United States

Natural language processing (NLP) research combines the study of universal principles, through basic science, with applied science targeting specific use cases and settings. However, the process of exchange between basic NLP and applications is often assumed to emerge naturally, resulting in many innovations going unapplied and many important questions left unstudied. We describe a new paradigm of Translational NLP, which aims to structure and facilitate the processes by which basic and applied NLP research inform one another. Translational NLP thus presents a third research paradigm, focused on understanding the challenges posed by application needs and how these challenges can drive innovation in basic science and technology design. We show that many significant advances in NLP research have emerged from the intersection of basic principles with application needs, and present a conceptual framework outlining the stakeholders and key questions in translational research. Our framework provides a roadmap for developing Translational NLP as a dedicated research area, and identifies general translational principles to facilitate exchange between basic and applied research.


NAACL 2021

Translational NLP: A New Paradigm and General Principles for Natural Language Processing Research

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

Document-level neural machine translation (NMT) has proven to be of profound value for its effectiveness on capturing contextual information. Nevertheless, existing approaches 1) simply introduce the representations of context sentences without explicitly characterizing the inter-sentence reasoning process; and 2) feed ground-truth target contexts as extra inputs at the training time, thus facing the problem of exposure bias. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-Hop Transformer (MHT) which offers NMT abilities to explicitly model the human-like draft-editing and reasoning process. Specifically, our model serves the sentence-level translation as a draft and properly refines its representations by attending to multiple antecedent sentences iteratively. Experiments on four widely used document translation tasks demonstrate that our method can significantly improve document-level translation performance.


Multi-Hop Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation

Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) that relies solely on massive monolingual corpora has achieved remarkable results in several translation tasks. However, in real-world scenarios, massive monolingual corpora do not exist for some extremely low-resource languages such as Estonian, and UNMT systems usually perform poorly when there is not adequate training corpus for one language. In this paper, we first define and analyze the unbalanced training data scenario for UNMT. Based on this scenario, we propose UNMT self-training mechanisms to train a robust UNMT system and improve its performance in this case. Experimental results on several language pairs show that the proposed methods substantially outperform conventional UNMT systems.


Self-Training for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation in Unbalanced Training Data Scenarios

Domain Adaptation is widely used in practical applications of neural machine translation, which aims to achieve good performance on both general domain and in-domain data. However, the existing methods for domain adaptation usually suffer from catastrophic for- getting, large domain divergence, and model explosion. To address these three problems, we propose a method of “divide and conquer” which is based on the importance of neurons or parameters for the translation model. In this method, we first prune the model and only keep the important neurons or parameters, making them responsible for both general-domain and in-domain translation. Then we further train the pruned model supervised by the original whole model with knowledge dis- titillation. Last we expand the model to the original size and fine-tune the added parameters for the in-domain translation. We conducted experiments on different language pairs and domains and the results show that our method can achieve significant improvements compared with several strong baselines.


Pruning-then-Expanding Model for Domain Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation

Most privacy protection studies for textual data focus on removing explicit sensitive identifiers. However, personal writing style, as a strong indicator of authorship, is often neglected. Recent studies, such as SynTF, have shown promising results on privacy-preserving text mining. However, their anonymization algorithm can only output numeric term vectors which are difficult for the recipients to interpret. We propose a novel text generation model with a two-set exponential mechanism for authorship anonymization. By augmenting the semantic information through a REINFORCE training reward function, the model can generate differentially private text that has a close semantic and similar grammatical structure to the original text while removing personal traits of the writing style. It does not assume any conditioned labels or paralleled text data for training. 


