross attention-augmented transducer for simultaneous translation that optimizes both policies and translation models by expanding target sequences with blank symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves better latency-quality trade-offs than state-of-the-art approaches. |
English to Hindi Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation and Hindi Image Captioning (D19-52)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal translation is an emerging task of the MT community, where visual features of image combine with textual features of parallel source-target text to translate sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use convolutional neural net-works and visual geometry to extract image features and attention-based Neural MachineTranslation (NMT) system for translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-modal translation system improves translation quality and improves the quality of the captions of the images. |
Towards Making the Most of Dialogue Characteristics for Neural Chat Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural Chat Translation (NCT) models that use dialogue characteristics of chat are often incoherent and speakerirrelevant. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce the modeling of dialogue characteristics into the NCT model by capturing the inherent dialogue characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate conversational text between speakers of different languages. |
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. |
SYSTRAN @ WAT 2019: Russian-Japanese News Commentary task (D19-52)
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| Challenge: | Several data sets were provided for the task, but the data was limited and the distance and richness of the language pair were very challenging. |
| Approach: | They describe the SYSTRAN neural MT systems employed for the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT) they use the neural Transformer architecture learned over the provided resources and perform synthetic data generation experiments which aim at alleviating the data scarcity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems rank first according to automatic evaluations based on the neural Transformer architecture learned over the provided resources. |
Selecting, Planning, and Rewriting: A Modular Approach for Data-to-Document Generation and Translation (D19-56)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for document-level generation and translation are too complex to capture the complexity of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt a large scale system trained on WMT data to a document in a different language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates a textual document from structured data or a document in a different language. |
Evaluating the Impact of SAE-based Language Steering on LLM Performance (2026.eacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have revealed interpretable features within large language models (LLMs) however, the impact of SAE-based language steering on output quality and task performance remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They apply language-specific SAE feature steering to three LLMs from two model families and evaluate it on a translation task and a multilingual question-answering task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms prompting and language neuron-based steering on translation and multilingual question-answering tasks. |
Multi-task Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual neural machine translation systems rely on bitext training data, which is limited and costly to collect. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that trains the model with the translation task on bitext data and two denoising tasks on monolingual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms pre-training models for both NMT and cross-lingual transfer learning NLU tasks. |
Flow-Adapter Architecture for Unsupervised Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have boosted the development of neural machine translation (NMT). |
| Approach: | They propose a flow-adapter architecture for unsupervised neural machine translation that leverages normalizing flows to model distributions of sentence-level latent representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results on several unsupervised MT benchmarks. |
Entity-level Cross-modal Learning Improves Multi-modal Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal machine translation aims at improving translation performance by incorporating visual information. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit entity-level cross-modal learning approach that aims to augment the entity representation by combining a translation task and a reconstruction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art models. |
Combining Character and Word Information in Neural Machine Translation Using a Multi-Level Attention (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models learn to map from source language sentences to target language sentences via continuous-space intermediate representations. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder with character attention which augments the (sub)word-level representation with character-level information and a decoder with multiple attentions that enable the representations from different levels of granularity to control the translation cooperatively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the standard word-based model, subword-based models, and strong character-based ones on translation tasks. |
It’s Easier to Translate out of English than into it: Measuring Neural Translation Difficulty by Cross-Mutual Information (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art MT systems are based on neural networks, but it is unclear whether all translation directions are equally easy (or hard) to model for NMT. |
| Approach: | They propose an asymmetric information-theoretic metric of machine translation difficulty that exploits the probabilistic nature of most neural machine translation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric allows us to better evaluate the difficulty of translating text into the target language while controlling for the difficulty independent of the translation task. |
Rethinking Translation Memory Augmented Neural Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance neural machine translation (NMT) by using a TM have been reported to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation memory augmented neural machine translation model that is good at fitting data but more sensitive to fluctuations in training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves consistent gains over conventional and existing models under two variance-preferable scenarios as well as the high resource scenario. |
Heterogeneous Recycle Generation for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in the field of grammatical error correction (GEC) rely on neural machine translation-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose a heterogeneous approach to Chinese grammatical error correction using NMT-based models, sequence editing models, and a spell checker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance without data augmentation or changes in architecture . it adapts the ERRANT scorer to be able to score Chinese sentences . |
Formality Style Transfer with Shared Latent Space (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for formality style transfer use neural networks for sentence generation, but the dataset for formal style transfer is considerably smaller than translation corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach for formality style transfer using shared latent space and two auxiliary losses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines in various settings, especially when limited data is available. |
Continual Mixed-Language Pre-Training for Extremely Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a lack of data in low-resource languages has limited the performance of a multilingual pre-trained model. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuous pre-training framework to adapt mBART to unseen languages . they construct noisy mixed-language text from the monolingual corpus of the target language . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves finetuning performance on low-resource translation pairs . the proposed framework also improves on translation pairs where both languages are seen . |
