The evaluation campaign of the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2020) featured this year six challenge tracks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Video speech translation, (iii) Offline speech translation, (iv) Conversational speech translation, (v) Open domain translation, and (vi) Non-native speech translation. A total of 30 teams participated in at least one of the tracks. This paper introduces each track's goal, data and evaluation metrics, and reports the results of the received submissions.
Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition (NER) show that document-level contexts can significantly improve model performance. In many application scenarios, however, such contexts are not available. In this paper, we propose to find external contexts of a sentence by retrieving and selecting a set of semantically relevant texts through a search engine, with the original sentence as the query. We find empirically that the contextual representations computed on the retrieval-based input view, constructed through the concatenation of a sentence and its external contexts, can achieve significantly improved performance compared to the original input view based only on the sentence. Furthermore, we can improve the model performance of both input views by Cooperative Learning, a training method that encourages the two input views to produce similar contextual representations or output label distributions. Experiments show that our approach can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 8 NER data sets across 5 domains. 1
Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) has recently achieved remarkable results [19] with only large monolingual corpora in each language. However, the uncertainty of associating target with source sentences makes UNMT theoretically an ill-posed problem. This work investigates the possibility of utilizing images for disambiguation to improve the performance of UNMT. Our assumption is intuitively based on the invariant property of image, i.e., the description of the same visual content by different languages should be approximately similar. We propose an unsupervised multi-modal machine translation (UMNMT) framework based on the language translation cycle consistency loss conditional on the image, targeting to learn the bidirectional multi-modal translation simultaneously. Through an alternate training between multi-modal and uni-modal, our inference model can translate with or without the image. On the widely used Multi30K dataset, the experimental results of our approach are significantly better than those of the text-only UNMT on the 2016 test dataset. * indicates equal contribution. Work performed while Yuanhang Su was an internship at Alibaba.
This paper describes BiLSTM-based models to disfluency detection in speech transcripts using residual BiLSTM blocks, self-attention, and noisy training approach. Our best model not only surpasses BERT in 4 non-Switchboard test sets, but also is 20 times smaller than the BERT-based model [1]. Thus, we demonstrate that strong performance can be achieved without extensively use of very large training data. In addition, we show that it is possible to be robust across data sets with noisy training approach in which we found insertion is the most useful noise for augmenting training data.
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