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Multilingual models, such as M-BERT and XLM-R, have gained increasing popularity, due to their zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities. However, their generalization ability is still inconsistent for typologically diverse languages and across different benchmarks. Recently, meta-learning has garnered attention as a promising technique for enhancing transfer learning under low-resource scenarios: particularly for cross-lingual transfer in Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

In this work, we propose X-METRA-ADA, a cross-lingual MEta-TRAnsfer learning ADAptation approach for NLU. Our approach adapts MAML, an optimization-based meta-learning approach, to learn to adapt to new languages. We extensively evaluate our framework on two challenging cross-lingual NLU tasks: multilingual task-oriented dialog and typologically diverse question answering. We show that our approach outperforms naive fine-tuning, reaching competitive performance on both tasks for most languages. Our analysis reveals that X-METRA-ADA can leverage limited data for faster adaptation.


NAACL 2021

X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

Relation prediction informed from a combination of text corpora and curated knowledge bases, combining knowledge graph completion with relation extraction, is a relatively little studied task. A system that can perform this task has the ability to extend an arbitrary set of relational database tables with information extracted from a document corpus. OpenKi[1] addresses this task through extraction of named entities and predicates via OpenIE tools then learning relation embeddings from the resulting entity-relation graph for relation prediction, outperforming previous approaches. We present an extension of OpenKi that incorporates embeddings of text-based representations of the entities and the relations. We demonstrate that this results in a substantial performance increase over a system without this information.


Integrating Lexical Information into Entity Neighbourhood Representations for Relation Prediction

Existing work on tabular representationlearning jointly models tables and associated text using self-supervised objective functions derived from pretrained language models such as BERT. While this joint pretraining improves tasks involving paired tables and text (e.g., answering questions about tables), we show that it underperforms on tasks that operate over tables without any associated text (e.g., populating missing cells). We devise a simple pretraining objective (corrupt cell detection) that learns exclusively from tabular data and reaches the state-of-the-art on a suite of tablebased prediction tasks. Unlike competing approaches, our model (TABBIE) provides embeddings of all table substructures (cells, rows,and columns), and it also requires far less compute to train. A qualitative analysis of our model’s learned cell, column, and row representations shows that it understands complex table semantics and numerical trends.


TABBIE: Pretrained Representations of Tabular Data

Recent studies in deep learning have shown significant progress in named entity recognition (NER). Most existing works assume clean data annotation, yet a fundamental challenge in real-world scenarios is a large amount of noise from a variety of sources (e.g., pseudo, weak, or distant annotations) which could degrade the model performance significantly. This work studies NER under a noisy labeled setting with calibrated confidence estimation. Based on empirical observations of different training dynamics of noisy and clean labels, we propose strategies for estimating confidence scores based on local and global independence assumptions. We partially marginalize out labels of low confidence with a CRF model. We further propose a calibration method for confidence scores based on the structure of entity labels. We integrate our approach into a self-training framework for boosting performance. 


Noisy-Labeled NER with Confidence Estimation

It has been shown that named entity recognition (NER) could benefit from incorporating the long-distance structured information captured by dependency trees. We believe this is because both types of features - the contextual information captured by the linear sequences and the structured information captured by the dependency trees may complement each other. However, existing approaches largely focused on stacking the LSTM and graph neural networks such as graph convolutional networks (GCNs) for building improved NER models, where the exact interaction mechanism between the two types of features is not very clear, and the performance gain does not appear to be significant. In this work, we propose a simple and robust solution to incorporate both types of features with our Synergized-LSTM (Syn-LSTM), which clearly captures how the two types of features interact. We conduct extensive experiments on several standard datasets across four languages. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than previous approaches while requiring fewer parameters. Our further analysis demonstrates that our model can capture longer dependencies compared with strong baselines.


Better Feature Integration for Named Entity Recognition

Event coreference resolution is an important research problem with many applications. Despite the recent remarkable success of pretrained language models, we argue that it is still highly beneficial to utilize symbolic features for the task. However, as the input for coreference resolution typically comes from upstream components in the information extraction pipeline, the automatically extracted symbolic features can be noisy and contain errors. Also, depending on the specific context, some features can be more informative than others. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel context-dependent gated module to adaptively control the information flows from the input symbolic features. Combined with a simple noisy training method, our best models achieve state-of-the-art results on two datasets: ACE 2005 and KBP 2016.


