Wei Peng


2023

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Intent Discovery with Frame-guided Semantic Regularization and Augmentation
Yajing Sun | Rui Zhang | Jingyuan Yang | Wei Peng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Most existing intent discovery methods leverage representation learning and clustering to transfer the prior knowledge of known intents to unknown ones. The learned representations are limited to the syntactic forms of sentences, therefore, fall short of recognizing adequate variations under the same meaning of unknown intents. This paper proposes an approach utilizing frame knowledge as conceptual semantic guidance to bridge the gap between known intents representation learning and unknown intents clustering. Specifically, we employ semantic regularization to minimize the bidirectional KL divergence between model predictions for frame-based and sentence-based samples. Moreover, we construct a frame-guided data augmenter to capture intent-friendly semantic information and implement contrastive clustering learning for unsupervised sentence embedding. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method achieves substantial improvements in accuracy (5%+) compared to solid baselines.

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New Datasets and Controllable Iterative Data Augmentation Method for Code-switching ASR Error Correction
Zhaohong Wan | Xiaojun Wan | Wei Peng | Rongjun Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

With the wide use of automatic speech recognition(ASR) systems, researchers pay more attention to the ASR error correction task to improve the quality of recognition results. In particular, ASR in bilingual or multilingual settings, namely code-switching ASR, has greater challenges and research value. In this paper, we first present code-switching ASR correction datasets obtained from solid ASR systems and automatic annotators. The datasets contain Chinese-English code-switching dialogues of bilingual speakers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Based on this task, we propose a controllable iterative (CI) data augmentation method for improving the performance of mainstream ASR error correction systems. With a small amount of training data, our proposed method has the ability to iteratively produce abundant pseudo parallel data from the monolingual corpus for Chinese-English code-switching ASR correction. Results of experiments show that our method achieves the best performance compared with the rule-based, back-translation-based data augmentation methods and large language model ChatGPT.

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PROSE: A Pronoun Omission Solution for Chinese-English Spoken Language Translation
Ke Wang | Xiutian Zhao | Yanghui Li | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems encounter a significant challenge when translating a pro-drop (‘pronoun-dropping’) language (e.g., Chinese) to a non-pro-drop one (e.g., English), since the pro-drop phenomenon demands NMT systems to recover omitted pronouns. This unique and crucial task, however, lacks sufficient datasets for benchmarking. To bridge this gap, we introduce PROSE, a new benchmark featured in diverse pro-drop instances for document-level Chinese-English spoken language translation. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the pro-drop phenomenon in spoken Chinese on this dataset, reconfirming that pro-drop reduces the performance of NMT systems in Chinese-English translation. To alleviate the negative impact introduced by pro-drop, we propose Mention-Aware Semantic Augmentation, a novel approach that leverages the semantic embedding of dropped pronouns to augment training pairs. Results from the experiments on four Chinese-English translation corpora show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods regarding omitted pronoun retrieval and overall translation quality.

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M3Seg: A Maximum-Minimum Mutual Information Paradigm for Unsupervised Topic Segmentation in ASR Transcripts
Ke Wang | Xiutian Zhao | Yanghui Li | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Topic segmentation aims to detect topic boundaries and split automatic speech recognition transcriptions (e.g., meeting transcripts) into segments that are bounded by thematic meanings. In this work, we propose M3Seg, a novel Maximum-Minimum Mutual information paradigm for linear topic segmentation without using any parallel data. Specifically, by employing sentence representations provided by pre-trained language models, M3Seg first learns a region-based segment encoder based on the maximization of mutual information between the global segment representation and the local contextual sentence representation. Secondly, an edge-based boundary detection module aims to segment the whole by topics based on minimizing the mutual information between different segments. Experiment results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of M3Seg, which outperform the state-of-the-art methods by a significant (18%–37% improvement) margin.

