Dan R. DeGenaro

This paper presents DC_DMV‘s submission to the AmericasNLP 2024 Shared Task 1: Machine Translation Systems for Indigenous Languages. Our submission consists of two multilingual approaches to building machine translation systems from Spanish to eleven Indigenous languages: fine-tuning the 600M distilled variant of NLLB-200, and an experiment in training from scratch a neural network using the Mamba State Space Modeling architecture. We achieve the best results on the test set for a total of 4 of the language pairs between two checkpoints by fine-tuning NLLB-200, and outperform the baseline score on the test set for 2 languages.

Videos inherently contain multiple modalities, including visual events, text overlays, sounds, and speech, all of which are important for retrieval. However, state-of-the-art multimodal language models like VAST and LanguageBind are built on vision-language models (VLMs), and thus overly prioritize visual signals. Retrieval benchmarks further reinforce this bias by focusing on visual queries and neglecting other modalities. We create a search system MMMORRF that extracts text and features from both visual and audio modalities and integrates them with a novel modality-aware weighted reciprocal rank fusion. MMMORRF is both effective and efficient, demonstrating practicality in searching videos based on users’ information needs instead of visual descriptive queries. We evaluate MMMORRF on MultiVENT 2.0 and TVR, two multimodal benchmarks designed for more targeted information needs, and find that it improves nDCG@20 by 81% over leading multimodal encoders and 37% over single-modality retrieval.

Despite recent advancements in neural retrieval, representing text fragments or phrases with proper contextualized embeddings is still challenging. Particularly in video retrieval, where documents are text extracted through OCR from the frames or ASR from audio tracks, the textual content is rarely complete sentences but only a bag of phrases. In this work, we propose FORTIFY, a generative model fine-tuning approach for noisy document rewriting and summarization, to improve the downstream retrieval effectiveness. By experimenting on MultiVENT 2.0, an informational video retrieval benchmark, we show Llama fine-tuned with FORTIFY provides an effective document expansion, leading to a 30% improvement over prompting an out-of-box Llama model on nDCG@10. Zero-shot transferring the model tailored for MultiVENT 2.0 to two out-of-distribution datasets still demonstrates competitive retrieval effectiveness to other document preprocessing alternatives.