Genta Indra Winata


2023

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Proceedings of the First Workshop in South East Asian Language Processing
Derry Wijaya | Alham Fikri Aji | Clara Vania | Genta Indra Winata | Ayu Purwarianti
Proceedings of the First Workshop in South East Asian Language Processing

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Current Status of NLP in South East Asia with Insights from Multilingualism and Language Diversity
Alham Fikri Aji | Jessica Zosa Forde | Alyssa Marie Loo | Lintang Sutawika | Skyler Wang | Genta Indra Winata | Zheng-Xin Yong | Ruochen Zhang | A. Seza Doğruöz | Yin Lin Tan | Jan Christian Blaise Cruz
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstract

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NusaX: Multilingual Parallel Sentiment Dataset for 10 Indonesian Local Languages
Genta Indra Winata | Alham Fikri Aji | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Rahmad Mahendra | Fajri Koto | Ade Romadhony | Kemal Kurniawan | David Moeljadi | Radityo Eko Prasojo | Pascale Fung | Timothy Baldwin | Jey Han Lau | Rico Sennrich | Sebastian Ruder
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Natural language processing (NLP) has a significant impact on society via technologies such as machine translation and search engines. Despite its success, NLP technology is only widely available for high-resource languages such as English and Chinese, while it remains inaccessible to many languages due to the unavailability of data resources and benchmarks. In this work, we focus on developing resources for languages in Indonesia. Despite being the second most linguistically diverse country, most languages in Indonesia are categorized as endangered and some are even extinct. We develop the first-ever parallel resource for 10 low-resource languages in Indonesia. Our resource includes sentiment and machine translation datasets, and bilingual lexicons. We provide extensive analyses and describe challenges for creating such resources. We hope this work can spark NLP research on Indonesian and other underrepresented languages.

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Towards a Unified Multi-Domain Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Model
Mayank Kulkarni | Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro | Karthik Radhakrishnan | Genta Indra Winata | Shijie Wu | Lingjue Xie | Shaohua Yang
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Named Entity Recognition is a key Natural Language Processing task whose performance is sensitive to choice of genre and language. A unified NER model across multiple genres and languages is more practical and efficient by leveraging commonalities across genres or languages. In this paper, we propose a novel setup for NER which includes multi-domain and multilingual training and evaluation across 13 domains and 4 languages. We explore a range of approaches to building a unified model using domain and language adaptation techniques. Our experiments highlight multiple nuances to consider while building a unified model, including that naive data pooling fails to obtain good performance, that domain-specific adaptations are more important than language-specific ones and that including domain-specific adaptations in a unified model nears the performance of training multiple dedicated monolingual models at a fraction of their parameter count.

2022

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One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia
Alham Fikri Aji | Genta Indra Winata | Fajri Koto | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Ade Romadhony | Rahmad Mahendra | Kemal Kurniawan | David Moeljadi | Radityo Eko Prasojo | Timothy Baldwin | Jey Han Lau | Sebastian Ruder
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

NLP research is impeded by a lack of resources and awareness of the challenges presented by underrepresented languages and dialects. Focusing on the languages spoken in Indonesia, the second most linguistically diverse and the fourth most populous nation of the world, we provide an overview of the current state of NLP research for Indonesia’s 700+ languages. We highlight challenges in Indonesian NLP and how these affect the performance of current NLP systems. Finally, we provide general recommendations to help develop NLP technology not only for languages of Indonesia but also other underrepresented languages.

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IndoRobusta: Towards Robustness Against Diverse Code-Mixed Indonesian Local Languages
Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Genta Indra Winata | Pascale Fung | Ayu Purwarianti
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scaling Up Multilingual Evaluation

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Retrieval-Free Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Response Generation with Adapters
Yan Xu | Etsuko Ishii | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Dan Su | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. The existing methods tackle the knowledge grounding challenge by retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augmenting the dialogues with explicit extra information. Despite their success, however, the existing works have drawbacks on the inference efficiency. This paper proposes KnowExpert, an end-to-end framework to bypass the explicit retrieval process and inject knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters and adapt to the knowledge-grounded dialogue task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this challenge without retrieval in this task under an open-domain chit-chat scenario. The experimental results show that KnowExpert performs comparably with some retrieval-based baselines while being time-efficient in inference, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code
Sebastian Gehrmann | Abhik Bhattacharjee | Abinaya Mahendiran | Alex Wang | Alexandros Papangelis | Aman Madaan | Angelina Mcmillan-major | Anna Shvets | Ashish Upadhyay | Bernd Bohnet | Bingsheng Yao | Bryan Wilie | Chandra Bhagavatula | Chaobin You | Craig Thomson | Cristina Garbacea | Dakuo Wang | Daniel Deutsch | Deyi Xiong | Di Jin | Dimitra Gkatzia | Dragomir Radev | Elizabeth Clark | Esin Durmus | Faisal Ladhak | Filip Ginter | Genta Indra Winata | Hendrik Strobelt | Hiroaki Hayashi | Jekaterina Novikova | Jenna Kanerva | Jenny Chim | Jiawei Zhou | Jordan Clive | Joshua Maynez | João Sedoc | Juraj Juraska | Kaustubh Dhole | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Laura Perez Beltrachini | Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro | Lewis Tunstall | Li Zhang | Mahim Pushkarna | Mathias Creutz | Michael White | Mihir Sanjay Kale | Moussa Kamal Eddine | Nico Daheim | Nishant Subramani | Ondrej Dusek | Paul Pu Liang | Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi | Qi Zhu | Ratish Puduppully | Reno Kriz | Rifat Shahriyar | Ronald Cardenas | Saad Mahamood | Salomey Osei | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Sanja Štajner | Sebastien Montella | Shailza Jolly | Simon Mille | Tahmid Hasan | Tianhao Shen | Tosin Adewumi | Vikas Raunak | Vipul Raheja | Vitaly Nikolaev | Vivian Tsai | Yacine Jernite | Ying Xu | Yisi Sang | Yixin Liu | Yufang Hou
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. The compatibility, often facilitated through leaderboards, thus leads to outdated but standardized evaluation practices. We pose that the standardization is taking place in the wrong spot. Evaluation infrastructure should enable researchers to use the latest methods and what should be standardized instead is how to incorporate these new evaluation advances. We introduce GEMv2, the new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark which uses a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each other’s work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages, ongoing online evaluation for all datasets, and our interactive tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

2021

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Language Models are Few-shot Multilingual Learners
Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Zhaojiang Lin | Rosanne Liu | Jason Yosinski | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning

General-purpose language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities, performing on par with state-of-the-art approaches on a range of downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks and benchmarks when inferring instructions from very few examples. Here, we evaluate the multilingual skills of the GPT and T5 models in conducting multi-class classification on non-English languages without any parameter updates. We show that, given a few English examples as context, pre-trained language models can predict not only English test samples but also non-English ones. Finally, we find the in-context few-shot cross-lingual prediction results of language models are significantly better than random prediction, and they are competitive compared to the existing state-of-the-art cross-lingual models and translation models.

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Preserving Cross-Linguality of Pre-trained Models via Continual Learning
Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained language models (e.g., multilingual BERT) to downstream cross-lingual tasks has shown promising results. However, the fine-tuning process inevitably changes the parameters of the pre-trained model and weakens its cross-lingual ability, which leads to sub-optimal performance. To alleviate this problem, we leverage continual learning to preserve the original cross-lingual ability of the pre-trained model when we fine-tune it to downstream tasks. The experimental result shows that our fine-tuning methods can better preserve the cross-lingual ability of the pre-trained model in a sentence retrieval task. Our methods also achieve better performance than other fine-tuning baselines on the zero-shot cross-lingual part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition tasks.

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X2Parser: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Framework for Task-Oriented Compositional Semantic Parsing
Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Peng Xu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)

Task-oriented compositional semantic parsing (TCSP) handles complex nested user queries and serves as an essential component of virtual assistants. Current TCSP models rely on numerous training data to achieve decent performance but fail to generalize to low-resource target languages or domains. In this paper, we present X2Parser, a transferable Cross-lingual and Cross-domain Parser for TCSP. Unlike previous models that learn to generate the hierarchical representations for nested intents and slots, we propose to predict intents and slots separately and cast both prediction tasks into sequence labeling problems. After that, we further propose a fertility-based slot predictor that first learns to detect the number of labels for each token, and then predicts the slot types. Experimental results illustrate that our model can significantly outperform existing strong baselines in cross-lingual and cross-domain settings, and our model can also achieve a good generalization ability on target languages of target domains. Furthermore, we show that our model can reduce the latency by up to 66% compared to the generation-based model.

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Continual Mixed-Language Pre-Training for Extremely Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Pascale Fung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation
Samuel Cahyawijaya | Genta Indra Winata | Bryan Wilie | Karissa Vincentio | Xiaohong Li | Adhiguna Kuncoro | Sebastian Ruder | Zhi Yuan Lim | Syafri Bahar | Masayu Khodra | Ayu Purwarianti | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Natural language generation (NLG) benchmarks provide an important avenue to measure progress and develop better NLG systems. Unfortunately, the lack of publicly available NLG benchmarks for low-resource languages poses a challenging barrier for building NLG systems that work well for languages with limited amounts of data. Here we introduce IndoNLG, the first benchmark to measure natural language generation (NLG) progress in three low-resource—yet widely spoken—languages of Indonesia: Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese. Altogether, these languages are spoken by more than 100 million native speakers, and hence constitute an important use case of NLG systems today. Concretely, IndoNLG covers six tasks: summarization, question answering, chit-chat, and three different pairs of machine translation (MT) tasks. We collate a clean pretraining corpus of Indonesian, Sundanese, and Javanese datasets, Indo4B-Plus, which is used to pretrain our models: IndoBART and IndoGPT. We show that IndoBART and IndoGPT achieve competitive performance on all tasks—despite using only one-fifth the parameters of a larger multilingual model, mBART-large (Liu et al., 2020). This finding emphasizes the importance of pretraining on closely related, localized languages to achieve more efficient learning and faster inference at very low-resource languages like Javanese and Sundanese.

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ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine
Etsuko Ishii | Genta Indra Winata | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Divesh Lala | Tatsuya Kawahara | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface: a web-based virtual agent, Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android can offer a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.

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CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information Seeking Dialogue System
Yan Xu | Etsuko Ishii | Genta Indra Winata | Zhaojiang Lin | Andrea Madotto | Zihan Liu | Peng Xu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)

Information-seeking dialogue systems, including knowledge identification and response generation, aim to respond to users with fluent, coherent, and informative responses based on users’ needs, which. To tackle this challenge, we utilize data augmentation methods and several training techniques with the pre-trained language models to learn a general pattern of the task and thus achieve promising performance. In DialDoc21 competition, our system achieved 74.95 F1 score and 60.74 Exact Match score in subtask 1, and 37.72 SacreBLEU score in subtask 2. Empirical analysis is provided to explain the effectiveness of our approaches.

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XPersona: Evaluating Multilingual Personalized Chatbot
Zhaojiang Lin | Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Andrea Madotto | Yejin Bang | Etsuko Ishii | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI

Personalized dialogue systems are an essential step toward better human-machine interaction. Existing personalized dialogue agents rely on properly designed conversational datasets, which are mostly monolingual (e.g., English), which greatly limits the usage of conversational agents in other languages. In this paper, we propose a multi-lingual extension of Persona-Chat, namely XPersona. Our dataset includes persona conversations in six different languages other than English for evaluating multilingual personalized agents. We experiment with both multilingual and cross-lingual trained baselines and evaluate them against monolingual and translation-pipeline models using both automatic and human evaluation. Experimental results show that the multilingual trained models outperform the translation pipeline and that they are on par with the monolingual models, with the advantage of having a single model across multiple languages. On the other hand, the state-of-the-art cross-lingual trained models achieve inferior performance to the other models, showing that cross-lingual conversation modeling is a challenging task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will accelerate research in multilingual dialogue systems.

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Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?
Genta Indra Winata | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Zihan Liu | Zhaojiang Lin | Andrea Madotto | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

Multilingual language models have shown decent performance in multilingual and cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. However, the power of these multilingual models in code-switching tasks has not been fully explored. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of multilingual language models to understand their capability and adaptability to the mixed-language setting by considering the inference speed, performance, and number of parameters to measure their practicality. We conduct experiments in three language pairs on named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging and compare them with existing methods, such as using bilingual embeddings and multilingual meta-embeddings. Our findings suggest that pre-trained multilingual models do not necessarily guarantee high-quality representations on code-switching, while using meta-embeddings achieves similar results with significantly fewer parameters.

2020

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MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Zhaojiang Lin | Andrea Madotto | Genta Indra Winata | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In this paper, we propose Minimalist Transfer Learning (MinTL) to simplify the system design process of task-oriented dialogue systems and alleviate the over-dependency on annotated data. MinTL is a simple yet effective transfer learning framework, which allows us to plug-and-play pre-trained seq2seq models, and jointly learn dialogue state tracking and dialogue response generation. Unlike previous approaches, which use a copy mechanism to “carryover” the old dialogue states to the new one, we introduce Levenshtein belief spans (Lev), that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. We instantiate our learning framework with two pre-trained backbones: T5 and BART, and evaluate them on MultiWOZ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: 1) our systems establish new state-of-the-art results on end-to-end response generation, 2) MinTL-based systems are more robust than baseline methods in the low resource setting, and they achieve competitive results with only 20% training data, and 3) Lev greatly improves the inference efficiency.

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Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding with Regularized Representation Alignment
Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Peng Xu | Zhaojiang Lin | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Despite the promising results of current cross-lingual models for spoken language understanding systems, they still suffer from imperfect cross-lingual representation alignments between the source and target languages, which makes the performance sub-optimal. To cope with this issue, we propose a regularization approach to further align word-level and sentence-level representations across languages without any external resource. First, we regularize the representation of user utterances based on their corresponding labels. Second, we regularize the latent variable model (Liu et al., 2019) by leveraging adversarial training to disentangle the latent variables. Experiments on the cross-lingual spoken language understanding task show that our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, and our model, trained on a few-shot setting with only 3% of the target language training data, achieves comparable performance to the supervised training with all the training data.

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IndoNLU: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Understanding
Bryan Wilie | Karissa Vincentio | Genta Indra Winata | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Xiaohong Li | Zhi Yuan Lim | Sidik Soleman | Rahmad Mahendra | Pascale Fung | Syafri Bahar | Ayu Purwarianti
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Although Indonesian is known to be the fourth most frequently used language over the internet, the research progress on this language in natural language processing (NLP) is slow-moving due to a lack of available resources. In response, we introduce the first-ever vast resource for training, evaluation, and benchmarking on Indonesian natural language understanding (IndoNLU) tasks. IndoNLU includes twelve tasks, ranging from single sentence classification to pair-sentences sequence labeling with different levels of complexity. The datasets for the tasks lie in different domains and styles to ensure task diversity. We also provide a set of Indonesian pre-trained models (IndoBERT) trained from a large and clean Indonesian dataset (Indo4B) collected from publicly available sources such as social media texts, blogs, news, and websites. We release baseline models for all twelve tasks, as well as the framework for benchmark evaluation, thus enabling everyone to benchmark their system performances.

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Zero-Resource Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition
Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

Existing models for cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) rely on numerous unlabeled corpus or labeled NER training data in target domains. However, collecting data for low-resource target domains is not only expensive but also time-consuming. Hence, we propose a cross-domain NER model that does not use any external resources. We first introduce a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) by adding a new objective function to detect whether tokens are named entities or not. We then introduce a framework called Mixture of Entity Experts (MoEE) to improve the robustness for zero-resource domain adaptation. Finally, experimental results show that our model outperforms strong unsupervised cross-domain sequence labeling models, and the performance of our model is close to that of the state-of-the-art model which leverages extensive resources.

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Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Andrea Madotto | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Genta Indra Winata | Yan Xu | Zihan Liu | Zhaojiang Lin | Pascale Fung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Task-oriented dialogue systems are either modularized with separate dialogue state tracking (DST) and management steps or end-to-end trainable. In either case, the knowledge base (KB) plays an essential role in fulfilling user requests. Modularized systems rely on DST to interact with the KB, which is expensive in terms of annotation and inference time. End-to-end systems, instead, use the KB directly as input, but they cannot scale when the KB is larger than a few hundred entries. In this paper, we propose a method to embed the KB, of any size, directly into the model parameters. The resulting model does not require any DST or template responses, nor the KB as input, and it can dynamically update its KB via fine-tuning. We evaluate our solution in five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KB size. Our experiments show that end-to-end models can effectively embed knowledge bases in their parameters and achieve competitive performance in all evaluated datasets.