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ORCHID: A Chinese Debate Corpus for Target-Independent Stance Detection and Argumentative Dialogue Summarization
Xiutian Zhao | Ke Wang | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Dialogue agents have been receiving increasing attention for years, and this trend has been further boosted by the recent progress of large language models (LLMs). Stance detection and dialogue summarization are two core tasks of dialogue agents in application scenarios that involve argumentative dialogues. However, research on these tasks is limited by the insufficiency of public datasets, especially for non-English languages. To address this language resource gap in Chinese, we present ORCHID (Oral Chinese Debate), the first Chinese dataset for benchmarking target-independent stance detection and debate summarization. Our dataset consists of 1,218 real-world debates that were conducted in Chinese on 476 unique topics, containing 2,436 stance-specific summaries and 14,133 fully annotated utterances. Besides providing a versatile testbed for future research, we also conduct an empirical study on the dataset and propose an integrated task. The results show the challenging nature of the dataset and suggest a potential of incorporating stance detection in summarization for argumentative dialogue.

2022

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Huawei BabelTar NMT at WMT22 Biomedical Translation Task: How We Further Improve Domain-specific NMT
Weixuan Wang | Xupeng Meng | Suqing Yan | Ye Tian | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center’s neural machine translation system (“BabelTar”). Our submission to the WMT22 biomedical translation shared task covers language directions between English and the other seven languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese). During the past four years, our participation in this domain-specific track has witnessed a paradigm shift of methodology from a purely data-driven focus to embracing diversified techniques, including pre-trained multilingual NMT models, homograph disambiguation, ensemble learning, and preprocessing methods. We illustrate practical insights and measured performance improvements relating to how we further improve our domain-specific NMT system.

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COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activities
Yuqiang Xie | Yue Hu | Wei Peng | Guanqun Bi | Luxi Xing
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Motivations, emotions, and actions are inter-related essential factors in human activities. While motivations and emotions have long been considered at the core of exploring how people take actions in human activities, there has been relatively little research supporting analyzing the relationship between human mental states and actions. We present the first study that investigates the viability of modeling motivations, emotions, and actions in language-based human activities, named COMMA (Cognitive Framework of Human Activities). Guided by COMMA, we define three natural language processing tasks (emotion understanding, motivation understanding and conditioned action generation), and build a challenging dataset Hail through automatically extracting samples from Story Commonsense. Experimental results on NLP applications prove the effectiveness of modeling the relationship. Furthermore, our models inspired by COMMA can better reveal the essential relationship among motivations, emotions and actions than existing methods.

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Cross-lingual Feature Extraction from Monolingual Corpora for Low-resource Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction
Zihao Feng | Hailong Cao | Tiejun Zhao | Weixuan Wang | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite their progress in high-resource language settings, unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (UBLI) models often fail on corpora with low-resource distant language pairs due to insufficient initialization. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual feature extraction (CFE) method to learn the cross-lingual features from monolingual corpora for low-resource UBLI, enabling representations of words with the same meaning leveraged by the initialization step. By integrating cross-lingual representations with pre-trained word embeddings in a fully unsupervised initialization on UBLI, the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on low-resource language pairs (EN-VI, EN-TH, EN-ZH, EN-JA). The ablation study also proves that the learned cross-lingual features can enhance the representational ability and robustness of the existing embedding model.

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Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation
Yuqiang Xie | Yue Hu | Yunpeng Li | Guanqun Bi | Luxi Xing | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Controllable story generation is a challenging task in the field of NLP, which has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. However, most existing works generate a whole story conditioned on the appointed keywords or emotions, ignoring the psychological changes of the protagonist. Inspired by psychology theories, we introduce global psychological state chains, which include the needs and emotions of the protagonists, to help a story generation system create more controllable and well-planned stories. In this paper, we propose a Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) to generate stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist. Specifically, psychological state trackers are employed to memorize the protagonist’s local psychological states to capture their inner temporal relationships. In addition, psychological state planners are adopted to gain the protagonist’s global psychological states for story planning. Eventually, a psychology controller is designed to integrate the local and global psychological states into the story context representation for composing psychology-guided stories. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PICS outperforms baselines, and each part of PICS shows effectiveness for writing stories with more consistent psychological changes.

