Constantin Orasan

University of Surrey · Centre for Translation Studies

In this paper, we focus on how current Machine Translation (MT) tools perform on the translation of emotion-loaded texts by evaluating outputs from Google Translate according to a framework proposed in this paper. We propose this evaluation framework based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and perform a detailed error analysis of the MT...

This poster presents the results of MATRIC project where we looked at a hybrid workflow in interlingual S2T communication, using NTR evaluations of interpreter output as benchmark.

In this paper, we present a semi-automated workflow for live interlingual speech-to-text communication which seeks to reduce the shortcomings of existing ASR systems: a human respeaker works with a speaker-dependent speech recognition software (e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking) to deliver punctuated same-language output of superior quality than obta...

Transcription of legal proceedings is very important to enable access to justice. However, speech transcription is an expensive and slow process. In this paper we describe part of a combined research and industrial project for building an automated transcription tool designed specifically for the Justice sector in the UK. We explain the challenges...

In the online world, Machine Translation (MT) systems are extensively used to translate User-Generated Text (UGT) such as reviews, tweets, and social media posts, where the main message is often the author's positive or negative attitude towards the topic of the text. However, MT systems still lack accuracy in some low-resource languages and someti...

Extracting biographical information from online documents is a popular research topic among the information extraction (IE) community. Various natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as text classification, text summarisation and relation extraction are commonly used to achieve this. Among these techniques, RE is the most common since it...

The detection and extraction of abbreviations from unstructured texts can help to improve the performance of Natural Language Processing tasks, such as machine translation and information retrieval. However, in terms of publicly available datasets, there is not enough data for training deep-neural-networks-based models to the point of generalising...

Acronyms are abbreviated units of a phrase constructed by using initial components of the phrase in a text. Automatic extraction of acronyms from a text can help various Natural Language Processing tasks like machine translation, information retrieval, and text summarisation. This paper discusses an ensemble approach for the task of Acronym Extract...

Corpus-based contrastive and translation research are areas that keep evolving in the digital age, as the range of new corpus resources and tools expands, opening up to different approaches and application contexts. The current book contains a selection of papers which focus on corpora and translation research in the digital age, outlining some rec...

Social media companies as well as authorities make extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to monitor postings of hate speech, celebrations of violence or profanity. Since AI software requires massive volumes of data to train computers, Machine Translation (MT) of the online content is commonly used to process posts written in several l...

In translating text where sentiment is the main message, human translators give particular attention to sentiment-carrying words. The reason is that an incorrect translation of such words would miss the fundamental aspect of the source text, i.e. the author's sentiment. In the online world, MT systems are extensively used to translate User-Generate...

Current Machine Translation (MT) systems achieve very good results on a growing variety of language pairs and datasets. However, they are known to produce fluent translation outputs that can contain important meaning errors, thus undermining their reliability in practice. Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of automatically assessing the performanc...

As Machine Translation (MT) becomes increasingly ubiquitous, so does its use in professional translation workflows. However, its proliferation in the translation industry has brought about new challenges in the field of Post-Editing (PE). We are now faced with a need to find effective tools to assess the quality of MT systems to avoid underpayments...

One very common type of fake news is satire which comes in a form of a news website or an online platform that parodies reputable real news agencies to create a sarcastic version of reality. This type of fake news is often disseminated by individuals on their online platforms as it has a much stronger effect in delivering criticism than through a s...

Social media companies as well as authorities make extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to monitor postings of hate speech, celebrations of violence or profanity. Since AI software requires massive volumes of data to train computers, Machine Translation (MT) of the online content is commonly used to process posts written in several l...

Although emotions are universal concepts, transferring the different shades of emotion from one language to another may not always be straightforward for human translators, let alone for machine translation systems. Moreover, the cognitive states are established by verbal explanations of experience which is shaped by both the verbal and cultural co...

The presentation was prepared for ACL 2021 - https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.55/

Although emotions are universal concepts, transferring the different shades of emotion from one language to another may not always be straightforward for human translators, let alone for machine translation systems. Moreover, the cognitive states are established by verbal explanations of experience which is shaped by both the verbal and cultural co...

Most studies on word-level Quality Estimation (QE) of machine translation focus on language-specific models. The obvious disadvantages of these approaches are the need for labelled data for each language pair and the high cost required to maintain several language-specific models. To overcome these problems, we explore different approaches to multi...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a dynamic and rapidly developing field in which new trends, techniques, and applications are constantly emerging. This chapter focuses mainly on recent developments in NLP which could not be covered in other chapters of the Handbook. Topics such as crowdsourcing and processing of large datasets, which are no lon...

Since the advent of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) approaches there has been a tremendous improvement in the quality of automatic translation. However, NMT output still lacks accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes makes major errors that need extensive post-editing. This is particularly noticeable with texts that do not follow comm...

