Dominican Republic

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by jointly attending to information from different representation subspaces at different positions. In this paper, we present an approach to learning a hard retrieval attention where an attention head only attends to one token in the sentence rather than all tokens. The matrix multiplication between attention probabilities and the value sequence in the standard scaled dot-product attention can thus be replaced by a simple and efficient retrieval operation. We show that our hard retrieval attention mechanism is 1.43 times faster in decoding, while preserving translation quality on a wide range of machine translation tasks when used in the decoder self- and cross-attention networks.

EMNLP 2021

Learning Hard Retrieval Decoder Attention for Transformers

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.

technical paper

Multilingual pre-trained models have demonstrated their effectiveness in many multilingual NLP tasks and enabled zero-shot or few-shot transfer from high-resource languages to low-resource ones. However, due to significant typological differences and contradictions between some languages, such models usually perform poorly on many languages and cross-lingual settings, which shows the difficulty of learning a single model to handle massive diverse languages well at the same time. 
To alleviate this issue, we present a new multilingual pre-training pipeline. We propose to generate language representation from multilingual pre-trained model and conduct linguistic analysis to show that language representation similarity reflects linguistic similarity from multiple perspectives, including language family, geographical sprachbund, lexicostatistics, and syntax.
Then we cluster all the target languages into multiple groups and name each group as a representation sprachbund. Thus, languages in the same representation sprachbund are supposed to boost each other in both pre-training and fine-tuning as they share rich linguistic similarity.
We pre-train one multilingual model for each representation sprachbund. Experiments are conducted on cross-lingual benchmarks and significant improvements are achieved compared to strong baselines.

Discovering Representation Sprachbund For Multilingual Pre-Training

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) trains a single NMT model that supports translation between multiple languages, rather than training separate models for different languages. Learning a single model can enhance the low-resource translation by leveraging data from multiple languages. However, the performance of an MNMT model is highly dependent on the type of languages used in training, as transferring knowledge from a diverse set of languages degrades the translation performance due to negative transfer. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation (HKD) approach for MNMT which capitalises on language groups generated according to typological features and phylogeny of languages to overcome the issue of negative transfer. HKD generates a set of multilingual teacher-assistant models via a selective knowledge distillation mechanism based on the language groups, and then distills the ultimate multilingual model from those assistants in an adaptive way. Experimental results derived from the TED dataset with 53 languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in avoiding the negative transfer effect in MNMT, leading to an improved translation performance (about 1 BLEU score in average) compared to strong baselines.

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: Can Linguistic Hierarchies Help?

Cross-attention is an important component of neural machine translation (NMT), which is always realized by dot-product attention in previous methods. However, dot-product attention only considers the pair-wise correlation between words, resulting in dispersion when dealing with long sentences and neglect of source neighboring relationships. Inspired by linguistics, the above issues are caused by ignoring a type of cross-attention, called concentrated attention, which focuses on several central words and then spreads around them. In this work, we apply Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to model the concentrated attention in cross-attention. Experiments and analyses we conducted on three datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline and has significant improvement on alignment quality, N-gram accuracy, and long sentence translation.

Modeling Concentrated Cross-Attention for Neural Machine Translation with Gaussian Mixture Model

Measuring the similarity score between a pair of sentences in different languages is the essential requisite for multilingual sentence embedding methods. 
Predicting the similarity score consists of two sub-tasks, which are monolingual similarity evaluation and multilingual sentence retrieval.
However, conventional methods have mainly tackled only one of the sub-tasks and therefore showed biased performances.
In this paper, we suggest a novel and strong method for multilingual sentence embedding, which shows performance improvement on both sub-tasks, consequently resulting in robust predictions of multilingual similarity scores.
The suggested method consists of two parts: to learn semantic similarity of sentences in the pivot language and then to extend the learned semantic structure to different languages.
To align semantic structures across different languages, we introduce a teacher-student network. 
The teacher network distills the knowledge of the pivot language to different languages of the student network. 
During the distillation, the parameters of the teacher network are updated with the slow-moving average. 
Together with the distillation and the parameter updating, the semantic structure of the student network can be directly aligned across different languages while preserving the ability to measure the semantic similarity.
Thus, the multilingual training method drives performance improvement on multilingual similarity evaluation. 
The suggested model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on extended STS 2017 multilingual similarity evaluation as well as two sub-tasks, which are extended STS 2017 monolingual similarity evaluation and Tatoeba multilingual retrieval in 14 languages.

