Dominican Republic

We obtain new results using referential translation machines (RTMs) with predictions mixed and stacked to obtain a better mixture of experts prediction. Our super learner results improve the results and provide a robust combination model.

EMNLP 2021

RTM Super Learner Results at Quality Estimation Task

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.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

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.

workshop paper

This paper investigates continual learning for semantic parsing. In this setting, a neural semantic parser learns tasks sequentially without accessing full training data from previous tasks. Direct application of the SOTA continual learning algorithms to this problem fails to achieve comparable performance with re-training models with all seen tasks because they have not considered the special properties of structured outputs yielded by semantic parsers. Therefore, we propose TotalRecall, a continual learning method designed for neural semantic parsers from two aspects: i) a sampling method for memory replay that diversifies logical form templates and balances distributions of parse actions in a memory; ii) a two-stage training method that significantly improves generalization capability of the parsers across tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to study the research problems involved in continual semantic parsing and demonstrate that a neural semantic parser trained with TotalRecall achieves superior performance than the one trained directly with the SOTA continual learning algorithms and achieve a 3-6 times speedup compared to re-training from scratch.

Total Recall: a Customized Continual Learning Method for Neural Semantic Parsers

Resolving pronouns to their referents has long been studied as a fundamental natural language understanding problem. Previous works on pronoun coreference resolution (PCR) mostly focus on resolving pronouns to mentions in text while ignoring the exophoric scenario. Exophoric pronouns are common in daily communications, where speakers may directly use pronouns to refer to some objects present in the environment without introducing the objects first. Although such objects are not mentioned in the dialogue text, they can often be disambiguated by the general topics of the dialogue. Motivated by this, we propose to jointly leverage the local context and global topics of dialogues to solve the out-of-text PCR problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of adding topic regularization for resolving exophoric pronouns.

Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Topic Regularization

Impressive milestones have been achieved in text matching by adopting a cross-attention mechanism to capture pertinent semantic connections between two sentence representations. However, regular cross-attention focuses on word-level links between the two input sequences, neglecting the importance of contextual information. We propose a context-aware interaction network (COIN) to properly align two sequences and infer their semantic relationship. Specifically, each interaction block includes (1) a context-aware cross-attention mechanism to effectively integrate contextual information when aligning two sequences, and (2) a gate fusion layer to flexibly interpolate aligned representations. We apply multiple stacked interaction blocks to produce alignments at different levels and gradually refine the attention results. Experiments on two question matching datasets and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Context-Aware Interaction Network for Question Matching

As an essential form of knowledge representation, taxonomies are widely used in various downstream natural language processing tasks. However, with the continuously rising of new concepts, many existing taxonomies are unable to maintain coverage by manual expansion. In this paper, we propose TEMP, a self-supervised taxonomy expansion method, which predicts the position of new concepts by ranking the generated taxonomy-paths. For the first time, TEMP employs pre-trained contextual encoders in taxonomy construction and hypernym detection problems. Experiments prove that pre-trained contextual embeddings are able to capture hypernym-hyponym relations. To learn more detailed differences between taxonomy-paths, we train the model with dynamic margin loss by a novel dynamic margin function. Extensive evaluations exhibit that TEMP outperforms prior state-of-the-art taxonomy expansion approaches by 14.3% in accuracy and 15.8% in mean reciprocal rank on three public benchmarks.

TEMP: Taxonomy Expansion with Dynamic Margin Loss through Taxonomy-Paths

We propose a method to distil language-agnostic meaning embedding using a multilingual sentence encoder. By removing language-specific information from the original embedding, we retrieve an embedding that fully represents the meaning of the sentence. The proposed method relies only on parallel corpora without any human annotations. Our meaning embedding allows for efficient cross-lingual sentence similarity estimation using a simple cosine similarity calculation. Experimental results of both the quality estimation of machine translation and cross-lingual semantic textual similarity tasks reveal that our method consistently outperforms the strong baselines using the original multilingual embeddings. The method also consistently improves the performance of any pre-trained multilingual sentence encoder, even in low-resource language pairs, where only tens of thousands of parallel sentence pairs are available.