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IRRGN: An Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Multi-turn Response Selection
Jingcheng Deng | Hengwei Dai | Xuewei Guo | Yuanchen Ju | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The task of response selection in multi-turn dialogue is to find the best option from all candidates. In order to improve the reasoning ability of the model, previous studies pay more attention to using explicit algorithms to model the dependencies between utterances, which are deterministic, limited and inflexible. In addition, few studies consider differences between the options before and after reasoning. In this paper, we propose an Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network to address these issues, which consists of the Utterance Relational Reasoner (URR) and the Option Dual Comparator (ODC). URR aims to implicitly extract dependencies between utterances, as well as utterances and options, and make reasoning with relational graph convolutional networks. ODC focuses on perceiving the difference between the options through dual comparison, which can eliminate the interference of the noise options. Experimental results on two multi-turn dialogue reasoning benchmark datasets MuTual and MuTualplus show that our method significantly improves the baseline of four pre-trained language models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The model surpasses human performance for the first time on the MuTual dataset.

2021

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When does Further Pre-training MLM Help? An Empirical Study on Task-Oriented Dialog Pre-training
Qi Zhu | Yuxian Gu | Lingxiao Luo | Bing Li | Cheng Li | Wei Peng | Minlie Huang | Xiaoyan Zhu
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

Further pre-training language models on in-domain data (domain-adaptive pre-training, DAPT) or task-relevant data (task-adaptive pre-training, TAPT) before fine-tuning has been shown to improve downstream tasks’ performances. However, in task-oriented dialog modeling, we observe that further pre-training MLM does not always boost the performance on a downstream task. We find that DAPT is beneficial in the low-resource setting, but as the fine-tuning data size grows, DAPT becomes less beneficial or even useless, and scaling the size of DAPT data does not help. Through Representational Similarity Analysis, we conclude that more data for fine-tuning yields greater change of the model’s representations and thus reduces the influence of initialization.

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Huawei AARC’s Submissions to the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task: Domain Adaption from a Practical Perspective
Weixuan Wang | Wei Peng | Xupeng Meng | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center’s neural machine translation systems and submissions to the WMT21 biomedical translation shared task. Four of the submissions achieve state-of-the-art BLEU scores based on the official-released automatic evaluation results (EN->FR, EN<->IT and ZH->EN). We perform experiments to unveil the practical insights of the involved domain adaptation techniques, including finetuning order, terminology dictionaries, and ensemble decoding. Issues associated with overfitting and under-translation are also discussed.

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HyKnow: End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling with Hybrid Knowledge Management
Silin Gao | Ryuichi Takanobu | Wei Peng | Qun Liu | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Neural Machine Translation with Heterogeneous Topic Knowledge Embeddings
Weixuan Wang | Wei Peng | Meng Zhang | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has shown a strong ability to utilize local context to disambiguate the meaning of words. However, it remains a challenge for NMT to leverage broader context information like topics. In this paper, we propose heterogeneous ways of embedding topic information at the sentence level into an NMT model to improve translation performance. Specifically, the topic information can be incorporated as pre-encoder topic embedding, post-encoder topic embedding, and decoder topic embedding to increase the likelihood of selecting target words from the same topic of the source sentence. Experimental results show that NMT models with the proposed topic knowledge embedding outperform the baselines on the English -> German and English -> French translation tasks.

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IIE-NLP-Eyas at SemEval-2021 Task 4: Enhancing PLM for ReCAM with Special Tokens, Re-Ranking, Siamese Encoders and Back Translation
Yuqiang Xie | Luxi Xing | Wei Peng | Yue Hu
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)

This paper introduces our systems for all three subtasks of SemEval-2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning. To help our model better represent and understand abstract concepts in natural language, we well-design many simple and effective approaches adapted to the backbone model (RoBERTa). Specifically, we formalize the subtasks into the multiple-choice question answering format and add special tokens to abstract concepts, then, the final prediction of QA is considered as the result of subtasks. Additionally, we employ many finetuning tricks to improve the performance. Experimental results show that our approach gains significant performance compared with the baseline systems. Our system achieves eighth rank (87.51%) and tenth rank (89.64%) on the official blind test set of subtask 1 and subtask 2 respectively.

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Robustness Testing of Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialog
Jiexi Liu | Ryuichi Takanobu | Jiaxin Wen | Dazhen Wan | Hongguang Li | Weiran Nie | Cheng Li | Wei Peng | Minlie Huang
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)

Most language understanding models in task-oriented dialog systems are trained on a small amount of annotated training data, and evaluated in a small set from the same distribution. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable output when being exposed to natural language perturbation or variation in practice. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive evaluation and analysis with respect to the robustness of natural language understanding models, and introduce three important aspects related to language understanding in real-world dialog systems, namely, language variety, speech characteristics, and noise perturbation. We propose a model-agnostic toolkit LAUG to approximate natural language perturbations for testing the robustness issues in task-oriented dialog. Four data augmentation approaches covering the three aspects are assembled in LAUG, which reveals critical robustness issues in state-of-the-art models. The augmented dataset through LAUG can be used to facilitate future research on the robustness testing of language understanding in task-oriented dialog.

2020

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BLiMP: A Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English
Alex Warstadt | Alicia Parrish | Haokun Liu | Anhad Mohananey | Wei Peng | Sheng-Fu Wang | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2020

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IIE-NLP-NUT at SemEval-2020 Task 4: Guiding PLM with Prompt Template Reconstruction Strategy for ComVE
Luxi Xing | Yuqiang Xie | Yue Hu | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper introduces our systems for the first two subtasks of SemEval Task4: Commonsense Validation and Explanation. To clarify the intention for judgment and inject contrastive information for selection, we propose the input reconstruction strategy with prompt templates. Specifically, we formalize the subtasks into the multiple-choice question answering format and construct the input with the prompt templates, then, the final prediction of question answering is considered as the result of subtasks. Experimental results show that our approaches achieve significant performance compared with the baseline systems. Our approaches secure the third rank on both official test sets of the first two subtasks with an accuracy of 96.4 and an accuracy of 94.3 respectively.

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metaCAT: A Metadata-based Task-oriented Chatbot Annotation Tool
Ximing Liu | Wei Xue | Qi Su | Weiran Nie | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Creating high-quality annotated dialogue corpora is challenging. It is essential to develop practical annotation tools to support humans in this time-consuming and error-prone task. We present metaCAT, which is an open-source web-based annotation tool designed specifically for developing task-oriented dialogue data. To the best of our knowledge, metaCAT is the first annotation tool that provides comprehensive metadata annotation coverage to the domain, intent, and span information. The data annotation quality is enhanced by a real-time annotation constraint-checking mechanism. An Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) function is implemented to allow users to paraphrase and create more diversified annotated utterances. metaCAT is publicly available for the community.

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BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English
Alex Warstadt | Alicia Parrish | Haokun Liu | Anhad Mohananey | Wei Peng | Sheng-Fu Wang | Samuel R. Bowman
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

We introduce The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs (BLiMP),1 a challenge set for evaluating the linguistic knowledge of language models (LMs) on major grammatical phenomena in English. BLiMP consists of 67 individual datasets, each containing 1,000 minimal pairs—that is, pairs of minimally different sentences that contrast in grammatical acceptability and isolate specific phenomenon in syntax, morphology, or semantics. We generate the data according to linguist-crafted grammar templates, and human aggregate agreement with the labels is 96.4%. We evaluate n-gram, LSTM, and Transformer (GPT-2 and Transformer-XL) LMs by observing whether they assign a higher probability to the acceptable sentence in each minimal pair. We find that state-of-the-art models identify morphological contrasts related to agreement reliably, but they struggle with some subtle semantic and syntactic phenomena, such as negative polarity items and extraction islands.