Scheduled Multi-task Learning for Neural Chat Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve chat translation focus on modeling bilingual dialogue characteristics . however, there is insufficient data and simple joint training methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a scheduled multi-task learning framework to incorporate large-scale chat translation data into training by adding a second pre-training stage between the original pre- training and fine-tuning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation tasks on four language directions. |
Restoring and Mining the Records of the Joseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | voluminous historical records are difficult to fully utilize since they are written in ancient languages and some parts are damaged over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning approach to restore and translate historical documents using a self-attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the accuracy of the translation task over baselines without multi-task learning. |
Singlish Message Paraphrasing: A Joint Task of Creole Translation and Text Normalization (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing computational approaches to translate languages or creoles back to standard English are challenging . lexical level normalization, syntactic level editing, and semantic level rewriting are key to a successful translation task. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational task to parse Singlish into English using its dialects . they propose to use a dataset to normalize and edit the text to improve translation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve translation performance and improve stance detection. |
Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT is a non-parametric method that uses nearest neighbor retrieval to translate out-of-domain sentences, rare words, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences to build an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. |
Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Quality Estimation (QE) models evaluate the quality of machine translations without reference translations, serving as the reward models for the translation task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for alleviating distribution shift in synthetic QE data . they employ a constrained beam search algorithm and distinct generation models to enhance translation diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA baselines like CometKiwi in supervised and unsupervised settings. |
Addressing Asymmetry in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Fuzzy Task Clustering (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing clustering methods cannot handle asymmetric problem in multilingual NMT . existing models cannot handle the asymmetry problem since there are thousands of languages involved . |
| Approach: | They propose a fuzzy task clustering method to address the asymmetric problem in multilingual NMT by using task affinity as the clustering criterion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines for a multilingual model and the existing models. |
Learning Decoupled Retrieval Representation for Nearest Neighbour Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external corpus are sparse in practical applications, and noises in low similarity retrieval could lead to severe performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate external corpus into k-nearest neighbor machine translation (kNNMT) instead of storing discrete word sequence, kNN-MT uses a pre-trained NMT model to force decoding the external corpi. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves retrieval accuracy and BLEU score on five domains compared to vanilla kNNMT. |
Levenshtein Training for Word-level Quality Estimation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel scheme to perform word-level quality estimation is proposed for word-based quality estimation . authors propose a two-stage transfer learning procedure on augmented and human data . a Levenshtein Transformer can learn to post-edit without explicit supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel scheme to use a Levenshtein Transformer to perform word-level quality estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better under data-constrained and unconstrained conditions than existing methods. |
Few-Shot Natural Language to First-Order Logic Translation via Code Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on translation of natural language to first-order logical formula (NL-FOL) but these methods face challenges such as inconsistency between training and inference phases and data-intensive finetuning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for translating natural language into first-order logical formulas using code snippets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses training-free baselines and is comparable to supervised models trained on the full training data. |
Language Modeling, Lexical Translation, Reordering: The Training Process of NMT through the Lens of Classical SMT (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Statistical MT decomposes the translation task into distinct components that are learned separately. |
| Approach: | They show that neural machine translation models acquire different competences over the course of training . previous work shows how to improve some of the competences in NMT by using lexical translation probabilities, phrase memories, alignment information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation quality and word-by-word translation, while learning complex reordering patterns. |
DEplain: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current text simplification research mostly focuses on English and on sentencelevel simplification. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of parallel, professionally written and manually aligned simplifications in plain German "plain DE" and "Einfache Sprache" they build a web harvester and experiment with automatic alignment methods to facilitate integration of non-aligned and to be-published parallel documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset of parallel, professionally written and manually aligned simplifications in plain German is extended to 750 document pairs and 3.5k sentence pairs. |
How Programming Concepts and Neurons Are Shared in Code Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several studies have focused on programming languages in a monolingual setting, but most focus on programming language models. |
| Approach: | They perform a few-shot translation task on 21 PL pairs using two Llama-based models and decode the embeddings of intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model assigns high probability to English tokens in the second half of the intermediate layers and language-specific neurons are concentrated in the bottom layers . the model's concept space is closer to English (including PL keywords) and the model is more efficient at identifying language-related neurons. |
BOUQuET : dataset, Benchmark and Open initiative for Universal Quality Evaluation in Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Pierre Andrews, Mikel Artetxe, Mariano Coria Meglioli, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Joe Chuang, David Dale, Mark Duppenthaler, Nathanial Paul Ekberg, Cynthia Gao, Daniel Edward Licht, Jean Maillard, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Eduardo Sánchez, Ioannis Tsiamas, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Shireen Yates
| Challenge: | BOUQUET is a multi-way, multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark . the dataset is handcrafted in 8 non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose to use BOUQuET to collect a multi-way, multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark in 8 non-English languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/facebook/bouquet. |