Semantic Alignment with Calibrated Similarity for Multilingual Sentence Embedding

State-of-the-art multilingual systems rely on shared vocabularies that sufficiently cover all considered languages. To this end, a simple and frequently used approach makes use of subword vocabularies constructed jointly over several languages. We hypothesize that such vocabularies are suboptimal due to false positives (identical subwords with different meanings across languages) and false negatives (different subwords with similar meanings). To address these issues, we propose Subword Mapping and Anchoring across Languages (SMALA), a method to construct bilingual subword vocabularies. SMALA extracts subword alignments using an unsupervised state-of-the-art mapping technique and uses them to create cross-lingual anchors based on subword similarities. We demonstrate the benefits of SMALA for cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI), where it improves zero-shot transfer to an unseen language without task-specific data, but only by sharing subword embeddings. Moreover, in neural machine translation, we show that joint subword vocabularies obtained with SMALA lead to higher BLEU scores on sentences that contain many false positives and false negatives.

Subword Mapping and Anchoring across Languages

Can pre-trained BERT for one language and GPT for another be glued together to translate texts? Self-supervised training using only monolingual data has led to the success of pre-trained (masked) language models in many NLP tasks. However, directly connecting BERT as an encoder and GPT as a decoder can be challenging in machine translation, for GPT-like models lack a cross-attention component that is needed in seq2seq decoders. In this paper, we propose Graformer to graft separately pre-trained (masked) language models for machine translation. With monolingual data for pre-training and parallel data for grafting training, we maximally take advantage of the usage of both types of data. Experiments on 60 directions show that our method achieves average improvements of 5.8 BLEU in x2en and 2.9 BLEU in en2x directions comparing with the multilingual Transformer of the same size.

Multilingual Translation via Grafting Pre-trained Language Models

Developing a unified multilingual model has been a long pursuing goal for machine translation. 
However, existing approaches suffer from performance degradation - a single multilingual model is inferior to separately trained bilingual ones on rich-resource languages. 
We conjecture that such a phenomenon is due to interference brought by joint training with multiple languages. 
To accommodate the issue, we propose CIAT, an adapted Transformer model with a small parameter overhead for multilingual machine translation. We evaluate CIAT on multiple benchmark datasets, including IWSLT, OPUS-100, and WMT. 
Experiments show that the CIAT consistently outperforms strong multilingual baselines on 64 of total 66 language directions, 42 of which have above 0.5 BLEU improvement.

Counter-Interference Adapter for Multilingual Machine Translation

Pre-training (PT) and back-translation (BT) are two simple and powerful methods to utilize monolingual data for improving the model performance of neural machine translation (NMT). This paper takes the first step to investigate the complementarity between PT and BT. We introduce two probing tasks for PT and BT respectively and find that PT mainly contributes to the encoder module while BT brings more benefits to the decoder. Experimental results show that PT and BT are nicely complementary to each other, establishing state-of-the-art performances on the WMT16 English-Romanian and English-Russian benchmarks. Through extensive analyses on sentence originality and word frequency, we also demonstrate that combining Tagged BT with PT is more helpful to their complementarity, leading to better translation quality. Source code is freely available at https://github.com/SunbowLiu/PTvsBT.

On the Complementarity between Pre-Training and Back-Translation for Neural Machine Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation models typically handle one source language at a time. However, prior work has shown that translating from multiple source languages improves translation quality. Different from existing approaches on multi-source translation that are limited to the test scenario where parallel source sentences from multiple languages are available at inference time, we propose to improve multilingual translation in a more common scenario by exploiting synthetic source sentences from auxiliary languages. We train our model on synthetic multi-source corpora and apply random masking to enable flexible inference with single-source or bi-source inputs. Extensive experiments on Chinese/English-Japanese and a large-scale multilingual translation benchmark show that our model outperforms the multilingual baseline significantly by up to +4.0 BLEU with the largest improvements on low-resource or distant language pairs.

Improving Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Auxiliary Source Languages

Training data for machine translation (MT) is often sourced from a multitude of large corpora that are multi-faceted in nature, e.g. containing contents from multiple domains or different levels of quality or complexity. Naturally, these facets do not occur with equal frequency, nor are they equally important for the test scenario at hand. 
In this work, we propose to optimize this balance jointly with MT model parameters to relieve system developers from manual schedule design. A multi-armed bandit is trained to dynamically choose between facets in a way that is most beneficial for the MT system. 
We evaluate it on three different multi-facet applications: balancing translationese and natural training data, or data from multiple domains or multiple language pairs. We find that bandit learning leads to competitive MT systems across tasks, and our analysis provides insights into its learned strategies and the underlying data sets.

Learning Hard Retrieval Decoder Attention for Transformers

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Learning Hard Retrieval Decoder Attention for Transformers

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Next from EMNLP 2021

Discovering Representation Sprachbund For Multilingual Pre-Training

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Don't Go Far Off: An Empirical Study on Neural Poetry Translation

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