We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain social chatbot. Aiming to be both informative and conversational, our bot chats with users in an authentic, emotionally intelligent way. By integrating controlled neural generation with scaffolded, hand-written dialogue, we let both the user and bot take turns driving the conversation, producing an engaging and socially fluent experience. Deployed in the fourth iteration of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, Chirpy Cardinal handled thousands of conversations per day, placing second out of nine bots with an average user rating of 3.58/5.

Non-autoregressive encoder-decoder models greatly improve decoding speed over autoregressive models, at the expense of generation quality. To mitigate this, iterative decoding models repeatedly infill or refine the proposal of a non-autoregressive model. However, editing at the level of output sequences limits model flexibility. We instead propose *iterative realignment*, which by refining latent alignments allows more flexible edits in fewer steps. Our model, Align-Refine, is an end-to-end Transformer which iteratively realigns connectionist temporal classification (CTC) alignments. On the WSJ dataset, Align-Refine matches an autoregressive baseline with a 14x decoding speedup; on LibriSpeech, we reach an LM-free test-other WER of 9.0% (19% relative improvement on comparable work) in three iterations. We release our code at https://github.com/amazon-research/align-refine.

This paper presents our system for the single- and multi-word lexical complexity prediction tasks of SemEval Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction. Text comprehension depends on the reader’s ability to understand the words present in it; evaluating the lexical complexity of such texts can enable readers to find an appropriate text and systems to tailor a text to an audience’s needs. We present our model pipeline, which applies a combination of embedding-based and manual features to predict lexical complexity on the CompLex English dataset using various tree-based and linear models. Our method is ranked 27 / 54 on single-word prediction and 14 / 37 on multi-word prediction.

This paper presents our system for the Quantity span identification, Unit of measurement identification and Value modifier classification subtasks of the MeasEval 2021 task. The purpose of the Quantity span identification task was to locate spans of text that contain a count or measurement, consisting of a value, usually followed by a unit and occasionally additional modifiers. The goal of the modifier classification task was to determine whether an associated text fragment served to indicate range, tolerance, mean value, etc. of a quantity. The developed systems used pre-trained BERT models which were fine-tuned for the task at hand. We present our system, investigate how architectural decisions affected model predictions, and conduct an error analysis. Overall, our system placed 12 / 19 in the shared task and in the 2nd place for the Unit subcategory.

We investigate how Multilingual BERT (mBERT) encodes grammar by examining how the high-order grammatical feature of morphosyntactic alignment (how different languages define what counts as a “subject”) is manifested across the embedding spaces of different languages. To understand if and how morphosyntactic alignment affects contextual embedding spaces, we train classifiers to recover the subjecthood of mBERT embeddings in transitive sentences (which do not contain overt information about morphosyntactic alignment) and then evaluate them zero-shot on intransitive sentences (where subjecthood classification depends on alignment), within and across languages. We find that the resulting classifier distributions reflect the morphosyntactic alignment of their training languages. Our results demonstrate that mBERT representations are influenced by high-level grammatical features that are not manifested in any one input sentence, and that this is robust across languages. Further examining the characteristics that our classifiers rely on, we find that features such as passive voice, animacy and case strongly correlate with classification decisions, suggesting that mBERT does not encode subjecthood purely syntactically, but that subjecthood embedding is continuous and dependent on semantic and discourse factors, as is proposed in much of the functional linguistics literature. Together, these results provide insight into how grammatical features manifest in contextual embedding spaces, at a level of abstraction not covered by previous work.

Recent work has found evidence that Multilingual BERT (mBERT), a transformer-based multilingual masked language model, is capable of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, suggesting that some aspects of its representations are shared cross-lingually. To better understand this overlap, we extend recent work on finding syntactic trees in neural networks’ internal representations to the multilingual setting. We show that subspaces of mBERT representations recover syntactic tree distances in languages other than English, and that these subspaces are approximately shared across languages. Motivated by these results, we present an unsupervised analysis method that provides evidence mBERT learns representations of syntactic dependency labels, in the form of clusters which largely agree with the Universal Dependencies taxonomy. This evidence suggests that even without explicit supervision, multilingual masked language models learn certain linguistic universals.