Language-agnostic Representation from Multilingual Sentence Encoders for Cross-lingual Similarity Estimation

The paper presents our submission to the WMT2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). We participate in sentence-level predictions of human judgments and post-editing effort. We propose a glass-box approach based on attention weights extracted from machine translation systems. In contrast to the previous works, we directly explore attention weight matrices without replacing them with general metrics (like entropy). We show that some of our models can be trained with a small amount of a high-cost labelled data. In the absence of training data our approach still demonstrates a moderate linear correlation, when trained with synthetic data.

Direct Exploitation of Attention Weights for Translation Quality Estimation

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2021 Triangular MT Shared Task. We participate in the Russian-to-Chinese task under the constrained condition. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via a variant with larger parameter sizes. We perform detailed data pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual data. Several strategies are used to train our models, such as Multilingual Translation, Back Translation, Forward Translation, Data Denoising, Average Checkpoint, Ensemble, Fine-tuning, etc. Our system obtains 32.5 BLEU on the dev set and 27.7 BLEU on the test set, the highest score among all submissions.

HW-TSC’s Participation in the WMT 2021 Triangular MT Shared Task

We are using a semi-automated test suite in order to provide a fine-grained linguistic evaluation for state-of-the-art machine translation systems. The evaluation includes 18 German to English and 18 English to German systems, submitted to the Translation Shared Task of the 2021 Conference on Machine Translation. Our submission adds up to the submissions of the previous years by creating and applying a wide-range test suite for English to German as a new language pair. The fine-grained evaluation allows spotting significant differences between systems that cannot be distinguished by the direct assessment of the human evaluation campaign. We find that most of the systems achieve good accuracies in the majority of linguistic phenomena but there are few phenomena with lower accuracy, such as the idioms, the modal pluperfect and the German resultative predicates. Two systems have significantly better test suite accuracy in macro-average in every language direction, Online-W and Facebook-AI for German to English and VolcTrans and Online-W for English to German. The systems show a steady improvement as compared to previous years.

Linguistic evaluation for the 2021 state-of-the-art Machine Translation systems for German to English and English to German

This paper describes Naver Papago’s submission to the WMT21 shared triangular MT task to enhance the non-English MT system with tri-language parallel data. The provided parallel data are Russian-Chinese (direct), Russian-English (indirect), and English-Chinese (indirect) data. This task aims to improve the quality of the Russian-to-Chinese MT system by exploiting the direct and indirect parallel re- sources. The direct parallel data is noisy data crawled from the web. To alleviate the issue, we conduct extensive experiments to find effective data filtering methods. With the empirical knowledge that the performance of bilingual MT is better than multi-lingual MT and related experiment results, we approach this task as bilingual MT, where the two indirect data are transformed to direct data. In addition, we use the Transformer, a robust translation model, as our baseline and integrate several techniques, averaging checkpoints, model ensemble, and re-ranking. Our final system provides a 12.7 BLEU points improvement over a baseline system on the WMT21 triangular MT development set. In the official evalua- tion of the test set, ours is ranked 2nd in terms of BLEU scores.

Papago’s Submissions to the WMT21 triangular Translation Task

In this paper we present the FJWU's system submitted to the biomedical shared task at WMT21. We prepared state-of-the-art multilingual neural machine translation systems for three languages (i.e. German, Spanish and French) with English as target language. Our NMT systems based on Transformer architecture, were trained on combination of in-domain and out-domain parallel corpora developed using Information Retrieval (IR) and domain adaptation techniques.

Content not yet available

RTM Super Learner Results at Quality Estimation Task

Next from EMNLP 2021

Total Recall: a Customized Continual Learning Method for Neural Semantic Parsers

Similar lecture

Phrase-level Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES