The power of Prompts: Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Bias in MT with LLMs

This paper studies gender bias in machine translation through the lens of Large Language Models (LLMs). Four widely-used test sets are employed to benchmark various base LLMs, comparing their translation quality and gender bias against state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for English to Catalan (En $\rightarrow$ Ca) and English to Spanish (En $\rightarrow$ Es) translation directions. Our findings reveal pervasive gender bias across all models, with base LLMs exhibiting a higher degree of bias compared to NMT models. To combat this bias, we explore prompting engineering techniques applied to an instruction-tuned LLM. We identify a prompt structure that significantly reduces gender bias by up to 12% on the WinoMT evaluation dataset compared to more straightforward prompts. These results significantly reduce the gender bias accuracy gap between LLMs and traditional NMT systems.

Investigating the translation capabilities of Large Language Models trained on parallel data only

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency across a broad spectrum of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including Machine Translation. However, previous methods predominantly relied on iterative processes such as instruction fine-tuning or continual pre-training, leaving unexplored the challenges of training LLMs solely on parallel data. In this work, we introduce PLUME (Parallel Language Model), a collection of three 2B LLMs featuring varying vocabulary sizes (32k, 128k, and 256k) trained exclusively on Catalan-centric parallel examples. These models perform comparably to previous encoder-decoder architectures on 16 supervised translation directions and 56 zero-shot ones. Utilizing this set of models, we conduct a thorough investigation into the translation capabilities of LLMs, probing their performance, the impact of the different elements of the prompt, and their cross-lingual representation space.

Promoting Generalized Cross-lingual Question Answering in Few-resource Scenarios via Self-knowledge Distillation

Despite substantial progress in multilingual extractive Question Answering (QA), models with high and uniformly distributed performance across languages remain challenging, especially for languages with limited resources. We study cross-lingual transfer mainly focusing on the Generalized Cross-Lingual Transfer (G-XLT) task, where the question language differs from the context language - a challenge that has received limited attention thus far. Our approach seeks to enhance cross-lingual QA transfer using a high-performing multilingual model trained on a large-scale dataset, complemented by a few thousand aligned QA examples across languages. Our proposed strategy combines cross-lingual sampling and advanced self-distillation training in generations to tackle the previous challenge. Notably, we introduce the novel mAP@k coefficients to fine-tune self-knowledge distillation loss, dynamically regulating the teacher's model knowledge to perform a balanced and effective knowledge transfer. We extensively evaluate our approach to assess XLT and G-XLT capabilities in extractive QA. Results reveal that our self-knowledge distillation approach outperforms standard cross-entropy fine-tuning by a significant margin. Importantly, when compared to a strong baseline that leverages a sizeable volume of machine-translated data, our approach shows competitive results despite the considerable challenge of operating within resource-constrained settings, even in zero-shot scenarios. Beyond performance improvements, we offer valuable insights through comprehensive analyses and an ablation study, further substantiating the benefits and constraints of our approach. In essence, we propose a practical solution to improve cross-lingual QA transfer by leveraging a few data resources in an efficient way.

ReSeTOX: Re-learning attention weights for toxicity mitigation in machine translation

Our proposed method, ReSeTOX (REdo SEarch if TOXic), addresses the issue of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) generating translation outputs that contain toxic words not present in the input. The objective is to mitigate the introduction of toxic language without the need for re-training. In the case of identified added toxicity during the inference process, ReSeTOX dynamically adjusts the key-value self-attention weights and re-evaluates the beam search hypotheses. Experimental results demonstrate that ReSeTOX achieves a remarkable 57% reduction in added toxicity while maintaining an average translation quality of 99.5% across 164 languages.

Toxicity in Multilingual Machine Translation at Scale

Machine Translation systems can produce different types of errors, some of which get characterized as critical or catastrophic due to the specific negative impact they can have on users. Automatic or human evaluation metrics do not necessarily differentiate between such critical errors and more innocuous ones. In this paper we focus on one type of critical error: added toxicity. We evaluate and analyze added toxicity when translating a large evaluation dataset (HOLISTICBIAS, over 472k sentences, covering 13 demographic axes) from English into 164 languages. The toxicity automatic evaluation shows that added toxicity across languages varies from 0% to 5%. The output languages with the most added toxicity tend to be low-resource ones, and the demographic axes with the most added toxicity include sexual orientation, gender and sex, and ability. We also perform human evaluation on a subset of 8 directions, confirming the prevalence of true added toxicity. We use a measurement of the amount of source contribution to the translation, where a low source contribution implies hallucination, to interpret what causes toxicity. We observe that the source contribution is somewhat correlated with toxicity but that 45.6% of added toxic words have a high source contribution, suggesting that much of the added toxicity may be due to mistranslations. Combining the signal of source contribution level with a measurement of translation robustness allows us to flag 22.3% of added toxicity, suggesting that added toxicity may be related to both hallucination and the stability of translations in different contexts. Given these findings, our recommendations to reduce added toxicity are to curate training data to avoid mistranslations, mitigate hallucination and check unstable translations.

