Dominican Republic

Zero-shot translation, directly translating between language pairs unseen in training, is a promising capability of multilingual neural machine translation (NMT). However, it usually suffers from capturing spurious correlations between the output language and language invariant semantics due to the maximum likelihood training objective, leading to poor transfer performance on zero-shot translation. In this paper, we introduce a denoising autoencoder objective based on pivot language into traditional training objective to improve the translation accuracy on zero-shot directions. The theoretical analysis from the perspective of latent variables shows that our approach actually implicitly maximizes the probability distributions for zero-shot directions. On two benchmark machine translation datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method is able to effectively eliminate the spurious correlations and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a remarkable performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Victorwz/zs-nmt-dae.

EMNLP 2021

Rethinking Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation: From a Perspective of Latent Variables

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

workshop paper

This paper presents {Se}lf-{co}rrecting En{co}ding (Secoco), a framework that effectively deals with noisy input for robust neural machine translation by introducing self-correcting predictors. 
Different from previous robust approaches, Secoco enables NMT to explicitly correct noisy inputs and delete specific errors simultaneously with the translation decoding process. Secoco is able to achieve significant improvements over strong baselines on two real-world test sets and a benchmark WMT dataset with good interpretability. We will make our code and dataset publicly available soon.

Secoco: Self-Correcting Encoding for Neural Machine Translation

Quality Estimation (QE) plays an essential role in applications of Machine Translation (MT). Traditionally, a QE system accepts the original source text and translation from a black-box MT system as input. Recently, a few studies indicate that as a by-product of translation, QE benefits from the model and training data's information of the MT system where the translations come from, and it is called the "glass-box QE". In this paper, we extend the definition of "glass-box QE" generally to uncertainty quantification with both "black-box" and "glass-box" approaches and design several features deduced from them to blaze a new trial in improving QE's performance. We propose a framework to fuse the feature engineering of uncertainty quantification into a pre-trained cross-lingual language model to predict the translation quality. Experiment results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on the datasets of WMT 2020 QE shared task.

Beyond Glass-Box Features: Uncertainty Quantification Enhanced Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation

Writing mammography reports can be error-prone and time-consuming for radiologists.
In this paper we propose a method to generate mammography reports given four images, corresponding to the four views used in screening mammography. To the best of our knowledge our work represents the first attempt to generate the mammography report using deep-learning.
We propose an encoder-decoder model that includes an EfficientNet-based encoder and a Transformer-based decoder. We demonstrate that the Transformer-based attention mechanism can combine visual and semantic information to localize salient regions on the input mammograms and generate a visually interpretable report. 
The conducted experiments, including an evaluation by a certified radiologist, show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Generating Mammography Reports from Multi-view Mammograms with BERT

It is a well-known approach for fringe groups and organizations to use euphemisms---ordinary-sounding and innocent-looking words with a secret meaning---to conceal what they are discussing. For instance, drug dealers often use "pot" for marijuana and "avocado" for heroin. From a social media content moderation perspective, though recent advances in NLP have enabled the automatic detection of such single-word euphemisms, no existing work is capable of automatically detecting multi-word euphemisms, such as "blue dream" (marijuana) and "black tar" (heroin). Our paper tackles the problem of euphemistic phrase detection without human effort for the first time, as far as we are aware. We first perform phrase mining on a raw text corpus (e.g., social media posts) to extract quality phrases. Then, we utilize word embedding similarities to select a set of euphemistic phrase candidates. Finally, we rank those candidates by a masked language model---SpanBERT. Compared to strong baselines, we report 20-50% higher detection accuracies using our algorithm for detecting euphemistic phrases.

Euphemistic Phrase Detection by Masked Language Model

This paper investigates how to correct Chinese text errors with types of mistaken, missing and redundant characters, which are common for Chinese native speakers. Most existing models based on detect-correct framework can correct mistaken characters, but cannot handle missing or redundant characters due to inconsistency between model inputs and outputs. Although Seq2Seq-based or sequence tagging methods provide solutions to the three error types and achieved relatively good results in English context, they do not perform well in Chinese context according to our experiments. In our work, we propose a novel alignment-agnostic detect-correct framework that can handle both text aligned and non-aligned situations and can serve as a cold start model when no annotation data are provided. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our method is effective and achieves a better performance than most recent published models.

