Fine-tuning the SwissBERT Encoder Model for Embedding Sentences and Documents

Encoder models trained for the embedding of sentences or short documents have proven useful for tasks such as semantic search and topic modeling. In this paper, we present a version of the SwissBERT encoder model that we specifically fine-tuned for this purpose. SwissBERT contains language adapters for the four national languages of Switzerland -- German, French, Italian, and Romansh -- and has been pre-trained on a large number of news articles in those languages. Using contrastive learning based on a subset of these articles, we trained a fine-tuned version, which we call SentenceSwissBERT. Multilingual experiments on document retrieval and text classification in a Switzerland-specific setting show that SentenceSwissBERT surpasses the accuracy of the original SwissBERT model and of a comparable baseline. The model is openly available for research use.

Linear-time Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Reference Aggregation

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding is a text generation technique that has been shown to improve the quality of machine translations, but is expensive, even if a sampling-based approximation is used. Besides requiring a large number of sampled sequences, it requires the pairwise calculation of a utility metric, which has quadratic complexity. In this paper, we propose to approximate pairwise metric scores with scores calculated against aggregated reference representations. This changes the complexity of utility estimation from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$, while empirically preserving most of the quality gains of MBR decoding. We release our source code at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/mbr

Modular Adaptation of Multilingual Encoders to Written Swiss German Dialect

Creating neural text encoders for written Swiss German is challenging due to a dearth of training data combined with dialectal variation. In this paper, we build on several existing multilingual encoders and adapt them to Swiss German using continued pre-training. Evaluation on three diverse downstream tasks shows that simply adding a Swiss German adapter to a modular encoder achieves 97.5% of fully monolithic adaptation performance. We further find that for the task of retrieving Swiss German sentences given Standard German queries, adapting a character-level model is more effective than the other adaptation strategies. We release our code and the models trained for our experiments at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/swiss-german-text-encoders

Machine Translation Models are Zero-Shot Detectors of Translation Direction

Detecting the translation direction of parallel text has applications for machine translation training and evaluation, but also has forensic applications such as resolving plagiarism or forgery allegations. In this work, we explore an unsupervised approach to translation direction detection based on the simple hypothesis that $p(\text{translation}|\text{original})>p(\text{original}|\text{translation})$, motivated by the well-known simplification effect in translationese or machine-translationese. In experiments with massively multilingual machine translation models across 20 translation directions, we confirm the effectiveness of the approach for high-resource language pairs, achieving document-level accuracies of 82-96% for NMT-produced translations, and 60-81% for human translations, depending on the model used. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/translation-direction-detection

Trained MT Metrics Learn to Cope with Machine-translated References

Neural metrics trained on human evaluations of MT tend to correlate well with human judgments, but their behavior is not fully understood. In this paper, we perform a controlled experiment and compare a baseline metric that has not been trained on human evaluations (Prism) to a trained version of the same metric (Prism+FT). Surprisingly, we find that Prism+FT becomes more robust to machine-translated references, which are a notorious problem in MT evaluation. This suggests that the effects of metric training go beyond the intended effect of improving overall correlation with human judgments.

Investigating Multi-Pivot Ensembling with Massively Multilingual Machine Translation Models

Massively multilingual machine translation models allow for the translation of a large number of languages with a single model, but have limited performance on low- and very-low-resource translation directions. Pivoting via high-resource languages remains a strong strategy for low-resource directions, and in this paper we revisit ways of pivoting through multiple languages. Previous work has used a simple averaging of probability distributions from multiple paths, but we find that this performs worse than using a single pivot, and exacerbates the hallucination problem because the same hallucinations can be probable across different paths. As an alternative, we propose MaxEns, a combination strategy that is biased towards the most confident predictions, hypothesising that confident predictions are less prone to be hallucinations. We evaluate different strategies on the FLORES benchmark for 20 low-resource language directions, demonstrating that MaxEns improves translation quality for low-resource languages while reducing hallucination in translations, compared to both direct translation and an averaging approach. On average, multi-pivot strategies still lag behind using English as a single pivot language, raising the question of how to identify the best pivoting strategy for a given translation direction.

Mitigating Hallucinations and Off-target Machine Translation with Source-Contrastive and Language-Contrastive Decoding

Hallucinations and off-target translation remain unsolved problems in machine translation, especially for low-resource languages and massively multilingual models. In this paper, we introduce methods to mitigate both failure cases with a modified decoding objective, without requiring retraining or external models. In source-contrastive decoding, we search for a translation that is probable given the correct input, but improbable given a random input segment, hypothesising that hallucinations will be similarly probable given either. In language-contrastive decoding, we search for a translation that is probable, but improbable given the wrong language indicator token. In experiments on M2M-100 (418M) and SMaLL-100, we find that these methods effectively suppress hallucinations and off-target translations, improving chrF2 by 1.7 and 1.4 points on average across 57 tested translation directions. In a proof of concept on English--German, we also show that we can suppress off-target translations with the Llama 2 chat models, demonstrating the applicability of the method to machine translation with LLMs. We release our source code at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/ContraDecode.

Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Semantic Differences in Related Documents

Automatically highlighting words that cause semantic differences between two documents could be useful for a wide range of applications. We formulate recognizing semantic differences (RSD) as a token-level regression task and study three unsupervised approaches that rely on a masked language model. To assess the approaches, we begin with basic English sentences and gradually move to more complex, cross-lingual document pairs. Our results show that an approach based on word alignment and sentence-level contrastive learning has a robust correlation to gold labels. However, all unsupervised approaches still leave a large margin of improvement. Code to reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/recognizing-semantic-differences

SwissBERT: The Multilingual Language Model for Switzerland

We present SwissBERT, a masked language model created specifically for processing Switzerland-related text. SwissBERT is a pre-trained model that we adapted to news articles written in the national languages of Switzerland -- German, French, Italian, and Romansh. We evaluate SwissBERT on natural language understanding tasks related to Switzerland and find that it tends to outperform previous models on these tasks, especially when processing contemporary news and/or Romansh Grischun. Since SwissBERT uses language adapters, it may be extended to Swiss German dialects in future work. The model and our open-source code are publicly released at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/swissbert.

NMTScore: A Multilingual Analysis of Translation-based Text Similarity Measures

Being able to rank the similarity of short text segments is an interesting bonus feature of neural machine translation. Translation-based similarity measures include direct and pivot translation probability, as well as translation cross-likelihood, which has not been studied so far. We analyze these measures in the common framework of multilingual NMT, releasing the NMTScore library (available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/nmtscore). Compared to baselines such as sentence embeddings, translation-based measures prove competitive in paraphrase identification and are more robust against adversarial or multilingual input, especially if proper normalization is applied. When used for reference-based evaluation of data-to-text generation in 2 tasks and 17 languages, translation-based measures show a relatively high correlation to human judgments.