Dominican Republic

In this paper, we present the joint contribution of Unbabel and IST to the WMT 2021 Metrics Shared Task. With this year&#39;s focus on Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) as the ground-truth human assessment, our aim was to steer COMET towards higher correlations with MQM. We do so by first pre-training on Direct Assessments and then fine-tuning on z-normalized MQM scores. In our experiments we also show that reference-free COMET models are becoming competitive with reference-based models, even outperforming the best COMET model from 2020 on this year&#39;s development data. Additionally, we present COMETinho, a lightweight COMET model that is 19x faster on CPU than the original model, while also achieving state-of-the-art correlations with MQM. Finally, in the &quot;QE as a metric&#39;&#39; track, we also participated with a QE model trained using the OpenKiwi framework leveraging MQM scores and word-level annotations.

EMNLP 2021

Are References Really Needed? Unbabel-IST 2021 Submission for the Metrics Shared Task

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

In this paper, we present the joint contribution of Unbabel and IST to the WMT 2021 Metrics Shared Task. With this year's focus on Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) as the ground-truth human assessment, our aim was to steer COMET towards higher correlations with MQM. We do so by first pre-training on Direct Assessments and then fine-tuning on z-normalized MQM scores. In our experiments we also show that reference-free COMET models are becoming competitive with reference-based models, even outperforming the best COMET model from 2020 on this year's development data. Additionally, we present COMETinho, a lightweight COMET model that is 19x faster on CPU than the original model, while also achieving state-of-the-art correlations with MQM. Finally, in the "QE as a metric'' track, we also participated with a QE model trained using the OpenKiwi framework leveraging MQM scores and word-level annotations.

workshop paper

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task consists of several subtasks. Aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) subtask of ABSA was proposed recently which aims to formulate the relevant information into a triplet: target aspect object, opinion clue, and sentiment polarity orientation. However, most of the existing joint models only focus on the benefits of encoder sharing between subtasks but ignore the difference. Therefore, we propose a dual-encoder approach, in which a pair encoder especially focuses on candidate aspect-opinion pair classification, and the original encoder keeps attention on sequence labeling. Empirical results show that our proposed model signiﬁcantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on 8 benchmark datasets.

Seeking Common but Distinguishing Difference, A Joint Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Model

Argument pair extraction (APE) aims to extract interactive argument pairs from two passages of a discussion. Previous work studied this task in the context of peer review and rebuttal, and decomposed it into a sequence labeling task and a sentence relation classiﬁcation task. However, despite the promising performance, such an approach obtains the argument pairs implicitly by the two decomposed tasks, lacking explicitly modeling of the argument-level interactions between argument pairs. In this paper, we tackle the APE task by a mutual guidance framework, which could utilize the information of an argument in one passage to guide the identiﬁcation of arguments that can form pairs with it in another passage. In this manner, two passages can mutually guide each other in the process of APE. Furthermore, we propose an inter-sentence relation graph to effectively model the interrelations between two sentences and thus facilitates the extraction of argument pairs. Our proposed method can better represent the holistic argument-level semantics and thus explicitly capture the complex correlations between argument pairs. Experimental results show that our approach signiﬁcantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art model.

Argument Pair Extraction with Mutual Guidance and Inter-sentence Relation Graph

Aspect category sentiment analysis has attracted increasing research attention. The dominant methods make use of pre-trained language models by learning effective aspect category-specific representations, and adding specific output layers to its pre-trained representation. We consider a more direct way of making use of pre-trained language models, by casting the ACSA tasks into natural language generation tasks, using natural language sentences to represent the output. Our method al- lows more direct use of pre-trained knowledge in seq2seq language models by directly following the task setting during pre-training. Experiments on several benchmarks show that our method gives the best reported results, having large advantages in few-shot and zero-shot settings.

Solving Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis as a Text Generation Task

We present a model to predict fine-grained emotions along the continuous dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) with a corpus with categorical emotion annotations. Our model is trained by minimizing the EMD (Earth Mover's Distance) loss between the predicted VAD score distribution and the categorical emotion distributions sorted along VAD, and it can simultaneously classify the emotion categories and predict the VAD scores for a given sentence. We use pre-trained RoBERTa-Large and fine-tune on three different corpora with categorical labels and evaluate on EmoBank corpus with VAD scores. We show that our approach reaches comparable performance to that of the state-of-the-art classifiers in categorical emotion classification and shows significant positive correlations with the ground truth VAD scores. Also, further training with supervision of VAD labels leads to improved performance especially when dataset is small. We also present examples of predictions of appropriate emotion words that are not part of the original annotations.

Dimensional Emotion Detection from Categorical Emotion

Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to identify the sentiment polarity of a specific aspect in product reviews. We notice that about 30% of reviews do not contain obvious opinion words, but still convey clear human-aware sentiment orientation, which is known as implicit sentiment. However, recent neural network- based approaches paid little attention to Implicit sentiment entailed in the reviews. To overcome this issue, we adopt Supervised Contrastive Pre-training on large-scale sentiment annotated corpora retrieved from in-domain language resources. By aligning the representation of implicit sentiment expressions to those with the same sentiment label, the pretraining process leads to better capture of both implicit and explicit sentiment orientation towards aspects in reviews. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on SemEval2014 benchmarks, and comprehensive analysis validates its effectiveness on learning implicit sentiment.

Learning Implicit Sentiment in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training

This paper presents our submissions to the WMT2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation, Task 1 \textit{Sentence-Level Direct Assessment}.
While top-performing approaches utilize massively multilingual Transformer-based language models which have been pre-trained on all target languages of the task, 
the resulting insights are limited, as it is unclear how well the approach performs on languages unseen during pre-training; more problematically, these approaches 
do not provide any solutions for \textit{extending} the model to new languages or unseen scripts---arguably one of the objectives of this shared task. 
In this work, we thus focus on utilizing massively multilingual language models which only \textit{partly} cover the target languages during their pre-training phase. 
We extend the model to new languages and unseen scripts using recent adapter-based methods and achieve on par performance or even surpass models pre-trained on the respective languages.

Sentence-Level Direct Assessment with Adapters

This paper presents the Adam Mickiewicz University’s (AMU) submissions to the WMT 2021 News Translation Task. The submissions focus on the English↔Hausa translation directions, which is a low-resource translation scenario between distant languages. Our approach involves thorough data cleaning, transfer learning using a high-resource language pair, iterative training, and utilization of monolingual data via back-translation. We experiment with NMT and PB-SMT approaches alike, using the base Transformer architecture for all of the NMT models while utilizing PB-SMT systems as comparable baseline solutions.

Adam Mickiewicz University’s English-Hausa Submissions to the WMT 2021 News Translation Task

We submitted two uni-directional models, one for English→Icelandic direction and other for Icelandic→English direction. Our news translation system is based on the transformer-big architecture, it makes use of corpora filtering, back-translation and forward translation applied to parallel and monolingual data alike

Allegro.eu submission to WMT21 News Translation Task

This paper describes the Tencent AI Lab submission of the WMT2021 shared task on biomedical translation in eight language directions: English-German, English-French, English-Spanish and English-Russian. We utilized different Transformer architectures, pretraining and back-translation strategies to improve translation quality. Concretely, we explore mBART (Liu et al., 2020)
to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pretraining strategy. Our submissions (Tencent AI Lab Machine Translation, TMT) in German/French/Spanish⇒English are ranked 1st respectively according to the official evaluation results in terms of BLEU scores.

Tencent AI Lab Machine Translation Systems for the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task

This paper describes the SEBAMAT contribution to the 2021 WMT Similar Language Translation shared task. Using the Marian neural machine translation toolkit, translation systems based on Google’s transformer architecture were built in both directions of Catalan–Spanish and Portuguese–Spanish. The systems were trained in two contrastive parameter settings (different vocabulary sizes for byte pair encoding) using only the parallel but not the comparable corpora provided by the shared task organizers. According to their official evaluation results, the SEBAMAT system turned out to be competitive with rankings among the top teams and BLEU scores between 38 and 47 for the language pairs involving Portuguese and between 76 and 80 for the language pairs involving Catalan.

Are References Really Needed? Unbabel-IST 2021 Submission for the Metrics Shared Task

Next from EMNLP 2021

Seeking Common but Distinguishing Difference, A Joint Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Model

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