A Context-Dependent Gated Module for Incorporating Symbolic Semantics into Event Coreference Resolution

Story generation is an open-ended and subjective task, which poses a challenge for evaluating story generation models. We present Choose your own Adventure, a collaborative writing setup for pairwise model evaluation. Two models generate suggestions to people as they write a short story; we ask writers to choose one of the two suggestions, and we observe which model's suggestions they prefer. The setup also allows further analysis based on the revisions people make to the suggestions. We show that these measures, combined with automatic metrics, provide an informative picture of the models' performance, both in cases where the differences in generation methods are small (nucleus vs. top-k sampling) and large (GPT2 vs. Fusion models).


Choose Your Own Adventure: Paired Suggestions in Collaborative Writing for Evaluating Story Generation Models

We propose Future Discriminators for Generation (FUDGE), a flexible and modular method for controlled text generation. Given a preexisting model G for generating text from a distribution of interest, FUDGE enables conditioning on a desired attribute a (for example, formality) while requiring access only to G’s output logits. FUDGE learns an attribute predictor operating on a partial sequence, and uses this predictor’s outputs to adjust G’s original probabilities. We show that FUDGE models terms
corresponding to a Bayesian decomposition of the conditional distribution of G given attribute a. Moreover, FUDGE can easily compose predictors for multiple desired attributes. We evaluate FUDGE on three tasks — couplet completion in poetry, topic control in language generation, and formality change in machine translation — and observe gains in all three tasks.


FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminators

Text Simplification improves the readability of sentences through several rewriting transformations, such as lexical paraphrasing, deletion, and splitting. Current simplification systems are predominantly sequence-to-sequence models that are trained end-to-end to perform all these operations simultaneously. However, such systems limit themselves to mostly deleting words and cannot easily adapt to the requirements of different target audiences. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach that leverages linguistically motivated rules for splitting and deletion, and couples them with a neural paraphrasing model to produce varied rewriting styles. We introduce a new data augmentation method to improve the paraphrasing capability of our model. Through automatic and manual evaluations, we show that our proposed model establishes a new state-of-the-art for the task, paraphrasing more often than the existing systems, and can control the degree of each simplification operation applied to the input texts.


Controllable Text Simplification with Explicit Paraphrasing

Prior work on Data-To-Text Generation, the task of converting knowledge graph (KG) triples into natural text, focused on domain-specific benchmark datasets. In this paper, however, we verbalize the entire English Wikidata KG, and discuss the unique challenges associated with a broad, open-domain, large-scale verbalization. We further show that verbalizing a comprehensive, encyclopedic KG like Wikidata can be used to integrate structured KGs and natural language corpora. In contrast to the many architectures that have been developed to integrate these two sources, our approach converts the KG into natural text, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated into existing language models. It carries the further advantages of improved factual accuracy and reduced toxicity in the resulting language model. We evaluate this approach by augmenting the retrieval corpus in a retrieval language model and showing significant improvements on the knowledge intensive tasks of open domain QA and the LAMA knowledge probe.


Knowledge Graph Based Synthetic Corpus Generation for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model Pre-training

Limerick generation exemplifies some of the most difficult challenges faced in poetry generation, as the poems must tell a story in only five lines, with constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter. To address these challenges, we introduce LimGen, a novel and fully automated system for limerick generation that outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based poetry models, as well as prior rule-based poetry models. LimGen con-sists of three important pieces: the Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint algorithm that constrains our search to the space of realistic poems, the Multi-Templated Beam Search algorithm which searches efficiently through the space, and the probabilistic Storyline algorithm that provides coherent storylines related to a user-provided prompt word. The resulting limericks satisfy poetic constraints and have thematically coherent storylines, which are sometimes even funny (when we are lucky).


X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering

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Integrating Lexical Information into Entity Neighbourhood Representations for Relation Prediction

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Better Feature Integration for Named Entity Recognition