Ahmet Gunduz


2024

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An Automated End-to-End Open-Source Software for High-Quality Text-to-Speech Dataset Generation
Ahmet Gunduz | Kamer Ali Yuksel | Kareem Darwish | Golara Javadi | Fabio Minazzi | Nicola Sobieski | Sébastien Bratières
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Data availability is crucial for advancing artificial intelligence applications, including voice-based technologies. As content creation, particularly in social media, experiences increasing demand, translation and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies have become essential tools. Notably, the performance of these TTS technologies is highly dependent on the quality of the training data, emphasizing the mutual dependence of data availability and technological progress. This paper introduces an end-to-end tool to generate high-quality datasets for text-to-speech (TTS) models to address this critical need for high-quality data. The contributions of this work are manifold and include: the integration of language-specific phoneme distribution into sample selection, automation of the recording process, automated and human-in-the-loop quality assurance of recordings, and processing of recordings to meet specified formats. The proposed application aims to streamline the dataset creation process for TTS models through these features, thereby facilitating advancements in voice-based technologies.

2023

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EvolveMT: an Ensemble MT Engine Improving Itself with Usage Only
Kamer Yüksel | Ahmet Gunduz | Mohamed Al-badrashiny | Hassan Sawaf
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

This work proposes a method named EvolveMT for the efficient combination of multiple machine translation (MT) engines. The method selects the output from one engine for each segment, using online learning techniques to predict the most appropriate system for each translation request. A neural quality estimation metric supervises the method without requiring reference translations. The method’s online learning capability enables it to adapt to changes in the domain or MT engines dynamically, eliminating the requirement for retraining. The method selects a subset of translation engines to be called based on the source sentence features. The degree of exploration is configurable according to the desired quality-cost trade-off. Results from custom datasets demonstrate that EvolveMT achieves similar translation accuracy at a lower cost than selecting the best translation of each segment from all translations using an MT quality estimator. To the best of our knowledge, EvolveMT is the first MT system that adapts itself after deployment to incoming translation requests from the production environment without needing costly retraining on human feedback.

2022

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Efficient Machine Translation Corpus Generation
Kamer Ali Yuksel | Ahmet Gunduz | Shreyas Sharma | Hassan Sawaf
Proceedings of the 15th biennial conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Workshop 2: Corpus Generation and Corpus Augmentation for Machine Translation)

This paper proposes an efficient and semi-automated method for human-in-the-loop post- editing for machine translation (MT) corpus generation. The method is based on online training of a custom MT quality estimation metric on-the-fly as linguists perform post-edits. The online estimator is used to prioritize worse hypotheses for post-editing, and auto-close best hypothe- ses without post-editing. This way, significant improvements can be achieved in the resulting quality of post-edits at a lower cost due to reduced human involvement. The trained estimator can also provide an online sanity check mechanism for post-edits and remove the need for ad- ditional linguists to review them or work on the same hypotheses. In this paper, the effect of prioritizing with the proposed method on the resulting MT corpus quality is presented versus scheduling hypotheses randomly. As demonstrated by experiments, the proposed method im- proves the lifecycle of MT models by focusing the linguist effort on production samples and hypotheses, which matter most for expanding MT corpora to be used for re-training them