Dominican Republic

By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects’ shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their caregiver’s language is biased towards shape based categories. This presents a chicken and egg problem: if the shape bias must be present in the language in order for children to learn it, how did it arise in language in the first place? In this paper, we propose that communicative efficiency explains both how the shape bias emerged and why it persists across generations. We model this process with neural emergent language agents that learn to communicate about raw pixelated images. First, we show that the shape bias emerges as a result of efficient communication strategies employed by agents. Second, we show that pressure brought on by communicative need is also necessary for it to persist across generations; simply having a shape bias in an agent’s input language is insufficient. These results suggest that, over and above the operation of other learning strategies, the shape bias in human learners may emerge and be sustained by communicative pressures.

EMNLP 2021

The Emergence of the Shape Bias Results from Communicative Efficiency

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

Machine translation models have discrete vocabularies and commonly use subword segmentation techniques to achieve an 'open vocabulary.' This approach relies on consistent and correct underlying unicode sequences, and makes models susceptible to degradation from common types of noise and variation. Motivated by the robustness of human language processing, we propose the use of visual text representations, which dispense with a finite set of text embeddings in favor of continuous vocabularies created by processing visually rendered text with sliding windows. We show that models using visual text representations approach or match performance of traditional text models on small and larger datasets. More importantly, models with visual embeddings demonstrate significant robustness to varied types of noise, achieving e.g., 25.9 BLEU on a character permuted German-English task where subword models degrade to 1.9.

Robust Open-Vocabulary Translation from Visual Text Representations

Despite constant improvements in machine translation quality, automatic poetry translation remains a challenging problem due to the lack of open-sourced parallel poetic corpora, and to the intrinsic complexities involved in preserving the semantics, style and figurative nature of poetry. We present an empirical investigation for poetry translation along several dimensions: 1) size and style of training data (poetic vs. non-poetic), including a zero-shot setup; 2) bilingual vs. multilingual learning; and 3) language-family-specific models vs. mixed-language-family models. To accomplish this, we contribute a parallel dataset of poetry translations for several language pairs. Our results show that multilingual fine-tuning on poetic text significantly outperforms multilingual fine-tuning on non-poetic text that is 35X larger in size, both in terms of automatic metrics (BLEU, BERTScore, COMET) and human evaluation metrics such as faithfulness (meaning and poetic style). Moreover, multilingual fine-tuning on poetic data outperforms bilingual fine-tuning on poetic data.

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

Phrase grounding aims to map textual phrases to their associated image regions, which can be a prerequisite for multimodal reasoning and can benefit tasks requiring identifying objects based on language. With pre-trained vision-and-language models achieving impressive performance across tasks, it remains unclear if we can directly utilize their learned embeddings for phrase grounding without fine-tuning. To this end, we propose a method to extract matched phrase-region pairs from pre-trained vision-and-language embeddings and propose four fine-tuning objectives to improve the model phrase grounding ability using image-caption data without any supervised grounding signals. Experiments on two representative datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our objectives, outperforming baseline models in both weakly-supervised and supervised phrase grounding settings. In addition, we evaluate the aligned embeddings on several other downstream tasks and show that we can achieve better phrase grounding without sacrificing representation generality.

Improving Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Embeddings for Phrase Grounding

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) enables one model to serve all translation directions, including ones that are unseen during training, i.e. zero-shot translation. Despite being theoretically attractive, current models often produce low quality translations -- commonly failing to even produce outputs in the right target language. In this work, we observe that off-target translation is dominant even in strong multilingual systems, trained on massive multilingual corpora. To address this issue, we propose a joint approach to regularize NMT models at both representation-level and gradient-level. At the representation level, we leverage an auxiliary target language prediction task to regularize decoder outputs to retain information about the target language. At the gradient level, we leverage a small amount of direct data (in thousands of sentence pairs) to regularize model gradients. Our results demonstrate that our approach is highly effective in both reducing off-target translation occurrences and improving zero-shot translation performance by +5.59 and +10.38 BLEU on WMT and OPUS datasets respectively. Moreover, experiments show that our method also works well when the small amount of direct data is not available. Codes and rebuilt OPUS data at: https://github.com/yilinyang7/fairseq_multi_fix

Improving Multilingual Translation by Representation and Gradient Regularization

Understanding what sequence of steps are needed to complete a goal can help artificial intelligence systems reason about human activities. Past work in NLP has examined the task of goal-step inference for text. We introduce the visual analogue. We propose the Visual Goal-Step Inference (VGSI) task, where a model is given a textual goal and must choose which of four images represents a plausible step towards that goal. With a new dataset harvested from wikiHow consisting of 772,277 images representing human actions, we show that our task is challenging for state-of-the-art multimodal models. Moreover, the multimodal representation learned from our data can be effectively transferred to other datasets like HowTo100m, increasing the VGSI accuracy by 15 - 20%. Our task will facilitate multimodal reasoning about procedural events.

