The University of Macau (UM) announced in a statement yesterday that its Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory (NLP2CT) from the Faculty of Science and Technology (FST) along with Alibaba Dharma Academy’s translation team won several prizes during the “Metrics Shared Task at the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation”.
According to the public university’s statement, NLP2CT mostly conducts research on machine learning and natural language such as language processing with “deep learning, machine translation, dialogue systems, and natural language reasoning” and has published over 100 research articles at various leading international conferences.
Using the jointly developed automatic translation quality evaluation model “RoBLEURT”, the teams won first prizes in five out of eight automatic translation quality tests, as well as two second prizes and one fifth prize, the statement noted. The statement added that the model was sponsored by the Science and Technology Development Fund and UM.
The model has a multi-stage pre-training for enhancing learning capabilities, and utilises “robustness enhancement training strategies based on pseudo-data construction and innovative multi-model and multi-fold crossover combination technologies” including verification and reordering.
The statement pointed out that in the eight translation tests, first prizes were won in the “evaluation of one oral translation (Chinese-English) and four press release translations (Chinese-English, Czech-English, German-English, and Japanese-English)”, surpassing rival models from Google and Unbabel.
The model also won second prizes in the evaluation of a Hausa-to-English translation and Icelandic-to-English without training data.
The statement underlined that the competition showcased the university’s research in automatic translation quality evaluation, developed a platform for exchanging experience and knowledge with hi-tech companies, as well as an opportunity for students to learn about “cutting-edge” research.
The Sixth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT21) took place November 10-11 last year at The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021) in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic and online.
This undated handout photo provided by the University of Macau (UM) yesterday shows Faculty of Science and Technology (FST) Associate Professor Derek Wong Fai (centre) posing for a group photo with lab members.
This undated handout photo provided by UM yesterday shows the machine translation team from Alibaba Dharma Academy posing for a photo.
