United Arab Emirates

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of identifying the intended sense of a word in context. While prior work on unsupervised WSD has leveraged lexical knowledge bases, such as WordNet and BabelNet, these resources have proven to be less effective for Chinese. Instead, the most widely used lexical knowledge base for Chinese is HowNet. Previous HowNet-based WSD methods have not exploited contextual translation information. In this paper, we present the first HowNet-based WSD system which combines monolingual contextual information from a pretrained neural language model with bilingual information obtained via machine translation and sense translation information from HowNet. The results of our evaluation experiment on a test set from prior work demonstrate that our new method achieves a new state of the art for unsupervised Chinese WSD.

EMNLP 2022

Improving HowNet-Based Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation with Translations

hownet

semantic

workshop paper

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Memorization presents a challenge for several constrained Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), wherein the proclivity of neural models to memorize noisy and atypical samples reacts adversely with the noisy (web crawled) datasets. However, previous studies of memorization in constrained NLG tasks have only focused on counterfactual memorization, linking it to the problem of hallucinations. In this work, we propose a new, inexpensive algorithm for extractive memorization (exact training data generation under insufficient context) in constrained sequence generation tasks and use it to study extractive memorization and its effects in NMT. We demonstrate that extractive memorization poses a serious threat to NMT reliability by qualitatively and quantitatively characterizing the memorized samples as well as the model behavior in their vicinity. Based on empirical observations, we develop a simple algorithm which elicits non-memorized translations of memorized samples from the same model, for a large fraction of such samples. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithm could also be leveraged to mitigate memorization in the model through finetuning. We have released the code to reproduce our results at https://github.com/vyraun/Finding-Memo.

Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Tasks

Traditional machine translation (MT) metrics provide an average measure of translation quality that is insensitive to the long tail of behavioral problems. Examples include translation of numbers, physical units, dropped content and hallucinations. These errors, which occur rarely and unpredictably in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), greatly undermine the reliability of state-of-the-art MT systems. Consequently, it is important to have visibility into these problems during model development. Towards this end, we introduce SALTED, a specifications-based framework for behavioral testing of NMT models. At the core of our approach is the use of high-precision detectors that flag errors (or alternatively, verify output correctness) between a source sentence and a system output. These detectors provide fine-grained measurements of long-tail errors, providing a trustworthy view of problems that were previously invisible. We demonstrate that such detectors could be used not just to identify salient long-tail errors in MT systems, but also for higher-recall filtering of the training data, fixing targeted errors with model fine-tuning in NMT and generating novel data for metamorphic testing to elicit further bugs in models.

SALTED: A Framework for SAlient Long-tail Translation Error Detection

While collecting or generating more parallel data is necessary to improve machine translation (MT) in low-resource settings, we lack an understanding of how the limited amounts of existing data are actually used to help guide the collection of further resources.  In this paper, we apply data cartography techniques (Swayamdipta et al., 2020) to characterize the contribution of training samples in two low-resource MT tasks (Swahili-English and Turkish-English) throughout the training of standard neural MT models.  Our empirical study shows that, unlike in prior work for classification tasks, most samples contribute to model training in low-resource MT, albeit not uniformly throughout the training process. 
 Furthermore, uni-dimensional characterizations of samples -- e.g., based on dual cross-entropy or word frequency -- do not suffice to characterize to what degree they are hard or easy to learn.  Taken together, our results suggest that data augmentation strategies for low-resource MT would benefit from model-in-the-loop strategies to maximize improvements.

Data Cartography for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can translate between language pairs unseen during training, i.e., zero-shot translation. Improving zero-shot translation requires the model to learn universal representations and cross-mapping relationships to transfer the knowledge learned on the supervised directions to the zero-shot directions. In this work, we propose the state mover's distance based on the optimal theory to model the difference of the representations output by the encoder. Then, we bridge the gap between the semantic-equivalent representations of different languages at the token level by minimizing the proposed distance to learn universal representations. Besides, we propose an agreement-based training scheme, which can help the model make consistent predictions based on the semantic-equivalent sentences to learn universal cross-mapping relationships for all translation directions. The experimental results on diverse multilingual datasets show that our method can improve consistently compared with the baseline system and other contrast methods. The analysis proves that our method can better align the semantic space and improve the prediction consistency.

Improving Zero-Shot Multilingual Translation with Universal Representations and Cross-Mapping

Machine Translation task has made great progress with the help of auto-regressive decoding paradigm and Transformer architecture. In this paradigm, though the encoder can obtain global source representations, the decoder can only use translation history to determine the current word. Previous promising works attempted to address this issue by applying a draft or a fixed-length semantic embedding as target-side global information. However, these methods either degrade model efficiency or show limitations in expressing semantics. Motivated by Functional Equivalence Theory, we extract several semantic kernels from a source sentence, each of which can express one semantic segment of the original sentence. Together, these semantic kernels can capture global semantic information, and we project them into target embedding space to guide target sentence generation. We further force our model to use semantic kernels at each decoding step through an adaptive mask algorithm. Empirical studies on various machine translation benchmarks show that our approach gains approximately an improvement of 1 BLEU score on most benchmarks over the Transformer baseline and about 1.7 times faster than previous works on average at inference time.

Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Kernels

In simultaneous speech translation (SimulST), finding the best trade-off between high output quality and low latency is a challenging task. To meet the latency constraints posed by different application scenarios, multiple dedicated SimulST models are usually trained and maintained, generating high computational costs. 
In this paper, also motivated by the increased sensitivity towards sustainable AI, we investigate whether a single model trained offline can serve both offline and simultaneous applications under different latency regimes without additional training or adaptation. Experiments on en->{de, es} show that, aside from facilitating the adoption of well-established offline architectures and training strategies without affecting latency, offline training achieves similar or better quality compared to the standard SimulST training protocol, also being competitive with the state-of-the-art system.

Does Simultaneous Speech Translation need Simultaneous Models?

Word translation without parallel corpora has become feasible, rivaling the performance of supervised methods. 
Recent findings have shown the improvement in accuracy and robustness of unsupervised word translation (UWT) by utilizing visual observations, which are universal representations across languages.
Our work investigates the potential of using not only visual observations but also pretrained language-image models for enabling a more efficient and robust UWT. 
We develop a novel UWT method dubbed Word Alignment using Language-Image Pretraining (WALIP), leveraging visual observations via the shared image-text embedding space of CLIPs  (Radford et al., 2021). 
WALIP has a two-step procedure. 
First, we retrieve word pairs with high confidences of similarity, computed using our proposed image-based fingerprints, which define the initial pivot for the alignment.
Second, we apply our robust Procrustes algorithm to estimate the linear mapping between two embedding spaces, which iteratively corrects and refines the estimated alignment.
Our extensive experiments show that WALIP improves upon the state-of-the-art performance of bilingual word alignment for a few language pairs across different word embeddings and displays great robustness to the dissimilarity of language pairs or training corpora for two word embeddings.

Improving HowNet-Based Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation with Translations

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Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Tasks

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