Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland) - Divergences in Neural Machine Translation

Speaker: Marine Carpuat, University of Maryland

Talk Title: Divergences in Neural Machine Translation

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Despite the explosion of online content worldwide, much information remains isolated by language barriers. While deep neural networks have dramatically improved machine translation (MT), truly breaking language barriers requires not only translating accurately, but also understanding what is said and how it is said across languages. I will first challenge the assumption that translation always preserves meaning, and discuss how to automatically detect when the meaning of a translation diverges from its source. Next, I will show how modeling divergences between MT model hypotheses and reference human translations can improve MT. Finally, I will argue that translation does not necessarily need to preserve all properties of the input and introduce a family of models that let us tailor translation style while preserving input meaning. Taken together, these results illustrate how modeling divergences from common assumptions about translation data can not only improve MT, but also broaden the framing of MT to make it more responsive to user needs.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

Biography: Marine Carpuat is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on multilingual natural language processing and machine translation. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, she was a Research Scientist at the National Research Council Canada. She received a PhD in Computer Science and a MPhil in Electrical Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and a Diplome d'Ingenieur from the French Grande Ecole Supelec. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, research awards from Google and Amazon, best paper awards at *SEM and TALN, and an Outstanding Teaching Award.

Host: Yan Liu

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair