Thailand

We study the possibilities of building a non-autoregressive speech-to-text translation model using connectionist temporal classification (CTC), and use CTC-based automatic speech recognition as an auxiliary task to improve the performance. CTC&#39;s success on translation is counter-intuitive due to its monotonicity assumption, so we analyze its reordering capability. Kendall&#39;s tau distance is introduced as the quantitative metric, and gradient-based visualization provides an intuitive way to take a closer look into the model. Our analysis shows that transformer encoders have the ability to change the word order and points out the future research direction that worth being explored more on non-autoregressive speech translation.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Investigating the Reordering Capability in CTC-based Non-Autoregressive End-to-End Speech Translation

connectionist temporal classification

non-autoregressive

speech translation

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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

We study the possibilities of building a non-autoregressive speech-to-text translation model using connectionist temporal classification (CTC), and use CTC-based automatic speech recognition as an auxiliary task to improve the performance. CTC's success on translation is counter-intuitive due to its monotonicity assumption, so we analyze its reordering capability. Kendall's tau distance is introduced as the quantitative metric, and gradient-based visualization provides an intuitive way to take a closer look into the model. Our analysis shows that transformer encoders have the ability to change the word order and points out the future research direction that worth being explored more on non-autoregressive speech translation.

technical paper

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

State-of-the-art machine translation (MT) systems are typically trained to generate ``standard'' target language; however, many languages have multiple varieties (regional varieties, dialects, sociolects, non-native varieties) that are different from the standard language. Such varieties are often low-resource, and hence do not benefit from contemporary NLP solutions, MT included.
We propose a general framework to rapidly adapt MT systems to generate language varieties that are close to, but different from, the standard target language, using no parallel (source--variety) data. This also includes adaptation of MT systems to low-resource typologically-related target languages.
We experiment with adapting an English--Russian MT system to generate Ukrainian and Belarusian, an English--Norwegian Bokmål system to generate Nynorsk, and an English--Arabic system to generate four Arabic dialects, obtaining significant improvements over competitive baselines.

Machine Translation into Low-resource Language Varieties

Learning contextual text embeddings that represent causal graphs has been useful in improving the performance of downstream tasks like causal treatment effect estimation. However, existing causal embeddings which are trained to predict direct causal links, fail to capture other indirect causal links of the graph, thus leading to spurious correlations in downstream tasks. In this paper, we define the faithfulness property of contextual embeddings to capture geometric distance-based properties of directed acyclic causal graphs. By incorporating these faithfulness properties, we learn text embeddings that are 31.3\% more faithful to human validated causal graphs with about 800K and 200K causal links and achieve 21.1\% better Precision-Recall AUC in a link prediction fine-tuning task. Further, in a crowdsourced causal question-answering task on Yahoo! Answers with questions of the form ``What causes X?'', our faithful embeddings achieved a precision of the first ranked answer (P@1) of 41.07\%, outperforming the existing baseline by 10.2\%.

Learning Faithful Representations of Causal Graphs

Transformer-based language models benefit from conditioning on contexts of hundreds to thousands of previous tokens. What aspects of these contexts contribute to accurate model prediction? We describe a series of experiments that measure usable information by selectively ablating lexical and structural information in transformer language models trained on English Wikipedia. In both mid- and long-range contexts, we find that several extremely destructive context manipulations---including shuffling word order within sentences and deleting all words other than nouns---remove less than 15% of the usable information. Our results suggest that long contexts, but not their detailed syntactic and propositional content, are important for the low perplexity of current transformer language models.

What Context Features Can Transformer Language Models Use?

In this paper, we introduce Integrated Directional Gradients (IDG), a method for attributing importance scores to groups of features, indicating their relevance to the output of a neural network model for a given input. The success of Deep Neural Networks has been attributed to their ability to capture higher level feature interactions. Hence, in the last few years capturing the importance of these feature interactions has received increased prominence in ML interpretability literature. In this paper, we formally define the feature group attribution problem and outline a set of axioms that any intuitive feature group attribution method should satisfy. Earlier, cooperative game theory inspired axiomatic methods only borrowed axioms from solution concepts (such as Shapley value) for individual feature attributions and introduced their own extensions to model interactions. In contrast, our formulation is inspired by axioms satisfied by characteristic functions as well as solution concepts in cooperative game theory literature. We believe that characteristic functions are much better suited to model importance of groups compared to just solution concepts. We demonstrate that our proposed method, IDG, satisfies all the axioms. Using IDG we analyze two state-of-the-art text classifiers on three benchmark datasets for sentiment analysis. Our experiments show that IDG is able to effectively capture semantic interactions in linguistic models via negations and conjunctions.

Integrated Directional Gradients: Feature Interaction Attribution for Neural NLP Models

Sparse attention has been claimed to increase model interpretability under the assumption that it highlights influential inputs. Yet the attention distribution is typically over representations internal to the model rather than the inputs themselves, suggesting this assumption may not have merit. We build on the recent work exploring the interpretability of attention; we design a set of experiments to help us understand how sparsity affects our ability to use attention as an explainability tool. On three text classification tasks, we verify that only a weak relationship between inputs and co-indexed intermediate representations exists—under sparse attention and otherwise. Further, we do not find any plausible mappings from sparse attention distributions to a sparse set of influential inputs through other avenues. Rather, we observe in this setting that inducing sparsity may make it less plausible that attention can be used as a tool for understanding model behavior.

