Parker Riley


2024

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Finding Replicable Human Evaluations via Stable Ranking Probability
Parker Riley | Daniel Deutsch | George Foster | Viresh Ratnakar | Ali Dabirmoghaddam | Markus Freitag
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Reliable human evaluation is critical to the development of successful natural language generation models, but achieving it is notoriously difficult. Stability is a crucial requirement when ranking systems by quality: consistent ranking of systems across repeated evaluations is not just desirable, but essential. Without it, there is no reliable foundation for hill-climbing or product launch decisions. In this paper, we use machine translation and its state-of-the-art human evaluation framework, MQM, as a case study to understand how to set up reliable human evaluations that yield stable conclusions. We investigate the optimal configurations for item allocation to raters, number of ratings per item, and score normalization. Our study on two language pairs provides concrete recommendations for designing replicable human evaluation studies. We also collect and release the largest publicly available dataset of multi-segment translations rated by multiple professional translators, consisting of nearly 140,000 segment annotations across two language pairs.

2023

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XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages
Sebastian Ruder | Jonathan Clark | Alexander Gutkin | Mihir Kale | Min Ma | Massimo Nicosia | Shruti Rijhwani | Parker Riley | Jean-Michel Sarr | Xinyi Wang | John Wieting | Nitish Gupta | Anna Katanova | Christo Kirov | Dana Dickinson | Brian Roark | Bidisha Samanta | Connie Tao | David Adelani | Vera Axelrod | Isaac Caswell | Colin Cherry | Dan Garrette | Reeve Ingle | Melvin Johnson | Dmitry Panteleev | Partha Talukdar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) — languages for which NLP research is particularly far behind in meeting user needs — it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks — tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text), supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models.

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The Devil Is in the Errors: Leveraging Large Language Models for Fine-grained Machine Translation Evaluation
Patrick Fernandes | Daniel Deutsch | Mara Finkelstein | Parker Riley | André Martins | Graham Neubig | Ankush Garg | Jonathan Clark | Markus Freitag | Orhan Firat
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

Automatic evaluation of machine translation (MT) is a critical tool driving the rapid iterative development of MT systems. While considerable progress has been made on estimating a single scalar quality score, current metrics lack the informativeness of more detailed schemes that annotate individual errors, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). In this paper, we help fill this gap by proposing AutoMQM, a prompting technique which leverages the reasoning and in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and asks them to identify and categorize errors in translations. We start by evaluating recent LLMs, such as PaLM and PaLM-2, through simple score prediction prompting, and we study the impact of labeled data through in-context learning and finetuning. We then evaluate AutoMQM with PaLM-2 models, and we find that it improves performance compared to just prompting for scores (with particularly large gains for larger models) while providing interpretability through error spans that align with human annotations.

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FRMT: A Benchmark for Few-Shot Region-Aware Machine Translation
Parker Riley | Timothy Dozat | Jan A. Botha | Xavier Garcia | Dan Garrette | Jason Riesa | Orhan Firat | Noah Constant
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

We present FRMT, a new dataset and evaluation benchmark for Few-shot Region-aware Machine Translation, a type of style-targeted translation. The dataset consists of professional translations from English into two regional variants each of Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. Source documents are selected to enable detailed analysis of phenomena of interest, including lexically distinct terms and distractor terms. We explore automatic evaluation metrics for FRMT and validate their correlation with expert human evaluation across both region-matched and mismatched rating scenarios. Finally, we present a number of baseline models for this task, and offer guidelines for how researchers can train, evaluate, and compare their own models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available: https://bit.ly/frmt-task.

2021

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Outside Computation with Superior Functions
Parker Riley | Daniel Gildea
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We show that a general algorithm for efficient computation of outside values under the minimum of superior functions framework proposed by Knuth (1977) would yield a sub-exponential time algorithm for SAT, violating the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH).

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TextSETTR: Few-Shot Text Style Extraction and Tunable Targeted Restyling
Parker Riley | Noah Constant | Mandy Guo | Girish Kumar | David Uthus | Zarana Parekh
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a novel approach to the problem of text style transfer. Unlike previous approaches requiring style-labeled training data, our method makes use of readily-available unlabeled text by relying on the implicit connection in style between adjacent sentences, and uses labeled data only at inference time. We adapt T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), a strong pretrained text-to-text model, to extract a style vector from text and use it to condition the decoder to perform style transfer. As our label-free training results in a style vector space encoding many facets of style, we recast transfers as “targeted restyling” vector operations that adjust specific attributes of the input while preserving others. We demonstrate that training on unlabeled Amazon reviews data results in a model that is competitive on sentiment transfer, even compared to models trained fully on labeled data. Furthermore, applying our novel method to a diverse corpus of unlabeled web text results in a single model capable of transferring along multiple dimensions of style (dialect, emotiveness, formality, politeness, sentiment) despite no additional training and using only a handful of exemplars at inference time.

2020

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Translationese as a Language in “Multilingual” NMT
Parker Riley | Isaac Caswell | Markus Freitag | David Grangier
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Machine translation has an undesirable propensity to produce “translationese” artifacts, which can lead to higher BLEU scores while being liked less by human raters. Motivated by this, we model translationese and original (i.e. natural) text as separate languages in a multilingual model, and pose the question: can we perform zero-shot translation between original source text and original target text? There is no data with original source and original target, so we train a sentence-level classifier to distinguish translationese from original target text, and use this classifier to tag the training data for an NMT model. Using this technique we bias the model to produce more natural outputs at test time, yielding gains in human evaluation scores on both accuracy and fluency. Additionally, we demonstrate that it is possible to bias the model to produce translationese and game the BLEU score, increasing it while decreasing human-rated quality. We analyze these outputs using metrics measuring the degree of translationese, and present an analysis of the volatility of heuristic-based train-data tagging.

2018

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Orthographic Features for Bilingual Lexicon Induction
Parker Riley | Daniel Gildea
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Recent embedding-based methods in bilingual lexicon induction show good results, but do not take advantage of orthographic features, such as edit distance, which can be helpful for pairs of related languages. This work extends embedding-based methods to incorporate these features, resulting in significant accuracy gains for related languages.

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Feature-Based Decipherment for Machine Translation
Iftekhar Naim | Parker Riley | Daniel Gildea
Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 3 - September 2018

Orthographic similarities across languages provide a strong signal for unsupervised probabilistic transduction (decipherment) for closely related language pairs. The existing decipherment models, however, are not well suited for exploiting these orthographic similarities. We propose a log-linear model with latent variables that incorporates orthographic similarity features. Maximum likelihood training is computationally expensive for the proposed log-linear model. To address this challenge, we perform approximate inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and contrastive divergence. Our results show that the proposed log-linear model with contrastive divergence outperforms the existing generative decipherment models by exploiting the orthographic features. The model both scales to large vocabularies and preserves accuracy in low- and no-resource contexts.