The University of Macau’s (UM) Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory (NLP2CT) Prof. Wong Fai and his team presented several papers at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023) recently, according to a UM statement yesterday.
According to ACL 2023 website, the meeting was held in Toronto on July 9-14.
ACL is widely regarded as the top academic conference in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field, the statement noted. NLP research plays a crucial role in modern artificial intelligence (AI), driving the development of AI products such as ChatGPT.
The papers that UM presented “attracted considerable attention”, the statement said. The public university has presented over 20 papers at the conference in the past five years.
The statement said that ACL 2023 received 4,559 submissions worldwide, with 945, or 20.7 percent, of the submissions accepted. Five papers from UM were accepted as “main conference papers”, while two were accepted as “findings papers”. The papers covered subjects such as machine translation (MT).
The statement added that PhD students Liu Shudong and Zhan Runzhe presented two papers on machine translation training and evaluation at the conference. The first paper introduces “a training and extraction method that can effectively transfer knowledge from a high-resource MT model to a child model, thus enabling the translation of low-resource language pairs”.
The second paper, meanwhile, focuses on “the automatic evaluation of MT and proposes a self-supervised approach to dynamically adapt the model to deal with out-of-distribution issues in cross-domain evaluation, thereby enhancing prediction performance”, according to the statement.
Both methodologies have been submitted for a patent application.
Under Prof. Wong’s leadership, the statement said, the research team has been dedicated to NLP research for two decades and published a string of research results.
This undated handout photo provided by the University of Macau (UM) yesterday shows Prof. Wong Fai (second from right) and other representatives posing at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics last month in Toronto.
