15 accepted papers
Artificial Intelligence (AI) benchmarks play a central role in measuring progress in model development and guiding deployment decisions. However, many benchmarks quickly become saturated, meaning that they can no longer differentiate between the best-performing models, diminishing their long-term va…
Reranking, or scoring a list of prediction candidates from a machine translation system with an external scoring model and returning the highest-scoring candidate, remains a simple and effective method for improving prediction quality. However, reranking with high quality scoring models can add subs…
Subword regularization, used widely in NLP, improves model performance by reducing the dependency on exact tokenizations, augmenting the training corpus, and exposing the model to more unique contexts during training. BPE and MaxMatch, two popular subword tokenization schemes, have stochastic dropou…
We introduce a new, extensive multidimensional quality metrics (MQM) annotated dataset covering 11 language pairs in the biomedical domain. We use this dataset to investigate whether machine translation (MT) metrics which are fine-tuned on human-generated MT quality judgements are robust to domain s…
Using questions in written text is an effective strategy to enhance readability. However, what makes an active reading question good, what the linguistic role of these questions is, and what is their impact on human reading remains understudied. We introduce GuidingQ, a dataset of 10K in-text questi…
Ten years ago a single metric, BLEU, governed progress in machine translation research. For better or worse, there is no such consensus today, and consequently it is difficult for researchers to develop and retain intuitions about metric deltas that drove earlier research and deployment decisions. T…
Mapping words into a fixed-dimensional vector space is the backbone of modern NLP. While most word embedding methods successfully encode semantic information, they overlook phonetic information that is crucial for many tasks. We develop three methods that use articulatory features to build phonetica…
In Tokenization and the Noiseless Channel (Zouhar et al., 2023), Rényi efficiency is suggested as an intrinsic mechanism for evaluating a tokenizer: for NLP tasks, the tokenizer which leads to the highest Rényi efficiency of the unigram distribution should be chosen. The Rényi efficiency is thus tre…
In human-AI collaboration, users typically form a mental model of the AI system, which captures the user's beliefs about when the system performs well and when it does not. The construction of this mental model is guided by both the system's veracity as well as the system output presented to the use…
Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a popular algorithm used for tokenizing data in NLP, despite being devised initially as a compression method.BPE appears to be a greedy algorithm at face value, but the underlying optimization problem that BPE seeks to solve has not yet been laid down. We formalize BPE as…
Textbooks are one of the main mediums for delivering high-quality education to students. In particular, explanatory and illustrative visuals play a key role in retention, comprehension and general transfer of knowledge. However, many textbooks lack these interesting visuals to support student learni…
Topic models help us make sense of large text collections. Automatically evaluating their output and determining the optimal number of topics are both longstanding challenges, with no effective automated solutions to date. This paper proposes using large language models (LLMs) for these tasks. We fi…
Subword tokenization is a key part of most NLP pipelines. However, little is known about why some tokenizer and hyperparameter combinations lead to improved downstream model performance over others. We propose that good tokenizers lead to efficient channel usage, where the channel is the means by wh…
Translating text into a language unknown to the text’s author, dubbed outbound translation, is a modern need for which the user experience has significant room for improvement, beyond the basic machine translation facility. We demonstrate this by showing three ways in which user confidence in the ou…
We test the natural expectation that using MT in professional translation saves human processing time. The last such study was carried out by Sanchez-Torron and Koehn (2016) with phrase-based MT, artificially reducing the translation quality. In contrast, we focus on neural MT (NMT) of high quality,…