Is Sparse Attention more Interpretable?

Mechanisms for encoding positional information are central for transformer-based language models. In this paper, we analyze the position embeddings of existing language models, finding strong evidence of translation invariance, both for the embeddings themselves and for their effect on self-attention. The degree of translation invariance increases during training and correlates positively with model performance. Our findings lead us to propose translation-invariant self-attention (TISA), which accounts for the relative position between tokens in an interpretable fashion without needing conventional position embeddings. Our proposal has several theoretical advantages over existing position-representation approaches. Proof-of-concept experiments show that it improves on regular ALBERT on GLUE tasks, while only adding orders of magnitude less positional parameters.

The Case for Translation-Invariant Self-Attention in Transformer-Based Language Models

Data augmentation has recently seen increased interest in NLP due to more work in low-resource domains, new tasks, and the popularity of large-scale neural networks that require large amounts of training data. Despite this recent upsurge, this area is still relatively underexplored, perhaps due to the challenges posed by the discrete nature of language data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and unifying survey of data augmentation for NLP by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. We first introduce and motivate data augmentation for NLP, and then discuss major methodologically representative approaches. Next, we highlight techniques that are used for popular NLP applications and tasks. We conclude by outlining current challenges and directions for future research. Overall, our paper aims to clarify the landscape of existing literature in data augmentation for NLP and motivate additional work in this area. We also present a GitHub repository with a paper list that will be continuously updated at https://github.com/styfeng/DataAug4NLP

A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP

While word segmentation is a solved problem in many languages, it is still a challenge in continuous-script or low-resource languages.
Like other NLP tasks, word segmentation is domain-dependent, which can be a challenge in low-resource languages like Thai and Urdu since there can be domains with insufficient data.
This investigation proposes a new solution to adapt an existing domain-generic model to a target domain, as well as a data augmentation technique to combat the low-resource problems.
In addition to domain adaptation, we also propose a framework to handle out-of-domain inputs using an ensemble of domain-specific models called Multi-Domain Ensemble (MDE).
To assess the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, we conducted extensive experiments on domain adaptation and out-of-domain scenarios.
Moreover, we also proposed a multiple task dataset for Thai text processing, including word segmentation.
For domain adaptation, we compared our solution to the state-of-the-art Thai word segmentation (TWS) method and obtained improvements from 93.47% to 98.48% at the character level and 84.03% to 96.75% at the word level.
For out-of-domain scenarios, our MDE method significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art TWS and multi-criteria methods.
Furthermore, to demonstrate our method's generalizability, we also applied our MDE framework to other languages, namely Chinese, Japanese, and Urdu, and obtained improvements similar to Thai's.

Handling Cross- and Out-of-Domain Samples in Thai Word Segmentation

Sensor names as alphanumeric strings typically encode their key contextual information such as their function or physical location. We focus here on sensors used in smart building applications. In these applications, sensor names are curated in a building vendor-specific manner using different structures and esoteric vocabularies. Tremendous manual effort is needed to annotate sensor nodes for each building or even to just segment these sensor names into meaningful chunks for intelligent operation of buildings. We propose here a fully automated self-supervised framework, Sensei, that can learn to segment sensor names without any human annotation. We employ a neural language model to capture the underlying structure in sensor names and then induce self-supervision based on information from the language model to build the segmentation model. Extensive experiments on five real-world buildings comprising thousands of sensors demonstrate the superiority of Sensei over baseline methods.

{S}ensei: {S}elf-Supervised Sensor Name Segmentation

A good open-domain chatbot should avoid presenting contradictory responses about facts or opinions in a conversational session, known as its consistency capacity. However, evaluating the consistency capacity of a chatbot is still challenging. Employing human judges to interact with chatbots on purpose to check their capacities is costly and low-efficient, and difficult to get rid of subjective bias. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{A}ddressing \textbf{I}nquiries about \textbf{H}istory (\textbf{AIH}), an efficient and practical framework for the consistency evaluation. At the conversation stage, \textbf{AIH} attempts to address appropriate inquiries about the dialogue history to induce the chatbot to redeclare the historical facts or opinions. We carry out the conversation between chatbots, which is more efficient than the human-bot interaction and can also alleviate the subjective bias. In this way, we manage to rapidly obtain a dialog session that contains responses with high contradiction possibilities. At the contradiction recognition stage, we can either employ human judges or a natural language inference (NLI) model to recognize whether the answers to the inquiries are contradictory with history. Finally, we are able to rank chatbots according to the contradiction statistics. Experiments on open-domain chatbots show that our approach can efficiently and reliably assess the consistency capacity of chatbots and achieve a high ranking correlation with the human evaluation. We release the framework and hope to help improve the consistency capacity of chatbots.\footnote{\url{https://github.com/ictnlp/AIH}}

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