Koel Dutta Chowdhury

Also published as: Koel Dutta Chowdhury


2024

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When Elote, Choclo and Mazorca are not the Same. Isomorphism-Based Perspective to the Spanish Varieties Divergences
Cristina España-Bonet | Ankur Bhatt | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Alberto Barrón-Cedeño
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024)

Spanish is an official language in 20 countries; in 19 of them, it arrived by means of overseas colonisation. Its close contact with several coexistent languages and the rich regional and cultural diversity has produced varieties which divert from each other. We study these divergences in a data-based approach and according to their qualitative and quantitative effects in word embeddings. We generate embeddings for Spanish in 24 countries and examine the topology of the spaces. Due to the similarities between varieties —in contrast to what happens to different languages in bilingual topological studies— we first scrutinise the behaviour of three isomorphism measures in (quasi-)isomorphic settings: relational similarity, Eigenvalue similarity and Gromov-Hausdorff distance. We then use the most trustworthy measure to quantify the divergences among varieties. Finally, we use the departures from isomorphism to build relational trees for the Spanish varieties by hierarchical clustering.

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Mitigating Translationese with GPT-4: Strategies and Performance
Maria Kunilovskaya | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Heike Przybyl | Cristina España-Bonet | Josef Genabith
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)

Translations differ in systematic ways from texts originally authored in the same language.These differences, collectively known as translationese, can pose challenges in cross-lingual natural language processing: models trained or tested on translated input might struggle when presented with non-translated language. Translationese mitigation can alleviate this problem. This study investigates the generative capacities of GPT-4 to reduce translationese in human-translated texts. The task is framed as a rewriting process aimed at modified translations indistinguishable from the original text in the target language. Our focus is on prompt engineering that tests the utility of linguistic knowledge as part of the instruction for GPT-4. Through a series of prompt design experiments, we show that GPT4-generated revisions are more similar to originals in the target language when the prompts incorporate specific linguistic instructions instead of relying solely on the model’s internal knowledge. Furthermore, we release the segment-aligned bidirectional German-English data built from the Europarl corpus that underpins this study.

2022

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Towards Debiasing Translation Artifacts
Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Rricha Jalota | Cristina España-Bonet | Josef Genabith
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Cross-lingual natural language processing relies on translation, either by humans or machines, at different levels, from translating training data to translating test sets. However, compared to original texts in the same language, translations possess distinct qualities referred to as translationese. Previous research has shown that these translation artifacts influence the performance of a variety of cross-lingual tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reducing translationese by extending an established bias-removal technique. We use the Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP) algorithm, and show by measuring classification accuracy before and after debiasing, that translationese is reduced at both sentence and word level. We evaluate the utility of debiasing translationese on a natural language inference (NLI) task, and show that by reducing this bias, NLI accuracy improves. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to debias translationese as represented in latent embedding space.

2021

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EdinSaar@WMT21: North-Germanic Low-Resource Multilingual NMT
Svetlana Tchistiakova | Jesujoba Alabi | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Sourav Dutta | Dana Ruiter
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

We describe the EdinSaar submission to the shared task of Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for North Germanic Languages at the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT2021). We submit multilingual translation models for translations to/from Icelandic (is), Norwegian-Bokmal (nb), and Swedish (sv). We employ various experimental approaches, including multilingual pre-training, back-translation, fine-tuning, and ensembling. In most translation directions, our models outperform other submitted systems.

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Tracing Source Language Interference in Translation with Graph-Isomorphism Measures
Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Cristina España-Bonet | Josef van Genabith
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

Previous research has used linguistic features to show that translations exhibit traces of source language interference and that phylogenetic trees between languages can be reconstructed from the results of translations into the same language. Recent research has shown that instances of translationese (source language interference) can even be detected in embedding spaces, comparing embeddings spaces of original language data with embedding spaces resulting from translations into the same language, using a simple Eigenvector-based divergence from isomorphism measure. To date, it remains an open question whether alternative graph-isomorphism measures can produce better results. In this paper, we (i) explore Gromov-Hausdorff distance, (ii) present a novel spectral version of the Eigenvector-based method, and (iii) evaluate all approaches against a broad linguistic typological database (URIEL). We show that language distances resulting from our spectral isomorphism approaches can reproduce genetic trees on a par with previous work without requiring any explicit linguistic information and that the results can be extended to non-Indo-European languages. Finally, we show that the methods are robust under a variety of modeling conditions.

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Comparing Feature-Engineering and Feature-Learning Approaches for Multilingual Translationese Classification
Daria Pylypenko | Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Josef van Genabith | Cristina España-Bonet
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Traditional hand-crafted linguistically-informed features have often been used for distinguishing between translated and original non-translated texts. By contrast, to date, neural architectures without manual feature engineering have been less explored for this task. In this work, we (i) compare the traditional feature-engineering-based approach to the feature-learning-based one and (ii) analyse the neural architectures in order to investigate how well the hand-crafted features explain the variance in the neural models’ predictions. We use pre-trained neural word embeddings, as well as several end-to-end neural architectures in both monolingual and multilingual settings and compare them to feature-engineering-based SVM classifiers. We show that (i) neural architectures outperform other approaches by more than 20 accuracy points, with the BERT-based model performing the best in both the monolingual and multilingual settings; (ii) while many individual hand-crafted translationese features correlate with neural model predictions, feature importance analysis shows that the most important features for neural and classical architectures differ; and (iii) our multilingual experiments provide empirical evidence for translationese universals across languages.

2020

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Understanding Translationese in Multi-view Embedding Spaces
Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Cristina España-Bonet | Josef van Genabith
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recent studies use a combination of lexical and syntactic features to show that footprints of the source language remain visible in translations, to the extent that it is possible to predict the original source language from the translation. In this paper, we focus on embedding-based semantic spaces, exploiting departures from isomorphism between spaces built from original target language and translations into this target language to predict relations between languages in an unsupervised way. We use different views of the data — words, parts of speech, semantic tags and synsets — to track translationese. Our analysis shows that (i) semantic distances between original target language and translations into this target language can be detected using the notion of isomorphism, (ii) language family ties with characteristics similar to linguistically motivated phylogenetic trees can be inferred from the distances and (iii) with delexicalised embeddings exhibiting source-language interference most significantly, other levels of abstraction display the same tendency, indicating the lexicalised results to be not “just” due to possible topic differences between original and translated texts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time departures from isomorphism between embedding spaces are used to track translationese.

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How Human is Machine Translationese? Comparing Human and Machine Translations of Text and Speech
Yuri Bizzoni | Tom S Juzek | Cristina España-Bonet | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Josef van Genabith | Elke Teich
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

Translationese is a phenomenon present in human translations, simultaneous interpreting, and even machine translations. Some translationese features tend to appear in simultaneous interpreting with higher frequency than in human text translation, but the reasons for this are unclear. This study analyzes translationese patterns in translation, interpreting, and machine translation outputs in order to explore possible reasons. In our analysis we – (i) detail two non-invasive ways of detecting translationese and (ii) compare translationese across human and machine translations from text and speech. We find that machine translation shows traces of translationese, but does not reproduce the patterns found in human translation, offering support to the hypothesis that such patterns are due to the model (human vs machine) rather than to the data (written vs spoken).

2019

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Understanding the Effect of Textual Adversaries in Multimodal Machine Translation
Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Desmond Elliott
Proceedings of the Beyond Vision and LANguage: inTEgrating Real-world kNowledge (LANTERN)

It is assumed that multimodal machine translation systems are better than text-only systems at translating phrases that have a direct correspondence in the image. This assumption has been challenged in experiments demonstrating that state-of-the-art multimodal systems perform equally well in the presence of randomly selected images, but, more recently, it has been shown that masking entities from the source language sentence during training can help to overcome this problem. In this paper, we conduct experiments with both visual and textual adversaries in order to understand the role of incorrect textual inputs to such systems. Our results show that when the source language sentence contains mistakes, multimodal translation systems do not leverage the additional visual signal to produce the correct translation. We also find that the degradation of translation performance caused by textual adversaries is significantly higher than by visual adversaries.

2018

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Multimodal Neural Machine Translation for Low-resource Language Pairs using Synthetic Data
Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Mohammed Hasanuzzaman | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of training a multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) system with image features for a low-resource language pair, Hindi and English, using synthetic data. A three-way parallel corpus which contains bilingual texts and corresponding images is required to train a MNMT system with image features. However, such a corpus is not available for low resource language pairs. To address this, we developed both a synthetic training dataset and a manually curated development/test dataset for Hindi based on an existing English-image parallel corpus. We used these datasets to build our image description translation system by adopting state-of-the-art MNMT models. Our results show that it is possible to train a MNMT system for low-resource language pairs through the use of synthetic data and that such a system can benefit from image features.

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The RGNLP Machine Translation Systems for WAT 2018
Atul Kr. Ojha | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Chao-Hong Liu | Karan Saxena
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation: 5th Workshop on Asian Translation: 5th Workshop on Asian Translation

2017

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Detection of Verbal Multi-Word Expressions via Conditional Random Fields with Syntactic Dependency Features and Semantic Re-Ranking
Alfredo Maldonado | Lifeng Han | Erwan Moreau | Ashjan Alsulaimani | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Carl Vogel | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2017)

A description of a system for identifying Verbal Multi-Word Expressions (VMWEs) in running text is presented. The system mainly exploits universal syntactic dependency features through a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) sequence model. The system competed in the Closed Track at the PARSEME VMWE Shared Task 2017, ranking 2nd place in most languages on full VMWE-based evaluation and 1st in three languages on token-based evaluation. In addition, this paper presents an option to re-rank the 10 best CRF-predicted sequences via semantic vectors, boosting its scores above other systems in the competition. We also show that all systems in the competition would struggle to beat a simple lookup baseline system and argue for a more purpose-specific evaluation scheme.

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DCU System Report on the WMT 2017 Multi-modal Machine Translation Task
Iacer Calixto | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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ADAPT at IJCNLP-2017 Task 4: A Multinomial Naive Bayes Classification Approach for Customer Feedback Analysis task
Pintu Lohar | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Haithem Afli | Mohammed Hasanuzzaman | Andy Way
Proceedings of the IJCNLP 2017, Shared Tasks

In this age of the digital economy, promoting organisations attempt their best to engage the customers in the feedback provisioning process. With the assistance of customer insights, an organisation can develop a better product and provide a better service to its customer. In this paper, we analyse the real world samples of customer feedback from Microsoft Office customers in four languages, i.e., English, French, Spanish and Japanese and conclude a five-plus-one-classes categorisation (comment, request, bug, complaint, meaningless and undetermined) for meaning classification. The task is to %access multilingual corpora annotated by the proposed meaning categorization scheme and develop a system to determine what class(es) the customer feedback sentences should be annotated as in four languages. We propose following approaches to accomplish this task: (i) a multinomial naive bayes (MNB) approach for multi-label classification, (ii) MNB with one-vs-rest classifier approach, and (iii) the combination of the multilabel classification-based and the sentiment classification-based approach. Our best system produces F-scores of 0.67, 0.83, 0.72 and 0.7 for English, Spanish, French and Japanese, respectively. The results are competitive to the best ones for all languages and secure 3rd and 5th position for Japanese and French, respectively, among all submitted systems.