Visual Goal-Step Inference using wikiHow

Pretrained transformer-based language models achieve state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks, but it is an open question whether the knowledge acquired by the models during pretraining resembles the linguistic knowledge of humans. We present both humans and pretrained transformers with descriptions of events, and measure their preference for telic interpretations (the event has a natural endpoint) or atelic interpretations (the event does not have a natural endpoint). To measure these preferences and determine what factors influence them, we design an English test and a novel-word test that include a variety of linguistic cues (noun phrase quantity, resultative structure, contextual information, temporal units) that bias toward certain interpretations. We find that humans’ choice of telicity interpretation is reliably influenced by theoretically-motivated cues, transformer models (BERT and RoBERTa) are influenced by some (though not all) of the cues, and transformer models often rely more heavily on temporal units than humans do.

Do pretrained transformers infer telicity like humans?

Black-box probing models can reliably extract linguistic features like tense,
number, and syntactic role from pretrained word representations. However, the
manner in which these features are encoded in representations remains
poorly understood. We present a systematic study of the linear geometry of contextualized word representations in ELMO and BERT. We show that a variety of linguistic features (including structured dependency relationships) are encoded in low-dimensional subspaces. We then refine this geometric picture, showing that there are hierarchical relations between the subspaces encoding general linguistic categories and more specific ones, and that low-dimensional feature encodings are distributed rather than aligned to individual neurons. Finally, we demonstrate that these linear subspaces are causally related to model behavior, and can be used to perform fine-grained manipulation of BERT's output distribution.

The Low-Dimensional Linear Geometry of Contextualized Word Representations

Human-AI collaboration, a long standing goal in AI, refers to a partnership where a human and artificial intelligence work together towards a shared goal. Collaborative dialog allows human-AI teams to communicate and leverage strengths from both partners. To design collaborative dialog systems, it is important to understand what mental models users form about their AI-dialog partners, however, how users perceive these systems is not fully understood. In this study, we designed a novel, collaborative, communication-based puzzle game and explanatory dialog system. We created a public corpus from 117 conversations and post-surveys and used this to analyze what mental models users formed.
Key takeaways include: 
Even when users were not engaged in the game, they perceived the AI-dialog partner as intelligent and likeable, implying they saw it as a partner separate from the game. This was further supported by users often overestimating the system's abilities and projecting human-like attributes which led to miscommunications.
We conclude that creating shared mental models between users and AI systems is important to achieving successful dialogs. We propose that our insights on mental models and miscommunication, the game, and our corpus provide useful tools for designing collaborative dialog systems.

"It's our fault!'': Insights Into Users' Understanding and Interaction With an Explanatory Collaborative Dialog System

Targeted evaluations have found that machine translation systems often output incorrect gender in translations, even when the gender is clear from context. Furthermore, these incorrectly gendered translations have the potential to reflect or amplify social biases. We propose gender-filtered self-training (GFST) to improve gender translation accuracy on unambiguously gendered inputs. 
Our GFST approach uses a source monolingual corpus and an initial model to generate gender-specific pseudo-parallel corpora which are then filtered and added to the training data. We evaluate GFST on translation from English into five languages, finding that it improves gender accuracy without damaging generic quality. We also show the viability of GFST on several experimental settings, including re-training from scratch, fine-tuning, controlling the gender balance of the data, forward translation, and back-translation.

GFST: Gender-Filtered Self-Training for More Accurate Gender in Translation

Multilingual T5 (mT5; Xue et al. 2020) pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on massive monolingual texts, which has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. In this paper, we improve multilingual text-to-text transfer Transformer with translation pairs (mT6). Specifically, we explore three cross-lingual text-to-text pre-training tasks, namely, machine translation, translation pair span corruption, and translation span corruption. In addition, we propose a partially nonautoregressive objective for text-to-text pretraining. We evaluate the methods on seven multilingual benchmark datasets, including sentence classification, named entity recognition, question answering, and abstractive summarization. Experimental results show that the proposed mT6 improves cross-lingual transferability over mT5.

The Emergence of the Shape Bias Results from Communicative Efficiency

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Robust Open-Vocabulary Translation from Visual Text Representations

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The Emergence of the Shape Bias Results from Communicative Efficiency

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Next from EMNLP 2021

Robust Open-Vocabulary Translation from Visual Text Representations

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Comparison of methods for explicit discourse connective identification across various domains

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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RESOURCES

Downloads