Articles

AbstractDeep learning (DL) techniques involving fine-tuning large numbers of model parameters have delivered impressive performance on the task of discriminating between language produced by cognitively healthy individuals, and those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, questions remain about their ability to generalize beyond the small reference sets that are publicly available …...

AbstractWhile GPT has become the de-facto method for text generation tasks, its application to pinyin input method remains unexplored. In this work, we make the first exploration to leverage Chinese GPT for pinyin input method. We find that a frozen GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin. However, the performance …...

AbstractStructured pruning has been extensively studied on monolingual pre-trained language models and is yet to be fully evaluated on their multilingual counterparts. This work investigates three aspects of structured pruning on multilingual pre-trained language models: settings, algorithms, and efficiency. Experiments on nine downstream tasks show several counter-intuitive phenomena: for settings, …...

AbstractPre-trained contextual representations have led to dramatic performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks. Such performance improvements have motivated researchers to quantify and understand the linguistic information encoded in these representations. In general, researchers quantify the amount of linguistic information through probing, an endeavor which consists of training a …...

AbstractOpen-domain questions are likely to be open-ended and ambiguous, leading to multiple valid answers. Existing approaches typically adopt the rerank-then-read framework, where a reader reads top-ranking evidence to predict answers. According to our empirical analysis, this framework faces three problems: first, to leverage a large reader under a memory constraint, …...

AbstractGender bias is largely recognized as a problematic phenomenon affecting language technologies, with recent studies underscoring that it might surface differently across languages. However, most of current evaluation practices adopt a word-level focus on a narrow set of occupational nouns under synthetic conditions. Such protocols overlook key features of grammatical …...

AbstractCrowdsourcing has emerged as a popular approach for collecting annotated data to train supervised machine learning models. However, annotator bias can lead to defective annotations. Though there are a few works investigating individual annotator bias, the group effects in annotators are largely overlooked. In this work, we reveal that annotators …...

AbstractRecent work has shown pre-trained language models capture social biases from the large amounts of text they are trained on. This has attracted attention to developing techniques that mitigate such biases. In this work, we perform an empirical survey of five recently proposed bias mitigation techniques: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA), …...

AbstractFine-tuning the entire set of parameters of a large pretrained model has become the mainstream approach for transfer learning. To increase its efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting and interference, techniques like adapters and sparse fine-tuning have been developed. Adapters are modular, as they can be combined to adapt a model …...

AbstractWith the increasing popularity of posting multimodal messages online, many recent studies have been carried out utilizing both textual and visual information for multi-modal sarcasm detection. In this paper, we investigate multi-modal sarcasm detection from a novel perspective by constructing a cross-modal graph for each instance to explicitly draw the …...

AbstractIt has been shown that machine translation models usually generate poor translations for named entities that are infrequent in the training corpus. Earlier named entity translation methods mainly focus on phonetic transliteration, which ignores the sentence context for translation and is limited in domain and language coverage. To address this …...

AbstractPersonalized language models are designed and trained to capture language patterns specific to individual users. This makes them more accurate at predicting what a user will write. However, when a new user joins a platform and not enough text is available, it is harder to build effective personalized language models. …...

AbstractA language-independent representation of meaning is one of the most coveted dreams in Natural Language Understanding. With this goal in mind, several formalisms have been proposed as frameworks for meaning representation in Semantic Parsing. And yet, the dependencies these formalisms share with respect to language-specific repositories of knowledge make the …...

AbstractWe present a framework for learning hierarchical policies from demonstrations, using sparse natural language annotations to guide the discovery of reusable skills for autonomous decision-making. We formulate a generative model of action sequences in which goals generate sequences of high-level subtask descriptions, and these descriptions generate sequences of low-level actions. …...

AbstractNatural language processing for sign language video—including tasks like recognition, translation, and search—is crucial for making artificial intelligence technologies accessible to deaf individuals, and is gaining research interest in recent years. In this paper, we address the problem of searching for fingerspelled keywords or key phrases in raw sign language …...

AbstractTransformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on short-input summarization. However, they still struggle with summarizing longer text. In this paper, we present DYLE, a novel dynamic latent extraction approach for abstractive long-input summarization. DYLE jointly trains an extractor and a generator and treats the extracted text snippets as the latent …...

AbstractDeep NLP models have been shown to be brittle to input perturbations. Recent work has shown that data augmentation using counterfactuals — i.e. minimally perturbed inputs — can help ameliorate this weakness. We focus on the task of creating counterfactuals for question answering, which presents unique challenges related to world …...

AbstractSince the development and wide use of pretrained language models (PLMs), several approaches have been applied to boost their performance on downstream tasks in specific domains, such as biomedical or scientific domains. Additional pre-training with in-domain texts is the most common approach for providing domain-specific knowledge to PLMs. However, these …...

AbstractOver the last few years, there has been a move towards data curation for multilingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems that can serve people speaking different languages. However, existing multilingual ToD datasets either have a limited coverage of languages due to the high cost of data curation, or ignore the fact …...

AbstractRound-trip Machine Translation (MT) is a popular choice for paraphrase generation, which leverages readily available parallel corpora for supervision. In this paper, we formalize the implicit similarity function induced by this approach, and show that it is susceptible to non-paraphrase pairs sharing a single ambiguous translation. Based on these insights, …...