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Predicting the answer to a product-related question is an emerging field of research that recently attracted a lot of attention. Answering subjective and opinion-based questions is most challenging due to the dependency on customer-generated content. Previous works mostly focused on review-aware answer prediction; however, these approaches fail for new or unpopular products, having no (or only a few) reviews at hand.

NAACL 2021

Answering Product-Questions by Utilizing Questions from Other Contextually Similar Products

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

Successful methods for unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) employ crosslingual pretraining via self-supervision, often in the form of a masked language modeling or a sequence generation task, which requires the model to align the lexical- and high-level representations of the two languages. While cross-lingual pretraining works for similar languages with abundant corpora, it performs poorly in low-resource and distant languages. Previous research has shown that this is because the representations are not sufficiently aligned. In this paper, we enhance the bilingual masked language model pretraining with lexical-level information by using type-level cross-lingual subword embeddings. Empirical results demonstrate improved performance both on UNMT (up to 4.5 BLEU) and bilingual lexicon induction using our method compared to a UNMT baseline.

Improving the Lexical Ability of Pretrained Language Models for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

We propose a simple method to align multilingual contextual embeddings as a postpretraining step for improved cross-lingual transferability of the pretrained language models. Using parallel data, our method aligns embeddings on the word level through the recently proposed Translation Language Modeling objective as well as on the sentence level via contrastive learning and random input shuffling. We also perform sentence-level code-switching with English when finetuning on downstream tasks. On XNLI, our best model (initialized from mBERT) improves over mBERT by 4.7% in the zero-shot setting and achieves comparable result to XLM for translate-train while using less than 18% of the same parallel data and 31% fewer model parameters. On MLQA, our model outperforms XLM-RBase, which has 57% more parameters than ours.

Multilingual BERT Post-Pretraining Alignment

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been observed to produce poor translations when there are few/no parallel sentences to train the models. In the absence of parallel data, several approaches have turned to the use of images to learn translations. Since images of words, e.g., horse may be unchanged across languages, translations can be identified via images associated with words in different languages that have a high degree of visual similarity. However, translating via images has been shown to improve upon text-only models only marginally. To better understand when images are useful for translation, we study image translatability of words, which we define as the translatability of words via images, by measuring intra- and inter-cluster similarities of image representations of words that are translations of each other. We find that images of words are not always invariant across languages, and that language pairs with shared culture, meaning having either a common language family, ethnicity or religion, have improved image translatability (i.e., have more similar images for similar words) compared to its converse, regardless of their geographic proximity. In addition, in line with previous works that show images help more in translating concrete words, we found that concrete words have improved image translatability compared to abstract ones.

Cultural and Geographical Influences on Image Translatability of Words across Languages

Data filtering for machine translation (MT) describes the task of selecting a subset of a given, possibly noisy corpus with the aim to maximize the performance of an MT system trained on this selected data.

Data Filtering using Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings

Translating text into a language unknown to the text's author, dubbed outbound translation, is a modern need for which the user experience has significant room for improvement, beyond the basic machine translation facility. We demonstrate this by showing three ways in which user confidence in the outbound translation, as well as its overall final quality, can be affected: backward translation, quality estimation (with alignment) and source paraphrasing. In this paper, we describe an experiment on outbound translation from English to Czech and Estonian. We examine the effects of each proposed feedback module and further focus on how the quality of machine translation systems influence these findings and the user perception of success. We show that backward translation feedback has a mixed effect on the whole process: it increases user confidence in the produced translation, but not the objective quality.

Backtranslation Improves Users Confidence in MT, Not Quality

Many NLP models operate over sequences of subword tokens produced by hand-crafted tokenization rules and heuristic subword induction algorithms. A simple universal alternative is to represent every computerized text as a sequence of bytes via UTF-8, obviating the need for an embedding layer since there are fewer token types (256) than dimensions. Surprisingly, replacing the ubiquitous embedding layer with one-hot representations of each byte does not hurt performance; experiments on byte-to-byte machine translation from English to 10 different languages show a consistent improvement in BLEU, rivaling character-level and even standard subword-level models. A deeper investigation reveals that the combination of embeddingless models with decoder-input dropout amounts to token dropout, which benefits byte-to-byte models in particular.

Neural Machine Translation without Embeddings

Interpretability or explainability is an emerging research field in NLP. From a user-centric point of view, the goal is to build models that provide proper justification for their decisions, similar to those of humans, by requiring the models to satisfy additional constraints. To this end, we introduce a new application on legal text where, contrary to mainstream literature targeting word-level rationales, we conceive rationales as selected paragraphs in multi-paragraph structured court cases. We also release a new dataset comprising European Court of Human Rights cases, including annotations for paragraph-level rationales. We use this dataset to study the effect of already proposed rationale constraints, i.e., sparsity, continuity, and comprehensiveness, formulated as regularizers. Our findings indicate that some of these constraints are not beneficial in paragraph-level rationale extraction, while others need re-formulation to better handle the multi-label nature of the task we consider. We also introduce a new constraint, singularity, which further improves the quality of rationales, even compared with noisy rationale supervision. Experimental results indicate that the newly introduced task is very challenging and there is a large scope for further research.

Paragraph-level Rationale Extraction through Regularization: A case study on European Court of Human Rights Cases

In online domain-specific customer service applications, many companies struggle to deploy advanced NLP models successfully, due to the limited availability of and noise in their datasets. While prior research demonstrated the potential of migrating large open-domain pretrained models for domain-specific tasks, the appropriate (pre)training strategies have not yet been rigorously evaluated in such social media customer service settings, especially under multilingual conditions. We address this gap by collecting a multilingual social media corpus containing customer service conversations (865k tweets), comparing various pipelines of pretraining and finetuning approaches, applying them on 5 different end tasks. We show that pretraining a generic multilingual transformer model on our in-domain dataset, before finetuning on specific end tasks, consistently boosts performance, especially in non-English settings.

A Million Tweets Are Worth a Few Points: Tuning Transformers for Customer Support Tasks

Siamese Neural Networks have been widely used to perform similarity classification in multi-class settings. Their architecture can be used to group the clinical trials belonging to the same drug-development pathway along the several clinical trial phases. Here we present an approach for the unmet need of drug-development pathway reconstruction, based on an Enhanced hybrid Siamese-Deep Neural Network (EnSidNet). The proposed model demonstrates significant improvement above baselines in a 1-shot evaluation setting and in a classical similarity setting. EnSidNet can be an essential tool in a semi-supervised learning environment: by selecting clinical trials highly likely to belong to the same drug-development pathway it is possible to speed up the labelling process of human experts, allowing the check of a consistent volume of data, further used in the model’s training dataset.

EnSidNet: Enhanced Hybrid Siamese-Deep Network for grouping clinical trials into drug-development pathways

We present a fast and scalable architecture called Explicit Modular Decomposition (EMD), in which we incorporate both classification-based and extraction-based methods and design four modules (for clas- sification and sequence labelling) to jointly extract dialogue states. Experimental results based on the MultiWoz 2.0 dataset validates the superiority of our proposed model in terms of both complexity and scalability when compared to the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the scenario of multi-domain dialogues entangled with many turns of utterances.

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