An Alignment-Agnostic Model for Chinese Text Error Correction

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and the medical aspects of disinformation merged as the problem got elevated to a whole new level to become the first global infodemic. Fighting this infodemic has been declared one of the most important focus areas of the World Health Organization, with dangers ranging from promoting fake cures, rumors, and conspiracy theories to spreading xenophobia and panic. Addressing the issue requires solving a number of challenging problems such as identifying messages containing claims, determining their check-worthiness and factuality, and their potential to do harm as well as the nature of that harm, to mention just a few. To address this gap, we release a large dataset of 16K manually annotated tweets for fine-grained disinformation analysis that (i) focuses on COVID-19, (ii) combines the perspectives and the interests of journalists, fact-checkers, social media platforms, policy makers, and society, and (iii) covers Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, and English. Finally, we show strong evaluation results using pretrained Transformers, thus confirming the practical utility of the dataset in monolingual vs. multilingual, and single task vs. multitask settings.

Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic: Modeling the Perspective of Journalists, Fact-Checkers, Social Media Platforms, Policy Makers, and the Society

Relations in most of the traditional knowledge graphs (KGs) only reflect static and factual connections, but fail to represent the dynamic activities and state changes about entities. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of incorporating events in KG representation learning, and propose an event-enhanced KG embedding model EventKE. Specifically, given the original KG, we first incorporate event nodes by building a heterogeneous network, where entity nodes and event nodes are distributed on the two sides of the network inter-connected by event argument links. We then use entity-entity relations from the original KG and event-event temporal links to inner-connect entity and event nodes respectively. We design a novel and effective attention-based message passing method, which is conducted on entity-entity, event-entity, and event-event relations to fuse the event information into KG embeddings. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that events can greatly improve the quality of the KG embeddings on multiple downstream tasks.

EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding

News recommendation techniques can help users on news platforms obtain their preferred news information. Most existing news recommendation methods rely on centrally stored user behavior data to train models and serve users. However, user data is usually highly privacy-sensitive, and centrally storing them in the news platform may raise privacy concerns and risks. In this paper, we propose a unified news recommendation framework, which can utilize user data locally stored in user clients to train models and serve users in a privacy-preserving way. Following a widely used paradigm in real-world recommender systems, our framework contains a stage for candidate news generation (i.e., recall) and a stage for candidate news ranking (i.e., ranking). At the recall stage, each client locally learns multiple interest representations from clicked news to comprehensively model user interests. These representations are uploaded to the server to recall candidate news from a large news pool, which are further distributed to the user client at the ranking stage for personalized news display. In addition, we propose an interest decomposer-aggregator method with perturbation noise to better protect private user information encoded in user interest representations. Besides, we collaboratively train both recall and ranking models on the data decentralized in a large number of user clients in a privacy-preserving way. Experiments on two real-world news datasets show that our method can outperform baseline methods and effectively protect user privacy.

Uni-FedRec: A Unified Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation Framework for Model Training and Online Serving

Math word problem solving has attracted considerable research interest in recent years.
Previous works have shown the effectiveness of utilizing graph neural networks to capture the relationships in the problem. 
However, these works did not carefully take the edge label information and the long-range word relationship across sentences into consideration.
In addition, during generation, they focus on the most relevant areas of the currently generated word, while neglecting the rest of the problem.
In this paper, we propose a novel Edge-Enhanced Hierarchical Graph-to-Tree model (EEH-G2T), in which the math word problems are represented as edge-labeled graphs.
Specifically, an edge-enhanced hierarchical graph encoder is used to incorporate edge label information. 
This encoder updates the graph nodes hierarchically in two steps: sentence-level aggregation and problem-level aggregation.
Furthermore, a tree-structured decoder with a split attention mechanism is applied to guide the model to pay attention to different parts of the input problem.
Experimental results on the MAWPS and Math23K dataset showed that our EEH-G2T can effectively improve performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

An Edge-Enhanced Hierarchical Graph-to-Tree Network for Math Word Problem Solving

We study the problem of multilingual automated reply suggestions (RS) model serving many languages simultaneously. Multilingual models are often challenged by model capacity and severe data distribution skew across languages. While prior works largely focus on monolingual models, we propose Conditional Generative Matching models (CGM), optimized within a Variational Autoencoder framework to address challenges arising from multilingual RS. CGM does so with expressive message conditional priors, mixture densities to enhance multilingual data representation, latent alignment for language discrimination, and effective variational optimization techniques for training multilingual RS. The enhancements result in performance that exceed competitive baselines in relevance (ROUGE score) by more than 10% on average, and 16%for low resource languages. CGM also shows remarkable improvements in diversity (80%) illustrating its expressiveness in representation of multi-lingual data.

Rethinking Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation: From a Perspective of Latent Variables

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