This paper presents the RGCL team submission to SemEval 2020 Task 6: DeftEval, subtasks 1 and 2. The system classifies definitions at the sentence and token levels. It utilises state-of-the-art neural network architectures, which have some task-specific adaptations, including an automatically extended training set. Overall, the approach achieves ac...

One very common type of fake news is satire which comes in a form of a news website or an online platform that parodies reputable real news agencies to create a sarcastic version of reality. This type of fake news is often disseminated by individuals on their online platforms as it has a much stronger effect in delivering criticism than through a s...

Recent years have seen big advances in the field of sentence-level quality estimation (QE), largely as a result of using neural-based architectures. However, the majority of these methods work only on the language pair they are trained on and need retraining for new language pairs. This process can prove difficult from a technical point of view and...

This paper presents the team TransQuest's participation in Sentence-Level Direct Assessment shared task in WMT 2020. We introduce a simple QE framework based on cross-lingual transformers, and we use it to implement and evaluate two different neural architectures. The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results surpassing the results obtained...

Since the advent of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) approaches there has been a tremendous improvement in the quality of automatic translation. However, NMT output still lacks accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes makes major errors that need extensive post-editing. This is particularly noticeable with texts that do not follow comm...

This paper presents the RGCL team submission to SemEval 2020 Task 6: DeftEval, subtasks 1 and 2. The system classifies definitions at the sentence and token levels. It utilises state-of-the-art neural network architectures, which have some task-specific adaptations, including an automatically extended training set. Overall, the approach achieves ac...

This paper presents the team TransQuest's participation in Sentence-Level Direct Assessment shared task in WMT 2020. We introduce a simple QE framework based on cross-lingual transformers, and we use it to implement and evaluate two different neural architectures. The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results surpassing the results obtained...

NLP approaches to automatic text adaptation often rely on user-need guidelines which are generic and do not account for the differences between various types of target groups. One such group are adults with high-functioning autism, who are usually able to read long sentences and comprehend difficult words but whose comprehension may be impeded by o...

Matching and retrieving previously translated segments from a Translation Memory is the key functionality in Translation Memories systems. However this matching and retrieving process is still limited to algorithms based on edit distance which we have identified as a major drawback in Translation Memories systems. In this paper we introduce sentenc...

Matching and retrieving previously translated segments from a Translation Memory is the key functionality in Translation Memories systems. However this matching and retrieving process is still limited to algorithms based on edit distance which we have identified as a major drawback in Translation Memories systems. In this paper we introduce sentenc...

This article describes the system submitted by the RGCL team to the IDAT 2019 Shared Task: Irony Detection in Arabic Tweets. The system detects irony in Arabic tweets using deep learning. The paper evaluates the performance of several deep learning models, as well as how text cleaning and text pre-processing influence the accuracy of the system. Se...

This article describes the system submitted by the RGCL team to the IDAT 2019 Shared Task: Irony Detection in Arabic Tweets. The system detects irony in Arabic tweets using deep learning. The paper evaluates the performance of several deep learning models, as well as how text cleaning and text pre-processing influence the accuracy of the system. Se...

This article describes the system submitted by the RGCL team to the IDAT 2019 Shared Task: Irony Detection in Arabic Tweets. The system detects irony in Arabic tweets using deep learning. The paper evaluates the performance of several deep learning models, as well as how text cleaning and text pre-processing influence the accuracy of the system. Se...

This paper explores automatic methods to identify relevant biography candidates in large databases, and extract biographical information from encyclopedia entries and databases. In this work, relevant candidates are defined as people who have made an impact in a certain country or region within a pre-defined time frame. We investigate the case of p...

This paper describes the system submitted by the RGCL team to GermEval 2019 Shared Task 2: Identification of Offensive Language. We experimented with five different neural network architectures in order to classify Tweets in terms of offensive language. By means of comparative evaluation, we select the best performing for each of the three subtasks...

Automatic text summarisation is a topic that has been receiving attention from the research community from the early days of computational linguistics, but it really took off around 25 years ago. This article presents the main developments from the last 25 years. It starts by defining what a summary is and how its definition changed over time as a...

In this paper, we report on the extrin-sic evaluation of an automatic sentence simplification method with respect to two NLP tasks: semantic role labelling (SRL) and information extraction (IE). The paper begins with our observation of challenges in the intrinsic evaluation of sentence simplification systems, which motivates the use of extrinsic ev...

Calculating Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) plays a significant role in many applications such as question answering, document summarisation, information retrieval and information extraction. All modern state of the art STS methods rely on word embeddings one way or another. The recently introduced contextu-alised word embeddings have proved more...

Calculating the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) is an important research area in natural language processing which plays a significant role in many applications such as question answering, document summarisation, information retrieval and information extraction. This paper evaluates Siamese recurrent architectures, a special type of neural networ...

