Dominican Republic

Conversational machine reading (CMR) requires machines to communicate with humans through multi-turn interactions between two salient dialogue states of decision making and question generation processes. In open CMR settings, as the more realistic scenario, the retrieved background knowledge would be noisy, which results in severe challenges in the information transmission. Existing studies commonly train independent or pipeline systems for the two subtasks. However, those methods are trivial by using hard-label decisions to activate question generation, which eventually hinders the model performance. In this work, we propose an effective gating strategy by smoothing the two dialogue states in only one decoder and bridge decision making and question generation to provide a richer dialogue state reference. Experiments on the OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our method, which achieves new state-of-the-art results.

EMNLP 2021

Smoothing Dialogue States for Open Conversational Machine Reading

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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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.

poster

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which requires a machine to answer questions given the relevant documents, is an important way to test machines' ability to understand human language. Multiple-choice MRC is one of the most studied tasks in MRC due to the convenience of evaluation and the flexibility of answer format. Post-hoc interpretation aims to explain a trained model and reveal how the model arrives at the prediction. One of the most important interpretation forms is to attribute model decisions to input features. Based on post-hoc interpretation methods, we assess attributions of paragraphs in multiple-choice MRC and improve the model by punishing the illogical attributions. Our method can improve model performance without any external information and model structure change. Furthermore, we also analyze how and why such a self-training method works.

Enhancing Multiple-choice Machine Reading Comprehension by Punishing Illogical Interpretations

Numerical reasoning in machine reading comprehension (MRC) has shown drastic improvements over the past few years. While the previous models for numerical MRC are able to interpolate the learned numerical reasoning capabilities, it is not clear whether they can perform just as well on numbers unseen in the training dataset. Our work rigorously tests state-of-the-art models on DROP, a numerical MRC dataset, to see if they can handle passages that contain out-of-range numbers. One of the key findings is that the models fail to extrapolate to unseen numbers. Presenting numbers as digit-by-digit input to the model, we also propose the E-digit number form that alleviates the lack of extrapolation in models and reveals the need to treat numbers differently from regular words in the text. Our work provides a valuable insight into the numerical MRC models and the way to represent number forms in MRC.

Have You Seen That Number? Investigating Extrapolation in Question Answering Models

Dense retrieval methods have shown great promise over sparse retrieval methods in a range of NLP problems. Among them, dense phrase retrieval-the most fine-grained retrieval unit-is appealing because phrases can be directly used as the output for question answering and slot filling tasks. In this work, we follow the intuition that retrieving phrases naturally entails retrieving larger text blocks and study whether phrase retrieval can serve as the basis for coarse-level retrieval including passages and documents. We first observe that a dense phrase-retrieval system, without any retraining, already achieves better passage retrieval accuracy (+3-5% in top-5 accuracy) compared to passage retrievers, which also helps achieve superior end-to-end QA performance with fewer passages. Then, we provide an interpretation for why phrase-level supervision helps learn better fine-grained entailment compared to passage-level supervision, and also show that phrase retrieval can be improved to achieve competitive performance in document-retrieval tasks such as entity linking and knowledge-grounded dialogue. Finally, we demonstrate how phrase filtering and vector quantization can reduce the size of our index by 4-10x, making dense phrase retrieval a practical and versatile solution in multi-granularity retrieval.

Phrase Retrieval Learns Passage Retrieval, Too

In this work, we introduce back-training, an alternative to self-training for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) from source to target domain. While self-training generates synthetic training data where natural inputs are aligned with noisy outputs, back-training results in natural outputs aligned with noisy inputs. This significantly reduces the gap between the target domain and synthetic data distribution, and reduces model overfitting to the source domain. We run UDA experiments on question generation and passage retrieval from the Natural Questions domain to machine learning and biomedical domains. We find that back-training vastly outperforms selftraining by a mean improvement of 7.8 BLEU-4 points on generation, and 17.6% top-20 retrieval accuracy across both domains. We further propose consistency filters to remove low-quality synthetic data before training. We also release a new domain-adaptation datasetMLQuestions containing 35K unaligned questions, 50K unaligned passages, and 3K aligned question-passage pairs.