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Bi-directional CognitiveThinking Network for Machine Reading Comprehension
Wei Peng | Yue Hu | Luxi Xing | Yuqiang Xie | Jing Yu | Yajing Sun | Xiangpeng Wei
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We propose a novel Bi-directional Cognitive Knowledge Framework (BCKF) for reading comprehension from the perspective of complementary learning systems theory. It aims to simulate two ways of thinking in the brain to answer questions, including reverse thinking and inertial thinking. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we design a corresponding Bi-directional Cognitive Thinking Network (BCTN) to encode the passage and generate a question (answer) given an answer (question) and decouple the bi-directional knowledge. The model has the ability to reverse reasoning questions which can assist inertial thinking to generate more accurate answers. Competitive improvement is observed in DuReader dataset, confirming our hypothesis that bi-directional knowledge helps the QA task. The novel framework shows an interesting perspective on machine reading comprehension and cognitive science.

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Huawei’s Submissions to the WMT20 Biomedical Translation Task
Wei Peng | Jianfeng Liu | Minghan Wang | Liangyou Li | Xupeng Meng | Hao Yang | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes Huawei’s submissions to the WMT20 biomedical translation shared task. Apart from experimenting with finetuning on domain-specific bitexts, we explore effects of in-domain dictionaries on enhancing cross-domain neural machine translation performance. We utilize a transfer learning strategy through pre-trained machine translation models and extensive scope of engineering endeavors. Four of our ten submissions achieve state-of-the-art performance according to the official automatic evaluation results, namely translation directions on English<->French, English->German and English->Italian.

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Filtering Noisy Parallel Corpus using Transformers with Proxy Task Learning
Haluk Açarçiçek | Talha Çolakoğlu | Pınar Ece Aktan Hatipoğlu | Chong Hsuan Huang | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper illustrates Huawei’s submission to the WMT20 low-resource parallel corpus filtering shared task. Our approach focuses on developing a proxy task learner on top of a transformer-based multilingual pre-trained language model to boost the filtering capability for noisy parallel corpora. Such a supervised task also helps us to iterate much more quickly than using an existing neural machine translation system to perform the same task. After performing empirical analyses of the finetuning task, we benchmark our approach by comparing the results with past years’ state-of-theart records. This paper wraps up with a discussion of limitations and future work. The scripts for this study will be made publicly available.

2019

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Investigating BERT’s Knowledge of Language: Five Analysis Methods with NPIs
Alex Warstadt | Yu Cao | Ioana Grosu | Wei Peng | Hagen Blix | Yining Nie | Anna Alsop | Shikha Bordia | Haokun Liu | Alicia Parrish | Sheng-Fu Wang | Jason Phang | Anhad Mohananey | Phu Mon Htut | Paloma Jeretic | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Though state-of-the-art sentence representation models can perform tasks requiring significant knowledge of grammar, it is an open question how best to evaluate their grammatical knowledge. We explore five experimental methods inspired by prior work evaluating pretrained sentence representation models. We use a single linguistic phenomenon, negative polarity item (NPI) licensing, as a case study for our experiments. NPIs like any are grammatical only if they appear in a licensing environment like negation (Sue doesn’t have any cats vs. *Sue has any cats). This phenomenon is challenging because of the variety of NPI licensing environments that exist. We introduce an artificially generated dataset that manipulates key features of NPI licensing for the experiments. We find that BERT has significant knowledge of these features, but its success varies widely across different experimental methods. We conclude that a variety of methods is necessary to reveal all relevant aspects of a model’s grammatical knowledge in a given domain.

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Huawei’s NMT Systems for the WMT 2019 Biomedical Translation Task
Wei Peng | Jianfeng Liu | Liangyou Li | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

This paper describes Huawei’s neural machine translation systems for the WMT 2019 biomedical translation shared task. We trained and fine-tuned our systems on a combination of out-of-domain and in-domain parallel corpora for six translation directions covering English–Chinese, English–French and English–German language pairs. Our submitted systems achieve the best BLEU scores on English–French and English–German language pairs according to the official evaluation results. In the English–Chinese translation task, our systems are in the second place. The enhanced performance is attributed to more in-domain training and more sophisticated models developed. Development of translation models and transfer learning (or domain adaptation) methods has significantly contributed to the progress of the task.