This paper compares how different machine learning classifiers can be used together with simple string matching and named entity recognition to detect locations in texts. We compare five different state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers in order to predict whether a sentence contains a location or not. Following this classification task, we u...

Technologies have transformed the way we work, and this is also applicable to the translation industry. In the past thirty to thirty-five years, professional translators have experienced an increased technification of their work. Barely thirty years ago, a professional translator would not have received a translation assignment attached to an e-mai...

This article describes the system submitted by the RGCL-WLV team to the SemEval 2019 Task 12: Toponym resolution in scientific papers. The system detects toponyms using a bootstrapped machine learning (ML) approach which classifies names identified using gazetteers extracted from the GeoNames geographical database. The paper evaluates the performan...

This article presents a new method to automatically simplify English sentences. The approach is designed to reduce the number of compound clauses and nominally bound relative clauses in input sentences. The article provides an overview of a corpus annotated with information about various explicit signs of syntactic complexity and describes the two...

This paper describes our participation in the First Shared Task on Aggression Identification. The method proposed relies on machine learning to identify social media texts which contain aggression. The main features employed by our method are information extracted from word embed-dings and the output of a sentiment analyser. Several machine learnin...

The ability to automatically detect human stress and relaxation is crucial for timely diagnosing stress-related diseases, ensuring customer satisfaction in services and managing human-centric applications such as traffic management. Traditional methods employ stress-measuring scales or physiological monitoring which may be intrusive and inconvenien...

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which has a life-long impact on the lives of people diagnosed with the condition. In many cases, people with ASD are unable to derive the gist or meaning of written documents due to their inability to process complex sentences, understand non-literal text, and understand uncommon and...

This workshop addresses BOTH the most recent developments in contributions of NLP to translation/interpreting and the contributions of translation/interpreting to NLP/MT. In this way it addresses the interests of researchers & specialists in both areas and their joint collaborations, aiming for example to improve their own tasks with the techniques...

Post-Editing of Machine Translation (MT) has become a reality in professional translation workflows. In order to optimize the management of projects that use post-editing and avoid underpayments and mistrust from professional translators, effective tools to assess the quality of Machine Translation (MT) systems need to be put in place. One field of...

This paper reports on the organization and results of the first Automatic Translation Memory Cleaning Shared Task. This shared task is aimed at finding automatic ways of cleaning translation memories (TMs) that have not been properly curated and thus include incorrect translations. As a follow up of the shared task, we also conducted two surveys, o...

Translation memory tools lack semantic knowledge like paraphrasing when they perform matching and retrieval. As a result, paraphrased segments are often not retrieved. One of the primary reasons for this is the lack of a simple and efficient algorithm to incorporate paraphrasing in the TM matching process. Gupta and Orăsan [1] proposed an algorithm...

Most current translation memory (TM) systems work on the string level (character or word level) and lack semantic knowledge while matching. They use simple edit-distance (ED) calculated on the surface form or some variation on it (stem, lemma), which does not take into consideration any semantic aspects in matching. This paper presents a novel and...

This paper summarizes the work done to prepare the first shared task on automatic translation memory cleaning. This shared task aims at finding automatic ways of cleaning TMs that, for some reason, have not been properly curated and include wrong translations. Participants in this task are required to take pairs of source and target segments from T...

Quality Estimation (QE) predicts the quality of machine translation output without the need for a reference translation. This quality can be defined differently based on the task at hand. In an attempt to focus further on the adequacy and informativeness of translations, we integrate features of semantic similarity into QuEst, a framework for QE fe...

This paper gives a brief overview of the EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation (EXPERT) project, an FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network, which is preparing the next generation of world-class researchers in the field of hybrid machine translation. The project is employing 15 Marie Curie fellows who are working on 15 individual, but int...

This paper investigates the use of semantic preferences for ontology population. It draws on a new resource, the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs, which lists semantic categories expected in each syntactic slot of a verb pattern. Knowledge of semantic preferences is used to drive and control bootstrapped pattern extraction techniques on the EnCl...

This paper describes the system submitted by the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Malaga for SemEval-2015 Task 2: Semantic Textual Similarity. The system uses a Supported Vector Machine approach based on a number of linguistically motivated features. Our system performed satisfactorily for English and obtained a mean 0.7216 Pearson...

This paper investigates to what extent the use of paraphrasing in translation memory (TM) matching and retrieval is useful for human translators. Current translation memories lack semantic knowledge like paraphrasing in matching and retrieval. Due to this, paraphrased segments are often not retrieved. Lack of semantic knowledge also results in inap...

This paper investigates non-destructive simplification, a type of syntactic text simplification which focuses on extracting embedded clauses from structurally complex sentences and rephras-ing them without affecting their original meaning. This process reduces the average sentence length and complexity to make text simpler. Although relevant for hu...