Thailand

Neural machine translation systems are known to be vulnerable to adversarial test inputs, however, as we show in this paper, these systems are also vulnerable to training attacks. Specifically, we propose a poisoning attack in which a malicious adversary inserts a small poisoned sample of monolingual text into the training set of a system trained using back-translation. This sample is designed to induce a specific, targeted translation behaviour, such as peddling misinformation. We present two methods for crafting poisoned examples, and show that only a tiny handful of instances, amounting to only 0.02% of the training set, is sufficient to enact a successful attack. We outline a defence method against said attacks, which partly ameliorates the problem. However, we stress that this is a blind-spot in modern NMT, demanding immediate attention.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Putting words into the system&#39;s mouth: A targeted attack on neural machine translation using monolingual data poisoning

monolingual corpus

poisoning attacks

machine translation

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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).

Putting words into the system's mouth: A targeted attack on neural machine translation using monolingual data poisoning

technical paper

This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each mono-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) task and pruning the remaining heads leads to comparable or improved performance of the model. However, the impact of pruning attention heads is not yet clear in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that (1) pruning a number of attention heads in a multi-lingual Transformer-based model has, in general, positive effects on its performance in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks and (2) the attention heads to be pruned can be ranked using gradients and identified with a few trial experiments. Our experiments focus on sequence labeling tasks, with potential applicability on other cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. For comprehensiveness, we examine two pre-trained multi-lingual models, namely multi-lingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM-R, on three tasks across 9 languages each. We also discuss the validity of our findings and their extensibility to truly resource-scarce languages and other task settings.

Contributions of Transformer Attention Heads in Multi- and Cross-lingual Tasks

Effective adversary generation for neural machine translation (NMT) is a crucial prerequisite for building robust machine translation systems. In this work, we investigate veritable evaluations of NMT adversarial attacks, and propose a novel method to craft NMT adversarial examples. We first show the current NMT adversarial attacks may be improperly estimated by the commonly used mono-directional translation, and we propose to leverage the round-trip translation technique to build valid metrics for evaluating NMT adversarial attacks. Our intuition is that an effective NMT adversarial example, which imposes minor shifting on the source and degrades the translation dramatically, would naturally lead to a semantic-destroyed round-trip translation result. We then propose a promising black-box attack method called Word Saliency speedup Local Search (WSLS) that could effectively attack the mainstream NMT architectures. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed metrics could accurately evaluate the attack effectiveness, and the proposed WSLS could significantly break the state-of-art NMT models with small perturbation. Besides, WSLS exhibits strong transferability on attacking Baidu and Bing online translators.

Crafting Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translation

Transfer learning has yielded state-of-the-art (SoTA) results in many supervised NLP tasks. However, annotated data for every target task in every target language is rare, especially for low-resource languages. We propose UXLA, a novel unsupervised data augmentation framework for zero-resource transfer learning scenarios. In particular, UXLA aims to solve cross-lingual adaptation problems from a source language task distribution to an unknown target language task distribution, assuming no training label in the target language. At its core, UXLA performs simultaneous self-training with data augmentation and unsupervised sample selection. To show its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on three diverse zero-resource cross-lingual transfer tasks. UXLA achieves SoTA results in all the tasks, outperforming the baselines by a good margin. With an in-depth framework dissection, we demonstrate the cumulative contributions of different components to its success.

UXLA: A Robust Unsupervised Data Augmentation Framework for Cross-Lingual NLP

Recent work on non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) aims at improving the efficiency by parallel decoding without sacrificing the quality. However, existing NAT methods are either inferior to Transformer or require multiple decoding passes, leading to reduced speedup. We propose the Glancing Language Model (GLM) for single-pass parallel generation models. With GLM, we develop Glancing Transformer (GLAT) for machine translation. With only single-pass parallel decoding, GLAT is able to generate high-quality translation with 8×-15× speedup. Note that GLAT does not modify the network architecture, which is a training method to learn word interdependency. Experiments on multiple WMT language directions show that GLAT outperforms all previous single pass non-autoregressive methods, and is nearly comparable to Transformer, reducing the gap to 0.25-0.9 BLEU points.

