Roger Wechsler

Diego Velazquez, Mikaela Grace, Konstantinos Karageorgos et al.

Automatic post-editing (APE) aims to correct errors in machine-translated text, enhancing translation quality, while reducing the need for human intervention. Despite advances in neural machine translation (NMT), the development of effective APE systems has been hindered by the lack of large-scale multilingual datasets specifically tailored to NMT outputs. To address this gap, we present and release LangMark, a new human-annotated multilingual APE dataset for English translation to seven languages: Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The dataset has 206,983 triplets, with each triplet consisting of a source segment, its NMT output, and a human post-edited translation. Annotated by expert human linguists, our dataset offers both linguistic diversity and scale. Leveraging this dataset, we empirically show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot prompting can effectively perform APE, improving upon leading commercial and even proprietary machine translation systems. We believe that this new resource will facilitate the future development and evaluation of APE systems.

Joachim Daiber, Lautaro Quiroz, Roger Wechsler et al.

Compounding is a highly productive word-formation process in some languages that is often problematic for natural language processing applications. In this paper, we investigate whether distributional semantics in the form of word embeddings can enable a deeper, i.e., more knowledge-rich, processing of compounds than the standard string-based methods. We present an unsupervised approach that exploits regularities in the semantic vector space (based on analogies such as "bookshop is to shop as bookshelf is to shelf") to produce compound analyses of high quality. A subsequent compound splitting algorithm based on these analyses is highly effective, particularly for ambiguous compounds. German to English machine translation experiments show that this semantic analogy-based compound splitter leads to better translations than a commonly used frequency-based method.