Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models achieve comparable or better grammatical error correction performance compared to sequence-to-edit (seq2edit) models. Seq2edit models normally iteratively refine the correction result, while seq2seq models decode only once without aware of subsequent tokens. Iteratively refining the correction results of seq2seq models via Multi-Pass Decoding (MPD) may lead to better performance. However, MPD increases the inference costs. Deleting or replacing corrections in previous rounds may lose useful information in the source input. We present an early-stop mechanism to alleviate the efficiency issue. To address the source information loss issue, we propose to merge the source input with the previous round correction result into one sequence. Experiments on the CoNLL-14 test set and BEA-19 test set show that our approach can lead to consistent and significant improvements over strong BART and T5 baselines (+1.80, +1.35, and +2.02 F0.5 for BART 12-2, large and T5 large respectively on CoNLL-14 and +2.99, +1.82, and +2.79 correspondingly on BEA-19), obtaining F0.5 scores of 68.41 and 75.36 on CoNLL-14 and BEA-19 respectively.

Multi-pass Decoding for Grammatical Error Correction

Spelling Error Correction (SEC) that requires high-level language understanding is a challenging but useful task. Current SEC approaches normally leverage a pre-training then fine-tuning procedure that treats data equally. By contrast, Curriculum Learning (CL) utilizes training data differently during training and has shown its effectiveness in improving both performance and training efficiency in many other NLP tasks. In NMT, a model's performance has been shown sensitive to the difficulty of training examples, and CL has been shown effective to address this. In SEC, the data from different language learners are naturally distributed at different difficulty levels (some errors made by beginners are obvious to correct while some made by fluent speakers are hard), and we expect that designing a curriculum correspondingly for model learning may also help its training and bring about better performance. In this paper, we study how to further improve the performance of the state-of-the-art SEC method with CL, and propose a Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning (SSCL) approach. Specifically, we directly use the cross-entropy loss as criteria for: 1) scoring the difficulty of training data, and 2) evaluating the competence of the model. In our approach, CL improves the model training, which in return improves the CL measurement. In our experiments on the SIGHAN 2015 Chinese spelling check task, we show that SSCL is superior to previous norm-based and uncertainty-aware approaches, and establish a new state of the art (74.38% F1).

Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning for Spelling Error Correction

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.

Learning Hard Retrieval Decoder Attention for Transformers

One of the reasons Transformer translation models are popular is that self-attention networks for context modelling can be easily parallelized at sequence level. However, the computational complexity of a self-attention network is $O(n^2)$, increasing quadratically with sequence length. By contrast, the complexity of LSTM-based approaches is only O(n). In practice, however, LSTMs are much slower to train than self-attention networks as they cannot be parallelized at sequence level: to model context, the current LSTM state relies on the full LSTM computation of the preceding state. This has to be computed n times for a sequence of length n. The linear transformations involved in the LSTM gate and state computations are the major cost factors in this. To enable sequence-level parallelization of LSTMs, we approximate full LSTM context modelling by computing hidden states and gates with the current input and a simple bag-of-words representation of the preceding tokens context. This allows us to compute each input step efficiently in parallel, avoiding the formerly costly sequential linear transformations. We then connect the outputs of each parallel step with computationally cheap element-wise computations. We call this the Highly Parallelized LSTM. To further constrain the number of LSTM parameters, we compute several small HPLSTMs in parallel like multi-head attention in the Transformer. The experiments show that our MHPLSTM decoder achieves significant BLEU improvements, while being even slightly faster than the self-attention network in training, and much faster than the standard LSTM.

Multi-Head Highly Parallelized LSTM Decoder for Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation has achieved great success in bilingual settings, as well as in multilingual settings. With the increase of the number of languages, multilingual systems tend to underperform their bilingual counterparts. Model capacity has been found crucial for massively multilingual NMT to support language pairs with varying typological characteristics. Previous work increases the modeling capacity by deepening or widening the Transformer. However, modeling cardinality based on aggregating a set of transformations with the same topology has been proven more effective than going deeper or wider when increasing capacity. In this paper, we propose to efficiently increase the capacity for multilingual NMT by increasing the cardinality. Unlike previous work which feeds the same input to several transformations and merges their outputs into one, we present a Multi-Input-Multi-Output (MIMO) architecture that allows each transformation of the block to have its own input. We also present a task-aware attention mechanism to learn to selectively utilize individual transformations from a set of transformations for different translation directions. Our model surpasses previous work and establishes a new state-of-the-art on the large scale OPUS-100 corpus while being 1.31 times as fast.

Modeling Task-Aware MIMO Cardinality for Efficient Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

**Read the paper on the folowing link:**

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.naacl-main.7/

**Abstract:**

0

Probing Word Translations in the Transformer and Trading Decoder for Encoder Layers

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are trained on parallel corpora with unbalanced word frequency distribution. As a result, NMT models are likely to prefer high-frequency words than low-frequency ones despite low-frequency word may carry the crucial semantic information, which may hamper the translation quality once they are neglected. The objective of this study is to enhance the translation of meaningful but low-frequency words. Our general idea is to optimize the translation of low-frequency words through knowledge distillation. Specifically, we employ a low-frequency teacher model that excels in translating low-frequency words to guide the learning of the student model. To remain the translation quality of high-frequency words, we further introduce a dual-teacher distillation framework, leveraging both the low-frequency and high-frequency teacher models to guide the student model's training. Our single-teacher distillation method already achieves a +0.64 BLEU improvements over the state-of-the-art method on the WMT 16 English-to-German translation task on the low-frequency test set. While our dual-teacher framework leads to +0.87, +1.24, +0.47, +0.87 and +0.86 BLEU improvements on the IWSLT 14 German-to-English, WMT 16 English-to-German, WMT 15 English-to-Czech, WMT 14 English-to-French and WMT 18 Chinese-to-English tasks respectively compared to the baseline, while maintaining the translation performance of high-frequency words.

Dual-teacher Knowledge Distillation for Low-frequency Word Translation

Main conference posters, Findings, Industry track and Demos are being presented during this session.

Virtual Poster Session 2

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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.

Findings Papers - Machine Translation and Multilinguality

technical paper

**Session Chair: ** Qun Liu 
**Session Volunteer: ** Joseph Imperial

1E: Machine Translation and Multilinguality #1

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

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**Session Chair: ** Tong Xiao 
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5A: Machine Translation and Multilinguality #3

**Session Chair: ** Svitlana Volkova

1B-Oral: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Hongfei Xu

7

1

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Multi-pass Decoding for Grammatical Error Correction

Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning for Spelling Error Correction

Learning Hard Retrieval Decoder Attention for Transformers

Multi-Head Highly Parallelized LSTM Decoder for Neural Machine Translation

Modeling Task-Aware MIMO Cardinality for Efficient Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Probing Word Translations in the Transformer and Trading Decoder for Encoder Layers

Dual-teacher Knowledge Distillation for Low-frequency Word Translation

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