United Arab Emirates

End-to-end Speech Translation (ST) aims at translating the source language speech into target language text without generating the intermediate transcriptions. However, the training of end-to-end methods relies on parallel ST data, which are difficult and expensive to obtain. Fortunately, the supervised data for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) are usually more accessible, making zero-shot speech translation a potential direction. Existing zero-shot methods fail to align the two modalities of speech and text into a shared semantic space, resulting in much worse performance compared to the supervised ST methods. In order to enable zero-shot ST, we propose a novel Discrete Cross-Modal Alignment (DCMA) method that employs a shared discrete vocabulary space to accommodate and match both modalities of speech and text. Specifically, we introduce a vector quantization module to discretize the continuous representations of speech and text into a finite set of virtual tokens, and use ASR data to map corresponding speech and text to the same virtual token in a shared codebook. This way, source language speech can be embedded in the same semantic space as the source language text, which can be then transformed into target language text with an MT module. Experiments on multiple language pairs demonstrate that our zero-shot ST method significantly improves the SOTA, and even performers on par with the strong supervised ST baselines.

EMNLP 2022

Discrete Cross-Modal Alignment Enables Zero-Shot Speech Translation

speech translation; cross-modal alignment; vector quantization

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Lyric-to-melody generation is an important task in automatic songwriting. Previous lyric-to-melody generation systems usually adopt end-to-end models that directly generate melodies from lyrics, which suffer from several issues: 1) lack of paired lyric-melody training data; 2) lack of control on generated melodies. In this paper, we develop TeleMelody, a two-stage lyric-to-melody generation system with music template (e.g., tonality, chord progression, rhythm pattern, and cadence) to bridge the gap between lyrics and melodies (i.e., the system consists of a lyric-to-template module and a template-to-melody module). TeleMelody has two advantages. First, it is data efficient. The template-to-melody module is trained in a self-supervised way (i.e., the source template is extracted from the target melody) that does not need any lyric-melody paired data. The lyric-to-template module is made up of some rules and a lyric-to-rhythm model, which is trained with paired lyric-rhythm data that is easier to obtain than paired lyric-melody data. Second, it is controllable. The design of the template ensures that the generated melodies can be controlled by adjusting the musical elements in the template. Both subjective and objective experimental evaluations demonstrate that TeleMelody generates melodies with higher quality, better controllability, and less requirement on paired lyric-melody data than previous generation systems.

TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method

k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) becomes an important research direction of NMT in recent years. Its main idea is to retrieve useful key-value pairs from an additional datastore to modify translations without updating the NMT model. However, the underlying retrieved noisy pairs will dramatically deteriorate the model performance. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study and find that this problem results from not fully exploiting the prediction of the NMT model. To alleviate the impact of noise, we propose a confidence-enhanced kNN-MT model with robust training. Concretely, we introduce the NMT confidence to refine the modeling of two important components of kNN-MT: kNN distribution and the interpolation weight. Meanwhile we inject two types of perturbations into the retrieved pairs for robust training. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model not only achieves significant improvements over current kNN-MT models, but also exhibits better robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Robust-knn-mt.

Towards Robust k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation

Text-video retrieval focuses on two aspects: cross-modality interaction and video-language encoding. Currently, the mainstream approach is to train a joint embedding space for multimodal interactions. However, there are structural and semantic differences between text and video, making this approach challenging for fine-grained understanding. In order to solve this, we propose an end-to-end graph-based hierarchical aggregation network for text-video retrieval according to the hierarchy possessed by text and video. We design a token-level weighted network to refine intra-modality representations and construct a graph-based message passing attention network for global-local alignment across modality. We conduct experiments on the public datasets MSR-VTT-9K, MSR-VTT-7K and MSVD, and achieve Recall@1 of 73.0\%, 65.6\%, and 64.0\% , which is 25.7\%, 16.5\%, and 14.2\% better than the current state-of-the-art model.

GHAN: Graph-Based Hierarchical Aggregation Network for Text-Video Retrieval

Hate speech is a global phenomenon, but most hate speech datasets so far focus on English-language content. This hinders the development of more effective hate speech detection models in hundreds of languages spoken by billions across the world. More data is needed, but annotating hateful content is expensive, time-consuming and potentially harmful to annotators. To mitigate these issues, we explore data-efficient strategies for expanding hate speech detection into under-resourced languages. In a series of experiments with mono- and multilingual models across five non-English languages, we find that 1) a small amount of target-language fine-tuning data is needed to achieve strong performance, 2) the benefits of using more such data decrease exponentially, and 3) initial fine-tuning on readily-available English data can partially substitute target-language data and improve model generalisability. Based on these findings, we formulate actionable recommendations for hate speech detection in low-resource language settings.

Data-Efficient Strategies for Expanding Hate Speech Detection into Under-Resourced Languages

Multilingual pretrained models have shown strong cross-lingual transfer ability. Some works used code-switching sentences, which consist of tokens from multiple languages, to enhance the cross-lingual representation further, and have shown success in many zero-shot cross-lingual tasks. However, code-switched tokens are likely to cause grammatical incoherence in newly substituted sentences, and negatively affect the performance on token-sensitive tasks, such as Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and Named-Entity-Recognition (NER). This paper mitigates the limitation of the code-switching method by not only making the token replacement but considering the similarity between the context and the switched tokens so that the newly substituted sentences are grammatically consistent during both training and inference. We conduct experiments on cross-lingual POS and NER over 30+ languages, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by outperforming the mBERT by 0.95 and original code-switching method by 1.67 on F1 scores.

Toward the Limitation of Code-Switching in Cross-Lingual Transfer

Recent research shows synthetic data as a source of supervision helps pretrained language models (PLM) transfer learning to new target tasks/domains. However, this idea is less explored for spatial language. We provide two new data resources on multiple spatial language processing tasks. The first dataset is synthesized for transfer learning on spatial question answering (SQA) and spatial role labeling (SpRL). Compared to previous SQA datasets, we include a larger variety of spatial relation types and spatial expressions. Our data generation process is easily extendable with new spatial expression lexicons. The second one is a real-world SQA dataset with human-generated questions built on an existing corpus with SPRL annotations. This dataset can be used to evaluate spatial language processing models in realistic situations. We show pretraining with automatically generated data significantly improves the SOTA results on several SQA and SPRL benchmarks, particularly when the training data in the target domain is small.

Transfer Learning with Synthetic Corpora for Spatial Role Labeling and Reasoning

In this work, we provide a literature review of active learning (AL) for its applications in natural language processing (NLP). In addition to a fine-grained categorization of query strategies, we also investigate several other important aspects of applying AL to NLP problems. These include AL for structured prediction tasks, annotation cost, model learning (especially with deep neural models), and starting and stopping AL. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of related topics and future directions.

A Survey of Active Learning for Natural Language Processing

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continually learn new relations from a class-incremental data stream. CRE model usually suffers from catastrophic forgetting problem, i.e., the performance of old relations seriously degrades when the model learns new relations. Most previous work attributes catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come, with an implicit assumption that the CRE models have adequately learned the old relations. In this paper, through empirical studies we argue that this assumption may not hold, and an important reason for catastrophic forgetting is that the learned representations do not have good robustness against the appearance of analogous relations in the subsequent learning process. To address this issue, we encourage the model to learn more precise and robust representations through a simple yet effective adversarial class augmentation mechanism (ACA), which is easy to implement and model-agnostic.
Experimental results show that ACA can consistently improve the performance of state-of-the-art CRE models on two popular benchmarks.

Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation

Teacher-forcing is widely used in training sequence generation models to improve sampling efficiency and to stabilize training. However, teacher-forcing is vulnerable to the exposure bias problem. Previous works have attempted to address exposure bias by modifying the training data to simulate model-generated results. Nevertheless, they do not consider the pairwise relationship between the original training data and the modified ones, which provides more information during training. Hence, we propose Regularized Teacher-Forcing (R-TeaFor) to utilize this relationship for better regularization. Empirically, our experiments show that R-TeaFor outperforms previous summarization state-of-the-art models, and the results can be generalized to different pre-trained models.

R-TeaFor: Regularized Teacher-Forcing for Abstractive Summarization

Protecting large language models from privacy leakage is becoming increasingly crucial with their wide adoption in real-world products. Yet applying *differential privacy* (DP), a canonical notion with provable privacy guarantees for machine learning models, to those models remains challenging due to the trade-off between model utility and privacy loss. Utilizing the fact that sensitive information in language data tends to be sparse, Shi et al. (2021) formalized a DP notion extension called *Selective Differential Privacy* (SDP) to protect only the sensitive tokens defined by a policy function. However, their algorithm only works for RNN-based models. In this paper, we develop a novel framework, *Just Fine-tune Twice* (JFT), that achieves SDP for state-of-the-art large transformer-based models. Our method is easy to implement: it first fine-tunes the model with *redacted* in-domain data, and then fine-tunes it again with the *original* in-domain data using a private training mechanism. Furthermore, we study the scenario of imperfect implementation of policy functions that misses sensitive tokens and develop systematic methods to handle it. Experiments show that our method achieves strong utility compared to previous baselines. We also analyze the SDP privacy guarantee empirically with the canary insertion attack.

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TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method

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Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation

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TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method

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Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation

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