Craig Stewart

Ricardo Rei, Craig Stewart, Ana C Farinha et al.

We present COMET, a neural framework for training multilingual machine translation evaluation models which obtains new state-of-the-art levels of correlation with human judgements. Our framework leverages recent breakthroughs in cross-lingual pretrained language modeling resulting in highly multilingual and adaptable MT evaluation models that exploit information from both the source input and a target-language reference translation in order to more accurately predict MT quality. To showcase our framework, we train three models with different types of human judgements: Direct Assessments, Human-mediated Translation Edit Rate and Multidimensional Quality Metrics. Our models achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the WMT 2019 Metrics shared task and demonstrate robustness to high-performing systems.

Nikolai Vogler, Craig Stewart, Graham Neubig

Simultaneous interpretation, the translation of speech from one language to another in real-time, is an inherently difficult and strenuous task. One of the greatest challenges faced by interpreters is the accurate translation of difficult terminology like proper names, numbers, or other entities. Intelligent computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools that could analyze the spoken word and detect terms likely to be untranslated by an interpreter could reduce translation error and improve interpreter performance. In this paper, we propose a task of predicting which terminology simultaneous interpreters will leave untranslated, and examine methods that perform this task using supervised sequence taggers. We describe a number of task-specific features explicitly designed to indicate when an interpreter may struggle with translating a word. Experimental results on a newly-annotated version of the NAIST Simultaneous Translation Corpus (Shimizu et al., 2014) indicate the promise of our proposed method.

Vaibhav Vaibhav, Sumeet Singh, Craig Stewart et al.

Modern Machine Translation (MT) systems perform consistently well on clean, in-domain text. However most human generated text, particularly in the realm of social media, is full of typos, slang, dialect, idiolect and other noise which can have a disastrous impact on the accuracy of output translation. In this paper we leverage the Machine Translation of Noisy Text (MTNT) dataset to enhance the robustness of MT systems by emulating naturally occurring noise in otherwise clean data. Synthesizing noise in this manner we are ultimately able to make a vanilla MT system resilient to naturally occurring noise and partially mitigate loss in accuracy resulting therefrom.