Dominican Republic

We present our submissions to the WMT21 shared task in Unsupervised and Very Low Resource machine translation between German and Upper Sorbian, German and Lower Sorbian, and Russian and Chuvash. Our low-resource systems (German↔Upper Sorbian, Russian↔Chuvash) are pre-trained on high-resource pairs of related languages. We fine-tune those systems using the available authentic parallel data and improve by iterated back-translation. The unsupervised German↔Lower Sorbian system is initialized by the best Upper Sorbian system and improved by iterated back-translation using monolingual data only.

EMNLP 2021

The LMU Munich Systems for the WMT21 Unsupervised and Very Low-Resource Translation 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.

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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.

workshop paper

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

Scripts are structured sequences of events together with the participants, which are extracted from the texts. Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the historical events in the script. Two kinds of information facilitate this task, namely, the event-level information and the script-level information. At the event level, existing studies view an event as a verb with its participants, while neglecting other useful properties, such as the state of the participants. At the script level, most existing studies only consider a single event sequence corresponding to one common protagonist. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model, called MCPredictor, which integrates deep event-level and script-level information for script event prediction. At the event level, MCPredictor utilizes the rich information in the text to obtain more comprehensive event semantic representations. At the script-level, it considers multiple event sequences corresponding to different participants of the subsequent event. The experimental results on the widely-used New York Times corpus demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.

Integrating Deep Event-Level and Script-Level Information for Script Event Prediction

Large pre-trained language models for textual data have an unconstrained output space; at each decoding step, they can produce any of 10,000s of sub-word tokens. When fine-tuned to target constrained formal languages like SQL, these models often generate invalid code, rendering it unusable. We propose PICARD (code and trained models available at this https://github.com/ElementAI/picard), a method for constraining auto-regressive decoders of language models through incremental parsing. PICARD helps to find valid output sequences by rejecting inadmissible tokens at each decoding step. On the challenging Spider and CoSQL text-to-SQL translation tasks, we show that PICARD transforms fine-tuned T5 models with passable performance into state-of-the-art solutions.

PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models

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.

FJWU participation for the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task

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.

RTM Super Learner Results at Quality Estimation Task

This paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center's neural machine translation systems and submissions to the WMT21 biomedical translation shared task. Four of the submissions achieve state-of-the-art BLEU scores based on the official-released automatic evaluation results (EN->FR, EN<->IT and ZH->EN). We perform experiments to unveil the practical insights of the involved domain adaptation techniques, including finetuning order, terminology dictionaries, and ensemble decoding. Issues associated with overfitting and under-translation are also discussed.

The LMU Munich Systems for the WMT21 Unsupervised and Very Low-Resource Translation Task

Next from EMNLP 2021

Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Topic Regularization

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