United States

In this work, we study hallucinations in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), which lie at an extreme end on the spectrum of NMT pathologies. Firstly, we connect the phenomenon of hallucinations under source perturbation to the Long-Tail theory of Feldman (2020), and present an empirically validated hypothesis that explains hallucinations under source perturbation. Secondly, we consider hallucinations under corpus-level noise (without any source perturbation) and demonstrate that two prominent types of natural hallucinations (detached and oscillatory outputs) could be generated and explained through specific corpus-level noise patterns. Finally, we elucidate the phenomenon of hallucination amplification in popular data-generation processes such as Backtranslation and sequence-level Knowledge Distillation. We have released the datasets and code to replicate our results at https://github.com/vyraun/hallucinations.

NAACL 2021

The Curious Case of Hallucinations in Neural Machine Translation

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

The robustness and security of natural language processing (NLP) models are significantly important in real-world applications. In the context of text classification tasks, adversarial examples can be designed by substituting words with synonyms under certain semantic and syntactic constraints, such that a well-trained model will give a wrong prediction. Therefore, it is crucial to develop techniques to provide a rigorous and provable robustness guarantee against such attacks. In this paper, we propose WordDP to achieve certified robustness against word substitution at- tacks in text classification via differential privacy (DP). We establish the connection between DP and adversarial robustness for the first time in the text domain and propose a conceptual exponential mechanism-based algorithm to formally achieve the robustness. We further present a practical simulated exponential mechanism that has efficient inference with certified robustness. We not only provide a rigorous analytic derivation of the certified condition but also experimentally compare the utility of WordDP with existing defense algorithms. The results show that WordDP achieves higher accuracy and more than 30 times efficiency improvement over the state-of-the-art certified robustness mechanism in typical text classification tasks.

Certified Robustness to Word Substitution Attack with Differential Privacy

Meta-learning promises few-shot learners that quickly adapt to new distributions by repurposing knowledge acquired from previous training. However, we believe meta-learning has not yet succeeded in NLP due to the lack of a well-defined task distribution, leading to attempts that treat datasets as tasks. Such an ad hoc task distribution causes problems of quantity and quality. Since there's only a handful of datasets for any NLP problem, meta-learners tend to overfit their adaptation mechanism and, since NLP datasets are highly heterogeneous, many learning episodes have poor transfer between their support and query sets, which discourages the meta-learner from adapting. To alleviate these issues, we propose DreCA, a simple method for discovering and using latent reasoning categories in a dataset, to form additional high quality tasks. DReCA works by splitting examples into label groups, embedding them with a finetuned BERT model and then clustering each group into reasoning categories. Across four few-shot NLI problems, we demonstrate that using DReCA improves the accuracy of meta-learners by 1.5 – 4%

DReCa: A General Task Augmentation Strategy for Few-Shot Natural Language Inference

Exploiting label hierarchies has become a promising approach to tackling the zero-shot multi-label text classification (ZS-MTC) problem. Conventional methods aim to learn a matching model between text and labels, using a graph encoder to incorporate label hierarchies to obtain effective label representations. More recently, pretrained models like BERT have been used to convert classification tasks into a textual entailment task. This approach is naturally suitable for the ZS-MTC task. However, pretrained models are underexplored in the existing work because they do not generate individual vector representations for text or labels, making it unintuitive to combine them with conventional graph encoding methods. In this paper, we explore to improve pretrained models with label hierarchies on the ZS-MTC task. We propose a Reinforced Label Hierarchy Reasoning (RLHR) approach to encourage interdependence among labels in the hierarchies during training. Meanwhile, to overcome the weakness of flat predictions, we design a rollback algorithm that can remove logical errors from predictions during inference. Experimental results on three real-life datasets show that our approach achieves better performance and outperforms previous non-pretrained methods on the ZS-MTC task.

Improving Pretrained Models for Zero-shot Multi-label Text Classification through Reinforced Label Hierarchy Reasoning

We present a simple method for extending transformers to source-side trees. We define a number of masks that limit self-attention based on relationships among tree nodes, and we allow each attention head to learn which mask or masks to use. On translation from English to various low-resource languages, and translation in both directions between English and German, our method always improves over simple linearization of the source-side parse tree and almost always improves over a sequence-to-sequence baseline, by up to +2.1% BLEU.

