This paper describes the University of Helsinki Language Technology group’s participation in the IWSLT 2020 offline speech translation task, addressing the translation of English audio into German text. In line with this year’s task objective, we train both cascade and end-to-end systems for spoken language translation. We opt for an end-to-end multitasking architecture with shared internal representations and a cascade approach that follows a standard procedure consisting of ASR, correction, and MT stages. We also describe the experiments that served as a basis for the submitted systems. Our experiments reveal that multitasking training with shared internal representations is not only possible but allows for knowledge-transfer across modalities.

In this paper we present the University of Helsinki submissions to the WMT 2019 shared news translation task in three language pairs : English-German, English-Finnish and Finnish-English. This year we focused first on cleaning and filtering the training data using multiple data-filtering approaches, resulting in much smaller and cleaner training sets. For English-German we trained both sentence-level transformer models as well as compared different document-level translation approaches. For Finnish-English and English-Finnish we focused on different segmentation approaches and we also included a rule-based system for English-Finnish.

This paper describes the University of Helsinki Language Technology group’s participation in the WMT 2019 parallel corpus filtering task. Our scores were produced using a two-step strategy. First, we individually applied a series of filters to remove the ‘bad’ quality sentences. Then, we produced scores for each sentence by weighting these features with a classification model. This methodology allowed us to build a simple and reliable system that is easily adaptable to other language pairs.

With the growth of the social web, user-generated text data has reached unprecedented sizes. Non-canonical text normalization provides a way to exploit this as a practical source of training data for language processing systems. The state of the art in Turkish text normalization is composed of a token level pipeline of modules, heavily dependent on external linguistic resources and manually defined rules. Instead, we propose a fully automated, context-aware machine translation approach with fewer stages of processing. Experiments with various implementations of our approach show that we are able to surpass the current best-performing system by a large margin.

This paper describes the MeMAD project entry to the IWSLT Speech Translation Shared Task, addressing the translation of English audio into German text. Between the pipeline and end-to-end model tracks, we participated only in the former, with three contrastive systems. We tried also the latter, but were not able to finish our end-to-end model in time. All of our systems start by transcribing the audio into text through an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model trained on the TED-LIUM English Speech Recognition Corpus (TED-LIUM). Afterwards, we feed the transcripts into English-German text-based neural machine translation (NMT) models. Our systems employ three different translation models trained on separate training sets compiled from the English-German part of the TED Speech Translation Corpus (TED-TRANS) and the OPENSUBTITLES2018 section of the OPUS collection. In this paper, we also describe the experiments leading up to our final systems. Our experiments indicate that using OPENSUBTITLES2018 in training significantly improves translation performance. We also experimented with various preand postprocessing routines for the NMT module, but we did not have much success with these. Our best-scoring system attains a BLEU score of 16.45 on the test set for this year’s task.

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2017, the task was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. In this paper, we define the task and evaluation methodology, describe how the data sets were prepared, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems.