Samsung Research and Samsung R&D Institute Poland (SRPOL) participated in a competition between scientific groups and laboratories to compare the quality of their translation tools. Teams from all over the world participated in the eight machine translation task competitions, from those representing widely known companies to research groups from various universities.

Samsung Research Global AI Center’s Language Lab participated in the Biomedical Translation task, which aims to evaluate systems for translating sentences from the biomedical domain. The task addressed a total of 14 language pairs, including English, French, German and Spanish. The team won first prize for effectively translating two language pairs: English → Spanish and Spanish → English. This was a particularly impressive feat due to the biomedical field’s frequent use of domain terminology.

In the case of domain-specific translation, one of the big factors that determine translation quality is terminology translation. Even with the same word, the translated word may vary depending on the domain, and compared to general terms, technical terms are used less frequently, making it difficult to learn. Considering these limitations, Samsung Research Global AI Center’s Language Lab improved domain-specific translation performance by incorporating soft-constrained terminology translation, which provides the terminology constraints of the target language as input with source sentences like a hint, and improved the domain terminology to be reflected in translation results as much as possible. Currently, Samsung Research is conducting research on domain-specific translation, including providing patent translation service (Korean—English) on Samsung Research’s translation service “SR Translate” (https://translate.samsung.com).

▲ Samsung Research Global AI Center’s Language Lab

SRPOL also participated in two General Machine Translation tasks, achieving high ranks by placing second for English → Russian and English → Croatian.

During the competitions, WMT only provides teams with a limited amount of corpora, collections of structured texts, to be analyzed for their translation model. Therefore, the SRPOL team attributed their success to focusing on improving the quality of corpora through processes like data preprocessing and filtering. In addition, the team focused on optimizing their model’s architecture and AI training process.

Using the improved corpus, SRPOL’s Machine Translation Team built a classifier using a machine learning framework called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). This classifier successfully categorized millions of sentences from the corpus into different domains. As a result, SRPOL was able to create models for not only general translation but also medical and legal.

SRPOL has been performing well in the field of machine translation, winning the challenges at the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), one of the world’s longest-running workshops on automatic language translation, for four consecutive years from 2017 to 2020.

Now more than ever, the goal of attaining a human-like level of language understanding seems to be within our grasp. As machine translation and language understanding slowly become an integral part of our everyday lives, Samsung will stay at the forefront of this technology to design the tools to overcome language barriers and improve your daily life.

▲ Samsung R&D Institute Poland

Samsung R&D Institute Poland at IWSLT 2019

2019 marks the third year in a row that Samsung R&D Institute Poland, in partnership with the U.K.’s University of Edinburgh (UEDIN), has received accolades at the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), one of the top two global workshops on automatic language translation, along with the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT). This year, Samsung R&D Institute Poland won first place in two categories, the first being text-to-text translation from English to Czech and the second – an end-to-end system translating English speech into German text.

For the text-to-text translation category, researchers worked to develop a model to translate the transcript of a spoken English-language TED Talk into Czech. Developing their winning model required the Samsung team to develop large, filtered corpora from which to work and generate as much synthetic data as possible. The work done by the Samsung R&D Institute Poland team, together with additional modeling help from UEDIN, was selected as the best in the challenge by human evaluators. This means that the translations produced by Samsung R&D Institute Poland’s system scored the highest both in fluency and adequacy.

Samsung R&D Institute Poland’s participation in their second winning category this year, the end-to-end translation system from English to German, was a first for the team. The task was to produce a German-language transcription of an English-language TED Talk audio recording. This task required the development of a single model that could take an audio file input and subsequently produce a translated transcription. It was made more difficult by the deficiency of the provided audio sources, compared to typical speech recognition task. Samsung R&D Institute Poland proposed several innovative methods for end-to-end speech translation that mitigated this source paucity, obtaining a state-of-the-art result with their final system that won them first place in the challenge.

Samsung Research America at ICCV 2019

This October, researchers from Samsung Research America’s AI Center received first place in the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)’s challenge: Linguistic Meets Image and Video Retrieval (Fashion IQ). ICCV is a premier international computer vision conference that took place in Seoul, Korea, this year.

The challenge Samsung Research America AI Center took part in, sponsored by IBM research, aims to develop conversational shopping assistants that are more natural and real-world applicable. The task given to Samsung Research America AI Center‘s team, the ‘Superraptors’, belonged to the domain of image retrieval. In the task, an input query was specified in the form of a candidate image as well as in two natural language expressions that describe the visual differences of the search target. The goal of this challenge was to gather opinions and experience from researchers on the emerging space of visual content retrieval with a natural language interface.

Samsung Research America AI Center’s submission to the challenge, “Multimodal Ensemble of Diverse Models for Image Retrieval Using Natural Language Feedback”, blended the given data in different modalities with multiple deep learning models. The team’s win marks the first time a Samsung Research team has won a multimodal (language and vision) challenge; previously, Samsung AI Center Moscow, Samsung R&D Institute Poland and Samsung R&D Institute China-Beijing have received awards in single modality challenges.