Glancing Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation has achieved great success in bilingual settings, as well as in multilingual settings. With the increase of the number of languages, multilingual systems tend to underperform their bilingual counterparts. Model capacity has been found crucial for massively multilingual NMT to support language pairs with varying typological characteristics. Previous work increases the modeling capacity by deepening or widening the Transformer. However, modeling cardinality based on aggregating a set of transformations with the same topology has been proven more effective than going deeper or wider when increasing capacity. In this paper, we propose to efficiently increase the capacity for multilingual NMT by increasing the cardinality. Unlike previous work which feeds the same input to several transformations and merges their outputs into one, we present a Multi-Input-Multi-Output (MIMO) architecture that allows each transformation of the block to have its own input. We also present a task-aware attention mechanism to learn to selectively utilize individual transformations from a set of transformations for different translation directions. Our model surpasses previous work and establishes a new state-of-the-art on the large scale OPUS-100 corpus while being 1.31 times as fast.

Modeling Task-Aware MIMO Cardinality for Efficient Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

kNN-MT, recently proposed by Khandelwal et al. (2020a), successfully combines pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to improve the translation accuracy. However, the traditional kNN algorithm used in kNN-MT simply retrieves a same number of nearest neighbors for each target token, which may cause prediction errors when the retrieved neighbors include noises. In this paper, we propose Adaptive kNN-MT to dynamically determine the number of k for each target token. We achieve this by introducing a light-weight Meta-k Network, which can be efficiently trained with only a few training samples. On four benchmark machine translation datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method is able to effectively filter out the noises in retrieval results and significantly outperforms the vanilla kNN-MT model. Even more noteworthy is that the Meta-k Network learned on one domain could be directly applied to other domains and obtain consistent improvements, illustrating the generality of our method. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zhengxxn/adaptive-knn-mt.

Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

Recent progress has been made in using BERT framework for Chinese spelling error correction (CSC). However, most existing methods correct words based on local contextual information, without considering the influence of error words in sentences. Imposing attention on error contextual information could mislead and decrease the overall performance of CSC. To address this issue, we propose a Global Attention Decoder (GAD) approach for CSC. Specifically, the proposed method learns the global relationship of the potential correct input characters and the candidates of potential error characters. Rich global contextual information is obtained to alleviate the impact of the local error contextual information. In addition, a BERT with Confusion set guided Replacement Strategy (BERT CRS) is designed to narrow the gap between BERT and CSC. The candidates generated by BERT CRS covering the correct character with more than 99.9% probability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we test our method on three human-annotated datasets. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms all competitor models by a large margin of up to 6.2%, achieving state-of-the-art methods on all datasets.

Global Attention Decoder for {C}hinese Spelling Error Correction

Rhetorical implicit emotion identification is one of important and challenging tasks in natural language processing. We observe that each rhetoric may express certain evidence of semantic and syntactic patterns. Then, we design a gate mechanism based classification module to capture respective rhetorical representation and identify each rhetoric. Moreover, sentences carved with rhetoric tends to express emotions in subtle ways. We thus propose a new multi-task learning framework that can encode the categorical correlation between tasks to improve the performance of rhetoric and emotion identification problem. Experimental results validate the benefit of the proposed model over state-of-the-art baselines for rhetoric and emotion identification tasks. In addition, a new Chinese rhetorical implicit emotion dataset was constructed and will be released in this work.

Jointly Identifying Rhetoric and Implicit Emotions via Multi-Task Learning

We present a new approach to encourage neural machine translation to satisfy lexical constraints. Our method acts at the training step and thereby avoiding the introduction of any extra computational overhead at inference step. The proposed method combines three main ingredients. The first one consists in augmenting the training data to specify the constraints. Intuitively, this encourages the model to learn a copy behavior when it encounters constraint terms. Compared to previous work, we use a simplified augmentation strategy without source factors. The second ingredient is constraint token masking, which makes it even easier for the model to learn the copy behavior and generalize better. The third one, is a modification of the standard cross entropy loss to bias the model towards assigning high probabilities to constraint words. Empirical results show that our method improves upon related baselines in terms of both BLEU score and the percentage of generated constraint terms.

Encouraging Neural Machine Translation to Satisfy Terminology Constraints

In this work, we propose BertGCN, a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. BertGCN constructs a heterogeneous graph over the dataset and represents documents as nodes using BERT representations. By jointly training the BERT and GCN modules within BertGCN, the proposed model is able to leverage the advantages of both worlds: large-scale pretraining which takes the advantage of the massive amount of raw data and transductive learning which jointly learns representations for both training data and unlabeled test data by propagating label influence through graph convolution. Experiments show that BertGCN achieves SOTA performances on a wide range of text classification datasets.

Putting words into the system's mouth: A targeted attack on neural machine translation using monolingual data poisoning

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