Towards Opening the Black Box of Neural Machine Translation: Source and Target Interpretations of the Transformer

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), each token prediction is conditioned on the source sentence and the target prefix (what has been previously translated at a decoding step). However, previous work on interpretability in NMT has focused solely on source sentence tokens attributions. Therefore, we lack a full understanding of the influences of every input token (source sentence and target prefix) in the model predictions. In this work, we propose an interpretability method that tracks complete input token attributions. Our method, which can be extended to any encoder-decoder Transformer-based model, allows us to better comprehend the inner workings of current NMT models. We apply the proposed method to both bilingual and multilingual Transformers and present insights into their behaviour.

A multi-task semi-supervised framework for Text2Graph & Graph2Text

The Artificial Intelligence industry regularly develops applications that mostly rely on Knowledge Bases, a data repository about specific, or general, domains, usually represented in a graph shape. Similar to other databases, they face two main challenges: information ingestion and information retrieval. We approach these challenges by jointly learning graph extraction from text and text generation from graphs. The proposed solution, a T5 architecture, is trained in a multi-task semi-supervised environment, with our collected non-parallel data, following a cycle training regime. Experiments on WebNLG dataset show that our approach surpasses unsupervised state-of-the-art results in text-to-graph and graph-to-text. More relevantly, our framework is more consistent across seen and unseen domains than supervised models. The resulting model can be easily trained in any new domain with non-parallel data, by simply adding text and graphs about it, in our cycle framework.

UPC's Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2021

This paper describes the submission to the IWSLT 2021 offline speech translation task by the UPC Machine Translation group. The task consists of building a system capable of translating English audio recordings extracted from TED talks into German text. Submitted systems can be either cascade or end-to-end and use a custom or given segmentation. Our submission is an end-to-end speech translation system, which combines pre-trained models (Wav2Vec 2.0 and mBART) with coupling modules between the encoder and decoder, and uses an efficient fine-tuning technique, which trains only 20% of its total parameters. We show that adding an Adapter to the system and pre-training it, can increase the convergence speed and the final result, with which we achieve a BLEU score of 27.3 on the MuST-C test set. Our final model is an ensemble that obtains 28.22 BLEU score on the same set. Our submission also uses a custom segmentation algorithm that employs pre-trained Wav2Vec 2.0 for identifying periods of untranscribable text and can bring improvements of 2.5 to 3 BLEU score on the IWSLT 2019 test set, as compared to the result with the given segmentation.

Gender Bias in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: The Architecture Matters

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation architectures mainly differ in the amount of sharing modules and parameters among languages. In this paper, and from an algorithmic perspective, we explore if the chosen architecture, when trained with the same data, influences the gender bias accuracy. Experiments in four language pairs show that Language-Specific encoders-decoders exhibit less bias than the Shared encoder-decoder architecture. Further interpretability analysis of source embeddings and the attention shows that, in the Language-Specific case, the embeddings encode more gender information, and its attention is more diverted. Both behaviors help in mitigating gender bias.

Enabling Zero-shot Multilingual Spoken Language Translation with Language-Specific Encoders and Decoders

Current end-to-end approaches to Spoken Language Translation (SLT) rely on limited training resources, especially for multilingual settings. On the other hand, Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MultiNMT) approaches rely on higher quality and more massive data sets. Our proposed method extends a MultiNMT architecture based on language-specific encoders-decoders to the task of Multilingual SLT (MultiSLT) Our experiments on four different languages show that coupling the speech encoder to the MultiNMT architecture produces similar quality translations compared to a bilingual baseline ($\pm 0.2$ BLEU) while effectively allowing for zero-shot MultiSLT. Additionally, we propose using Adapter networks for SLT that produce consistent improvements of +1 BLEU points in all tested languages.