Manuel García–Herranz

Francisco Casacuberta, Alexandru Ceausu, Khalid Choukri et al.

This work presents the results of the machine translation (MT) task from the Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval initiative, a community effort to improve the generation of MT systems focused on the current Covid-19 crisis. Nine teams took part in this event, which was divided in two rounds and involved seven different language pairs. Two different scenarios were considered: one in which only the provided data was allowed, and a second one in which the use of external resources was allowed. Overall, best approaches were based on multilingual models and transfer learning, with an emphasis on the importance of applying a cleaning process to the training data.

Christina Last, Prithviraj Pramanik, Nikita Saini et al.

This ongoing work attempts to understand and address the requirements of UNICEF, a leading organization working in children's welfare, where they aim to tackle the problem of air quality for children at a global level. We are motivated by the lack of a proper model to account for heavily fluctuating air quality levels across the world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to uncertainty among public health professionals on the exact levels of children's exposure to air pollutants. We create an initial model as per the agency's requirement to generate insights through a combination of virtual meetups and online presentations. Our research team comprised of UNICEF's researchers and a group of volunteer data scientists. The presentations were delivered to a number of scientists and domain experts from UNICEF and community champions working with open data. We highlight their feedback and possible avenues to develop this research further.

Miguel Domingo, Mercedes García-Martínez, Álvaro Peris et al.

A common use of machine translation in the industry is providing initial translation hypotheses, which are later supervised and post-edited by a human expert. During this revision process, new bilingual data are continuously generated. Machine translation systems can benefit from these new data, incrementally updating the underlying models under an online learning paradigm. We conducted a user study on this scenario, for a neural machine translation system. The experimentation was carried out by professional translators, with a vast experience in machine translation post-editing. The results showed a reduction in the required amount of human effort needed when post-editing the outputs of the system, improvements in the translation quality and a positive perception of the adaptive system by the users.

Miguel Domingo, Mercedes Garcıa-Martınez, Alexandre Helle et al.

Tokenization or segmentation is a wide concept that covers simple processes such as separating punctuation from words, or more sophisticated processes such as applying morphological knowledge. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) requires a limited-size vocabulary for computational cost and enough examples to estimate word embeddings. Separating punctuation and splitting tokens into words or subwords has proven to be helpful to reduce vocabulary and increase the number of examples of each word, improving the translation quality. Tokenization is more challenging when dealing with languages with no separator between words. In order to assess the impact of the tokenization in the quality of the final translation on NMT, we experimented on five tokenizers over ten language pairs. We reached the conclusion that the tokenization significantly affects the final translation quality and that the best tokenizer differs for different language pairs.

Mark Dredze, Manuel García-Herranz, Alex Rutherford et al.

Data on human spatial distribution and movement is essential for understanding and analyzing social systems. However existing sources for this data are lacking in various ways; difficult to access, biased, have poor geographical or temporal resolution, or are significantly delayed. In this paper, we describe how geolocation data from Twitter can be used to estimate global mobility patterns and address these shortcomings. These findings will inform how this novel data source can be harnessed to address humanitarian and development efforts.

Muhammad Imran, Patrick Meier, Carlos Castillo et al.

In response to the growing HIV/AIDS and other health-related issues, UNICEF through their U-Report platform receives thousands of messages (SMS) every day to provide prevention strategies, health case advice, and counsel- ing support to vulnerable population. Due to a rapid increase in U-Report usage (up to 300% in last 3 years), plus approximately 1,000 new registrations each day, the volume of messages has thus continued to increase, which made it impossible for the team at UNICEF to process them in a timely manner. In this paper, we present a platform designed to perform automatic classification of short messages (SMS) in real-time to help UNICEF categorize and prioritize health-related messages as they arrive. We employ a hybrid approach, which combines human and machine intelligence that seeks to resolve the information overload issue by introducing processing of large-scale data at high-speed while maintaining a high classification accuracy. The system has recently been tested in conjunction with UNICEF in Zambia to classify short messages received via the U-Report platform on various health related issues. The system is designed to enable UNICEF make sense of a large volume of short messages in a timely manner. In terms of evaluation, we report design choices, challenges, and performance of the system observed during the deployment to validate its effectiveness.