Back-Training excels Self-Training at Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Question Generation and Passage Retrieval

Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it’s still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of structural reading comprehension (SRC) on the web. Given a web page and a question about it, the task is to find the answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages. Along with the QA pairs, corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata are also provided in our dataset. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available.

WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension

Several neural-based metrics have been recently proposed to evaluate machine translation quality. However, all of them resort to point estimates, which provide limited information at segment level. This is made worse as they are trained on noisy, biased and scarce human judgements, often resulting in unreliable quality predictions.
In this paper, we introduce uncertainty-aware MT evaluation and analyze the trustworthiness of the predicted quality.
We combine the COMET framework with two uncertainty estimation methods, Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles, to obtain quality scores along with confidence intervals. 
We compare the performance of our uncertainty-aware MT evaluation methods across multiple language pairs from the QT21 dataset and the WMT20 metrics task, augmented with MQM annotations. We experiment with varying numbers of references and further discuss the usefulness of uncertainty-aware quality estimation (without references) to flag possibly critical translation mistakes.

Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation

In this paper, we describe our submissions for the Similar Language Translation Shared Task 2021. We built 3 systems in each direction for the Tamil ⇐⇒ Telugu language pair. This paper outlines experiments with various tokenization schemes to train statistical models. We also report the configuration of the submitted systems and results produced by them.

Machine Translation System for Similar Language Translation Shared Task 2021

This paper describes the methods behind the systems submitted by the University of Groningen for the WMT 2021 Unsupervised Machine Translation task for German--Lower Sorbian (DE--DSB): a high-resource language to a low-resource one. Our system uses a transformer encoder-decoder architecture in which we make three changes to the standard training procedure.
First, our training focuses on two languages at a time, contrasting with a wealth of research on multilingual systems. Second, we introduce a novel method for initializing the vocabulary of an unseen language, achieving improvements of 3.2 BLEU for DE->DSB and 4.0 BLEU for DSB->DE.Lastly, we experiment with the order in which offline and online back-translation are used to train an unsupervised system, finding that using online back-translation first works better for DE->DSB by 2.76 BLEU. Our submissions ranked first (tied with another team) for DSB->DE and third for DE->DSB.

Unsupervised Translation of German–Lower Sorbian: Exploring Training and Novel Transfer Methods on a Low-Resource Language

This paper introduces WeChat AI’s participation in WMT 2021 shared news translation task on English->Chinese, English->Japanese, Japanese->English and English->German. Our systems are based on the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) with several novel and effective variants. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, large-scale synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, knowledge distillation, forward-translation, iterative in-domain knowledge transfer), advanced finetuning approaches, and boosted Self-BLEU based model ensemble. Our constrained systems achieve 36.9, 46.9, 27.8 and 31.3 case-sensitive BLEU scores on English->Chinese, English->Japanese, Japanese->English and English->German, respectively. The BLEU scores of English->Chinese, English->Japanese and Japanese->English are the highest among all submissions, and that of English->German is the highest among all constrained submissions.

WeChat Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT21

Quality Estimation (QE) is an important component of the machine translation workflow as it assesses the quality of the translated output without consulting reference translations. In this paper, we discuss our submission to the WMT 2021 QE Shared Task. We participate in Task 2 sentence-level sub-task that challenge participants to predict the HTER score for sentence-level post-editing effort. Our proposed system is an ensemble of multilingual BERT (mBERT)-based regression models, which are generated by fine-tuning on different input settings. It demonstrates comparable performance with respect to the Pearson's correlation, and beat the baseline system in MAE/ RMSE for several language pairs. In addition, we adapt our system for the zero-shot setting by exploiting target language-relevant language pairs and pseudo-reference translations.

Smoothing Dialogue States for Open Conversational Machine Reading

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Enhancing Multiple-choice Machine Reading Comprehension by Punishing Illogical Interpretations

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