Articles

AbstractWhile much research has been done in text-to-image synthesis, little work has been done to explore the usage of linguistic structure of the input text. Such information is even more important for story visualization since its inputs have an explicit narrative structure that needs to be translated into an image …...

AbstractWe propose Visual News Captioner, an entity-aware model for the task of news image captioning. We also introduce Visual News, a large-scale benchmark consisting of more than one million news images along with associated news articles, image captions, author information, and other metadata. Unlike the standard image captioning task, news …...

AbstractAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are often optimized to work best for speakers with canonical speech patterns. Unfortunately, these systems perform poorly when tested on atypical speech and heavily accented speech. It has previously been shown that personalization through model fine-tuning substantially improves performance. However, maintaining such large models per …...

AbstractInteractive machine reading comprehension (iMRC) is machine comprehension tasks where knowledge sources are partially observable. An agent must interact with an environment sequentially to gather necessary knowledge in order to answer a question. We hypothesize that graph representations are good inductive biases, which can serve as an agent’s memory mechanism …...

AbstractWe propose a novel scheme to use the Levenshtein Transformer to perform the task of word-level quality estimation. A Levenshtein Transformer is a natural fit for this task: trained to perform decoding in an iterative manner, a Levenshtein Transformer can learn to post-edit without explicit supervision. To further minimize the …...

AbstractRecent multilingual pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance, where the model is only finetuned on one source language and directly evaluated on target languages. In this work, we propose a self-learning framework that further utilizes unlabeled data of target languages, combined with uncertainty estimation in the process to …...

AbstractTask-oriented conversational systems often use dialogue state tracking to represent the user’s intentions, which involves filling in values of pre-defined slots. Many approaches have been proposed, often using task-specific architectures with special-purpose classifiers. Recently, good results have been obtained using more general architectures based on pretrained language models. Here, we …...

AbstractNext generation task-oriented dialog systems need to understand conversational contexts with their perceived surroundings, to effectively help users in the real-world multimodal environment. Existing task-oriented dialog datasets aimed towards virtual assistance fall short and do not situate the dialog in the user’s multimodal context. To overcome, we present a new …...

AbstractDialogue disentanglement aims to group utterances in a long and multi-participant dialogue into threads. This is useful for discourse analysis and downstream applications such as dialogue response selection, where it can be the first step to construct a clean context/response set. Unfortunately, labeling all reply-to links takes quadratic effort w.r.t …...

AbstractWith the early success of query-answer assistants such as Alexa and Siri, research attempts to expand system capabilities of handling service automation are now abundant. However, preliminary systems have quickly found the inadequacy in relying on simple classification techniques to effectively accomplish the automation task. The main challenge is that …...

AbstractRecent work in open-domain conversational agents has demonstrated that significant improvements in humanness and user preference can be achieved via massive scaling in both pre-training data and model size (Adiwardana et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2020). However, if we want to build agents with human-like abilities, we must expand …...

AbstractDialogue models trained on human conversations inadvertently learn to generate toxic responses. In addition to producing explicitly offensive utterances, these models can also implicitly insult a group or individual by aligning themselves with an offensive statement. To better understand the dynamics of contextually offensive language, we investigate the stance of …...

AbstractThe Internet is home to thousands of communities, each with their own unique worldview and associated ideological differences. With new communities constantly emerging and serving as ideological birthplaces, battlegrounds, and bunkers, it is critical to develop a framework for understanding worldviews and ideological distinction. Most existing work, however, takes a …...

AbstractFor over thirty years, researchers have developed and analyzed methods for latent tree induction as an approach for unsupervised syntactic parsing. Nonetheless, modern systems still do not perform well enough compared to their supervised counterparts to have any practical use as structural annotation of text. In this work, we present …...

AbstractWe explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to focus on the macro level and not on the level of individual …...

AbstractThis paper introduces a novel approach to learn visually grounded meaning representations of words as low-dimensional node embeddings on an underlying graph hierarchy. The lower level of the hierarchy models modality-specific word representations, conditioned to another modality, through dedicated but communicating graphs, while the higher level puts these representations together …...

AbstractRecent work has shown that monolingual masked language models learn to represent data-driven notions of language variation which can be used for domain-targeted training data selection. Dataset genre labels are already frequently available, yet remain largely unexplored in cross-lingual setups. We harness this genre metadata as a weak supervision signal …...

AbstractWe aim to automatically identify human action reasons in online videos. We focus on the widespread genre of lifestyle vlogs, in which people perform actions while verbally describing them. We introduce and make publicly available the WhyAct dataset, consisting of 1,077 visual actions manually annotated with their reasons. We describe …...

AbstractVisual Dialog is assumed to require the dialog history to generate correct responses during a dialog. However, it is not clear from previous work how dialog history is needed for visual dialog. In this paper we define what it means for a visual question to require dialog history and we …...

AbstractPre-trained language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in solving various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There has been increasing interest in what knowledge these LMs contain and how we can extract that knowledge, treating LMs as knowledge bases (KBs). While there has been much work on probing LMs in the …...