ER-AE: Differentially Private Text Generation for Authorship Anonymization

We propose a practical instant question answering (QA) system on product pages of e-commerce services, where for each user query, relevant community question answer (CQA) pairs are retrieved. User queries and CQA pairs differ significantly in language characteristics making relevance learning difficult. Our proposed transformer-based model learns a robust relevance function by jointly learning unified syntactic and semantic representations without the need for human labeled data. This is achieved by distantly supervising our model by distilling from predictions of a syntactic matching system on user queries and simultaneously training with CQA pairs. Training with CQA pairs helps our model learning semantic QA relevance and distant supervision enables learning of syntactic features as well as the nuances of user querying language. Additionally, our model encodes queries and candidate responses independently allowing offline candidate embedding generation thereby minimizing the need for real-time transformer model execution. Consequently, our framework is able to scale to large e-commerce QA traffic. Extensive evaluation on user queries shows that our framework significantly outperforms both syntactic and semantic baselines in offline as well as large scale online A/B setups of a popular e-commerce service.


Distantly Supervised Transformers For E-Commerce Product QA

Understanding voluminous historical records provides clues on the past in various aspects, such as social and political issues and even natural science facts. However, it is generally difficult to fully utilize the historical records, since most of the documents are not written in a modern language and part of the contents are damaged over time. As a result, restoring the damaged or unrecognizable parts as well as translating the records into modern languages are crucial tasks. In response, we present a multi-task learning approach to restore and translate historical documents based on a self-attention mechanism, specifically utilizing two Korean historical records, ones of the most voluminous historical records in the world. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the accuracy of the translation task than baselines without multi-task learning. In addition, we present an in-depth exploratory analysis on our translated results via topic modeling, uncovering several significant historical events.


Restoring and Mining the Records of the Joseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation

Given the clinical notes written in electronic health records (EHRs), it is challenging to pre- dict the diagnostic codes which is formulated as a multi-label classification task. The large set of labels, the hierarchical dependency, and the imbalanced data make this prediction task extremely hard. Most existing work built a bi- nary prediction for each label independently, ignoring the dependencies between labels. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework to improve automatic ICD coding by capturing the label correlation. Specifically, we train a label set distribution estimator to rescore the probability of each label set can- didate generated by a base predictor. This pa- per is the first attempt at learning the label set distribution as a reranking module for medi- cal code prediction. In the experiments, our proposed framework is able to improve upon best-performing predictors on the benchmark MIMIC datasets.


Modeling Diagnostic Label Correlation for Automatic ICD Coding

In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make explicit the process of interpreting the communicative intents of the speaker's utterances by grounding them in the various modalities in which the dialogue is situated. This paper frames dialogue clarification mechanisms as an understudied research problem and a key missing piece in the giant jigsaw puzzle of natural language understanding. We discuss both the theoretical background and practical challenges posed by this problem, and propose a recipe for obtaining grounding annotations. We conclude by highlighting ethical issues that need to be addressed in future work. 


A recipe for annotating grounded clarifications

We introduce Dynabench, an open-source platform for dynamic dataset creation and model benchmarking. Dynabench runs in a web browser and supports human-and-model-in-the-loop dataset creation: annotators seek to create examples that a target model will misclassify, but that another person will not. In this paper, we argue that Dynabench addresses a critical need in our community: contemporary models quickly achieve outstanding performance on benchmark tasks but nonetheless fail on simple challenge examples and falter in real-world scenarios. With Dynabench, dataset creation, model development, and model assessment can directly inform each other, leading to more robust and informative benchmarks. We report on four initial NLP tasks, illustrating these concepts and highlighting the promise of the platform, and address potential objections to dynamic benchmarking as a new standard for the field.


Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP

We introduce a grey-box adversarial attack and defence framework for sentiment classification. We address the issues of differentiability, label preservation and input reconstruction for adversarial attack and defence in one unified framework. Our results show that once trained, the attacking model is capable of generating high-quality adversarial examples substantially faster (one order of magnitude less in time) than state-of-the-art attacking methods. These examples also preserve the original sentiment according to human evaluation. Additionally, our framework produces an improved classifier that is robust in defending against multiple adversarial attacking methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/adv-def-text-dist. 


Translational NLP: A New Paradigm and General Principles for Natural Language Processing Research

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