Kamil Guttmann

Kamil Guttmann, Zofia Fraś, Artur Nowakowski et al.

Current state-of-the-art Quality Estimation (QE) in machine translation relies on massive, proprietary LLMs, raising data privacy concerns. We demonstrate that smaller, open-source LLMs (<30B parameters) are a viable, cost-effective and privacy-preserving alternative. Using a single-pass prompting strategy, our models simultaneously generate quality scores, MQM error annotations, suggested error corrections, and full post-editions. Our analysis shows these models achieve highly competitive system-level correlations with human judgments that outperform traditional neural metrics, fine-tuned models, and human inter-annotator agreement, effectively approximating the capabilities of much larger proprietary LLMs.

Michał Ciesiółka, Dawid Wiśniewski, Adrian Charkiewicz et al.

We present ForMaT (Format-Preserving Multilingual Translation), a parallel corpus of 3,956 PDFs across 15 language pairs that preserves original layout metadata proposed for multimodal machine translation. To ensure structural diversity in the dataset, we employ K-Medoids sampling over 45 geometric features, capturing complex elements like nested tables and formulas to focus only on visually diverse PDF documents. Our evaluation reveals that current MT systems struggle with spatial grounding and geometric synchronization, often losing the link between text and its visual context. ForMaT provides a benchmark for developing layout-aware translation models that integrate visual and textual context for high-fidelity document reconstruction.

Artur Nowakowski, Gabriela Pałka, Kamil Guttmann et al.

This paper presents Adam Mickiewicz University's (AMU) submissions to the constrained track of the WMT 2022 General MT Task. We participated in the Ukrainian $\leftrightarrow$ Czech translation directions. The systems are a weighted ensemble of four models based on the Transformer (big) architecture. The models use source factors to utilize the information about named entities present in the input. Each of the models in the ensemble was trained using only the data provided by the shared task organizers. A noisy back-translation technique was used to augment the training corpora. One of the models in the ensemble is a document-level model, trained on parallel and synthetic longer sequences. During the sentence-level decoding process, the ensemble generated the n-best list. The n-best list was merged with the n-best list generated by a single document-level model which translated multiple sentences at a time. Finally, existing quality estimation models and minimum Bayes risk decoding were used to rerank the n-best list so that the best hypothesis was chosen according to the COMET evaluation metric. According to the automatic evaluation results, our systems rank first in both translation directions.

Artur Kot, Mikołaj Koszowski, Wojciech Chojnowski et al.

Does multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) lead to The Curse of the Multlinguality or provides the Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer within a language family? In this study, we explore multiple approaches for extending the available data-regime in NMT and we prove cross-lingual benefits even in 0-shot translation regime for low-resource languages. With this paper, we provide state-of-the-art open-source NMT models for translating between selected Slavic languages. We released our models on the HuggingFace Hub (https://hf.co/collections/allegro/multislav-6793d6b6419e5963e759a683) under the CC BY 4.0 license. Slavic language family comprises morphologically rich Central and Eastern European languages. Although counting hundreds of millions of native speakers, Slavic Neural Machine Translation is under-studied in our opinion. Recently, most NMT research focuses either on: high-resource languages like English, Spanish, and German - in WMT23 General Translation Task 7 out of 8 task directions are from or to English; massively multilingual models covering multiple language groups; or evaluation techniques.

Kamil Guttmann, Mikołaj Pokrywka, Adrian Charkiewicz et al.

This paper explores Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding for self-improvement in machine translation (MT), particularly for domain adaptation and low-resource languages. We implement the self-improvement process by fine-tuning the model on its MBR-decoded forward translations. By employing COMET as the MBR utility metric, we aim to achieve the reranking of translations that better aligns with human preferences. The paper explores the iterative application of this approach and the potential need for language-specific MBR utility metrics. The results demonstrate significant enhancements in translation quality for all examined language pairs, including successful application to domain-adapted models and generalisation to low-resource settings. This highlights the potential of COMET-guided MBR for efficient MT self-improvement in various scenarios.