We target the task of cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in the direct zero-shot setting, by incorporating syntactic features from Universal Dependencies (UD), and the key features we use are the syntactic relations within each sentence. While previous work has demonstrated effective syntax-guided MRC models, we propose to adopt the inter-sentence syntactic relations, in addition to the rudimentary intra-sentence relations, to further utilize the syntactic dependencies in the multi-sentence input of the MRC task. In our approach, we build the Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph (ISDG) connecting dependency trees to form global syntactic relations across sentences. We then propose the ISDG encoder that encodes the global dependency graph, addressing the inter-sentence relations via both one-hop and multi-hop dependency paths explicitly. Experiments on three multilingual MRC datasets (XQuAD, MLQA, TyDiQA-GoldP) show that our encoder that is only trained on English is able to improve the zero-shot performance on all 14 test sets covering 8 languages, with up to 3.8 F1 / 5.2 EM improvement on-average, and 5.2 F1 / 11.2 EM on certain languages. Further analysis shows the improvement can be attributed to the attention on the cross-linguistically consistent syntactic path. Our code is available at https://github.com/lxucs/multilingual-mrc-isdg.

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension via Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph

Measuring document similarity plays an important role in natural language processing tasks. Most existing document similarity approaches suffer from the information gap caused by context and vocabulary mismatches when comparing varying-length texts. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised concept representation learning approach to address the above issues. Speciﬁcally, we propose a novel Concept Generation Network (CGNet) to learn concept representations from the perspective of the entire text corpus. Moreover, a concept-based document matching method is proposed to leverage advances in the recognition of local phrase features and corpuslevel concept features. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate that new method can achieve a considerable improvement in comparing length-varying texts. In particular, our model achieved 6.5% better F1 Score compared to the best of the baseline models for a concept-project benchmark dataset.

Unsupervised Concept Representation Learning for Length-Varying Text Similarity

Forecasting on sparse multivariate time series (MTS) aims to model the predictors of future values of time series given their incomplete past, which is important for many emerging applications. However, most existing methods process MTSâ€™s individually, and do not leverage the dynamic distributions underlying the MTSâ€™s, leading to sub-optimal results when the sparsity is high. To address this challenge, we propose a novel generative model, which tracks the transition of latent clusters, instead of isolated feature representations, to achieve robust modeling. It is characterized by a newly designed dynamic Gaussian mixture distribution, which captures the dynamics of clustering structures, and is used for emitting time series. The generative model is parameterized by neural networks. A structured inference network is also designed for enabling inductive analysis.  A gating mechanism is further introduced to dynamically tune the Gaussian mixture distributions. Extensive experimental results on a variety of real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Dynamic Gaussian Mixture Based Deep Generative Model for Robust Forecasting on Sparse Multivariate Time Series

We consider the models of deep multi-task learning with recurrent architectures that exploit regularities across tasks to improve the performance of multiple sequence processing tasks jointly. Most existing architectures are painstakingly customized to learn task relationships for different problems, which is not flexible enough to model the dynamic task relationships and lacks generalization abilities to novel test-time scenarios. We propose multi-task recurrent modular networks (MT-RMN) that can be incorporated in any multi-task recurrent models to address the above drawbacks. MT-RMN consists of a shared encoder and multiple task-specific decoders, and recurrently operates over time. For better flexibility, it modularizes the encoder into multiple layers of sub-networks and dynamically controls the connection between these sub-networks and the decoders at different time steps, which provides the recurrent networks with varying degrees of parameter sharing for tasks with dynamic relatedness. For the generalization ability, MT-RMN aims to discover a set of generalizable sub-networks in the encoder that are assembled in different ways for different tasks. The policy networks augmented with the differentiable routers are utilized to make the binary connection decisions between the sub-networks. The experimental results on three multi-task sequence processing datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of MT-RMN.

Multi-Task Recurrent Modular Networks

Main_Track

technical paper

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AAAI 2022



<i>**Session Chair: ** John Wieting </i><br><br>

15E-Oral: Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics and Textual Inference

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Xuchao Zhang

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension via Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph

Unsupervised Concept Representation Learning for Length-Varying Text Similarity

Dynamic Gaussian Mixture Based Deep Generative Model for Robust Forecasting on Sparse Multivariate Time Series

Multi-Task Recurrent Modular Networks

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