Syntax-Based Attention Masking for Neural Machine Translation

One of the ways blind people understand their surroundings is by clicking images and relying on descriptions generated by image captioning systems. Current work on captioning images for the visually impaired do not use the textual data present in the image when generating captions. This problem is critical as many visual scenes contain text. Moreover, up to 21% of the questions asked by blind people about the images they click pertain to the text present in them. In this work, we propose altering AoANet, a state-of-the-art image captioning model, to leverage the text detected in the image as an input feature. In addition, we use a pointer-generator mechanism to copy the detected text to the caption when tokens need to be reproduced accurately. Our model outperforms AoANet on the benchmark dataset VizWiz, giving a 35% and 16.2% performance improvement on CIDEr and SPICE scores, respectively.

Multi-Modal Image Captioning for the Visually Impaired

Open-domain question answering (OpenQA) aims at locating the answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents. Retriever-readers and knowledge graph approaches are two big families of solutions to this task. A retriever-reader first applies information retrieval techniques to locate a few passages that are likely to be relevant, and then feeds the retrieved text to a neural network reader to extract the answer. Alternatively, knowledge graphs can be constructed and queried to answer users‘ questions. We propose an algorithm with a novel reader-retriever design that differs from both families. Our reader-retriever first uses an offline reader to read the corpus and generate collections of all answerable questions associated with their answers, and then uses an online retriever to respond to user queries by searching the pre-constructed question spaces for answers that are most likely to be asked in the given way. We further combine one retriever-reader and two reader-retrievers into a hybrid model called R6 for the best performance. Experiments with large-scale public datasets show that R6 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.

Open-Domain Question Answering with Pre-Constructed Question Spaces

Meeting minutes record any subject matters discussed, decisions reached and actions taken at meetings. The importance of minuting cannot be overemphasized in a time when a significant number of meetings take place in the virtual space. In this paper, we present a sliding window approach to automatic generation of meeting minutes. It aims to tackle issues associated with the nature of spoken text, including lengthy transcripts and lack of document structure, which make it difficult to identify salient content to be included in the meeting minutes. Our approach combines a sliding window and a neural abstractive summarizer to navigate through the transcripts to find salient content. The approach is evaluated on transcripts of natural meeting conversations, where we compare results obtained for human transcripts and two versions of automatic transcripts and discuss how and to what extent the summarizer succeeds at capturing salient content.

A Sliding-Window Approach to Automatic Creation of Meeting Minutes

**Read the paper on the folowing link:**

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.naacl-srw.12/

**Abstract:**



Shuffled-token Detection for Refining Pre-trained RoBERTa

In this work, we explore generating morphologically enhanced word embeddings for Tamil, a highly agglutinative South Indian language with rich morphology that remains low-resource with regards to NLP tasks. We present here the first-ever word analogy dataset for Tamil, consisting of 4499 hand-curated word tetrads across 10 semantic and 13 morphological relation types. Using a rules-based morphological segmenter and meta-embedding techniques, we train meta-embeddings that outperform existing baselines by 16% on our analogy task and appear to mitigate a previously observed trade-off between semantic and morphological accuracy.

Morphology-Aware Meta-Embeddings for Tamil

While traditional corpus-level evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) correlate well with fluency, they struggle to reflect adequacy. Model-based MT metrics trained on segment-level human judgments have emerged as an attractive replacement due to strong correlation results. These models, however, require potentially expensive re-training for new domains and languages. Furthermore, their decisions are inherently non-transparent and appear to reflect unwelcome biases. We explore the simple type-based classifier metric, MacroF1, and study its applicability to MT evaluation. We find that MacroF1 is competitive on direct assessment, and outperforms others in indicating downstream cross-lingual information retrieval task performance. Further, we show that MacroF1 can be used to effectively compare supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation, and reveal significant qualitative differences in the methods' outputs.

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