United Arab Emirates

This paper describes an approach for the morphosyntactic analysis of clauses, including the analysis of composite verb forms and both overt and covert pronouns. The approach uses grammatical rules for verb inflection and clause-internal word agreement to compute a clause&#39;s morphosyntactic features from the morphological features of the individual words. The approach is tested for eight languages in the 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-Level Morphology, where it achieves F1 scores between 79% and 99% (94% in average).

EMNLP 2022

Rule-Based Clause-Level Morphology for Multiple Languages

tense

morphosyntax

inflection

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This paper describes an approach for the morphosyntactic analysis of clauses, including the analysis of composite verb forms and both overt and covert pronouns. The approach uses grammatical rules for verb inflection and clause-internal word agreement to compute a clause's morphosyntactic features from the morphological features of the individual words. The approach is tested for eight languages in the 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-Level Morphology, where it achieves F1 scores between 79% and 99% (94% in average).

workshop paper

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MicroBERT: Effective Training of Low-resource Monolingual BERTs through Parameter Reduction and Multitask Learning

We present the University of British Columbia's submission to the MRL shared task on multilingual clause-level morphology. Our submission extends word-level inflectional models to the clause-level in two ways: first, by evaluating the role that BPE has on the learning of inflectional morphology, and second, by evaluating the importance of a copy bias obtained through data hallucination. Experiments demonstrate a strong preference for language-tuned BPE and a copy bias over a vanilla transformer. The methods are complementary for inflection and analysis tasks – combined models see error reductions of 38% for inflection and 15.6% for analysis; However, this synergy does not hold for reinflection, which performs best under a BPE-only setting. A deeper analysis of the errors generated by our models illustrates that the copy bias may be too strong - the combined model produces predictions more similar to the copy-influenced system, despite the success of the BPE-model.

Impact of Sequence Length and Copying on Clause-Level Inflection

This position paper discusses the problem of multilingual evaluation. Using simple statistics, such as average language performance, might inject linguistic biases in favor of dominant language families into evaluation methodology. We argue that a qualitative analysis informed by comparative linguistics is needed for multilingual results to detect this kind of bias. We show in our case study that results in published works can indeed be linguistically biased and we demonstrate that visualization based on URIEL typological database can detect it.

Average Is Not Enough: Caveats of Multilingual Evaluation

This paper presents a new natural language processing task - Actionable Entities Recognition (AER) - recognition of entities that protagonists could interact with for further plot development. Though similar to classical Named Entity Recognition (NER), it has profound differences. In particular, it is crucial for interactive fiction, where the agent needs to detect entities that might be useful in the future. We also discuss if AER  might be further useful for the systems dealing with narrative processing since actionable entities profoundly impact the causal relationship in a story. We validate the proposed task on two previously available datasets and present a new benchmark dataset for the AER task that includes 5550 descriptions with one or more actionable entities. 

AERBIF: Actionable Entities Recognition Benchmark for Interactive Fiction

Task planning is an important component of traditional robotics systems enabling robots to compose fine grained skills to perform more complex tasks. Recent work building systems for translating natural language to executable actions for task completion in simulated embodied agents is focused on directly predicting low level action sequences that would be expected to be directly executable by a physical robot. In this work, we instead focus on predicting a higher level plan representation for one such embodied task completion dataset - TEACh, under the assumption that techniques for high-level plan prediction from natural language are expected to be more transferable to physical robot systems . We demonstrate that better plans can be predicted using multimodal context, and that plan prediction and plan execution modules are likely dependent on each other and hence it may not be ideal to fully decouple them. Further, we benchmark execution of oracle plans to quantify the scope for improvement in plan prediction models.

Multimodal Contextualized Plan Prediction for Embodied Task Completion

We design and evaluate a Thompson sampling-based interactive Bayesian optimization algorithm that leverages a Gaussian process reward model of the Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training objective, for its sequential minimization. Transformer-based language model (TLM) pre-training requires large volumes of data and high computational resources, while introducing many unresolved design choices, such as hyperparameter selection of the pre-training procedure. We here fit TLM pre-training validation losses with a Gaussian process, and formulate a Thompson sampling bandit policy that maximizes its sequentially attained cumulative rewards. Instead of MLM pre-training with fixed masking probabilities, the proposed Gaussian process-based Thompson sampling (GP-TS) accelerates and improves MLM pre-training performance by sequentially selecting masking hyperparameters of the language model. GP-TS provides an interactive, efficient framework for pre-training TLMs, as it attains better MLM pre-training loss in less epochs, avoiding costly hyperparameter selection techniques.

Thompson sampling for interactive Bayesian optimization of dynamic masking-based language model pre-training

Recently, there has been an increasing inter- est in two-pass streaming end-to-end speech recognition (ASR) that incorporates a 2nd-pass rescoring model on top of the conventional 1st- pass streaming ASR model to improve recogni- tion accuracy while keeping latency low. One of the latest 2nd-pass rescoring model, Trans- former Rescorer, takes the n-best initial out- puts and audio embeddings from the 1st-pass model, and then choose the best output by re- scoring the n-best initial outputs. However, training this Transformer Rescorer requires ex- pensive paired audio-text training data because the model uses audio embeddings as input. In this work, we present our Joint Audio/Text training method for Transformer Rescorer, to leverage unpaired text-only data which is rela- tively cheaper than paired audio-text data. We evaluate Transformer Rescorer with our Joint Audio/Text training on Librispeech dataset as well as our large-scale in-house dataset and show that our training method can improve word error rate (WER) significantly compared to standard Transformer Rescorer without re- quiring any extra model parameters or latency.

Joint Audio/Text Training for Transformer Rescorer of Streaming Speech Recognition

Text games present opportunities for natural language understanding (NLU) methods to tackle reinforcement learning (RL) challenges. However, recent work has questioned the necessity of NLU by showing random text hashes could perform decently. In this paper, we pursue a fine-grained investigation into the roles of text in the face of different RL challenges, and reconcile that semantic and non-semantic language representations could be complementary rather than contrasting. Concretely, we propose a simple scheme to extract relevant contextual information into an approximate state hash as extra input for an RNN-based text agent. Such a lightweight plug-in achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art text agents using advanced NLU techniques such as knowledge graph and passage retrieval, suggesting non-NLU methods might suffice to tackle the challenge of partial observability. However, if we remove RNN encoders and use approximate or even ground-truth state hash alone, the model performs miserably, which confirms the importance of semantic function approximation to tackle the challenge of combinatorially large observation and action spaces. Our findings and analysis provide new insights for designing better text game task setups and agents.

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