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Coach: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Cross-domain Slot Filling
Zihan Liu | Genta Indra Winata | Peng Xu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

As an essential task in task-oriented dialog systems, slot filling requires extensive training data in a certain domain. However, such data are not always available. Hence, cross-domain slot filling has naturally arisen to cope with this data scarcity problem. In this paper, we propose a Coarse-to-fine approach (Coach) for cross-domain slot filling. Our model first learns the general pattern of slot entities by detecting whether the tokens are slot entities or not. It then predicts the specific types for the slot entities. In addition, we propose a template regularization approach to improve the adaptation robustness by regularizing the representation of utterances based on utterance templates. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in slot filling. Furthermore, our model can also be applied to the cross-domain named entity recognition task, and it achieves better adaptation performance than other existing baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/zliucr/coach.

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Meta-Transfer Learning for Code-Switched Speech Recognition
Genta Indra Winata | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Zhaojiang Lin | Zihan Liu | Peng Xu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

An increasing number of people in the world today speak a mixed-language as a result of being multilingual. However, building a speech recognition system for code-switching remains difficult due to the availability of limited resources and the expense and significant effort required to collect mixed-language data. We therefore propose a new learning method, meta-transfer learning, to transfer learn on a code-switched speech recognition system in a low-resource setting by judiciously extracting information from high-resource monolingual datasets. Our model learns to recognize individual languages, and transfer them so as to better recognize mixed-language speech by conditioning the optimization on the code-switching data. Based on experimental results, our model outperforms existing baselines on speech recognition and language modeling tasks, and is faster to converge.

2019

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CAiRE_HKUST at SemEval-2019 Task 3: Hierarchical Attention for Dialogue Emotion Classification
Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Zhaojiang Lin | Jamin Shin | Yan Xu | Peng Xu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Detecting emotion from dialogue is a challenge that has not yet been extensively surveyed. One could consider the emotion of each dialogue turn to be independent, but in this paper, we introduce a hierarchical approach to classify emotion, hypothesizing that the current emotional state depends on previous latent emotions. We benchmark several feature-based classifiers using pre-trained word and emotion embeddings, state-of-the-art end-to-end neural network models, and Gaussian processes for automatic hyper-parameter search. In our experiments, hierarchical architectures consistently give significant improvements, and our best model achieves a 76.77% F1-score on the test set.

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Code-Switched Language Models Using Neural Based Synthetic Data from Parallel Sentences
Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Chien-Sheng Wu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

Training code-switched language models is difficult due to lack of data and complexity in the grammatical structure. Linguistic constraint theories have been used for decades to generate artificial code-switching sentences to cope with this issue. However, this require external word alignments or constituency parsers that create erroneous results on distant languages. We propose a sequence-to-sequence model using a copy mechanism to generate code-switching data by leveraging parallel monolingual translations from a limited source of code-switching data. The model learns how to combine words from parallel sentences and identifies when to switch one language to the other. Moreover, it captures code-switching constraints by attending and aligning the words in inputs, without requiring any external knowledge. Based on experimental results, the language model trained with the generated sentences achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves end-to-end automatic speech recognition.

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Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue Systems with Transferable Latent Variables
Zihan Liu | Jamin Shin | Yan Xu | Genta Indra Winata | Peng Xu | Andrea Madotto | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented dialogue system to low-resource languages. To tackle this challenge, we first use a set of very few parallel word pairs to refine the aligned cross-lingual word-level representations. We then employ a latent variable model to cope with the variance of similar sentences across different languages, which is induced by imperfect cross-lingual alignments and inherent differences in languages. Finally, the experimental results show that even though we utilize much less external resources, our model achieves better adaptation performance for natural language understanding task (i.e., the intent detection and slot filling) compared to the current state-of-the-art model in the zero-shot scenario.

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Hierarchical Meta-Embeddings for Code-Switching Named Entity Recognition
Genta Indra Winata | Zhaojiang Lin | Jamin Shin | Zihan Liu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

In countries that speak multiple main languages, mixing up different languages within a conversation is commonly called code-switching. Previous works addressing this challenge mainly focused on word-level aspects such as word embeddings. However, in many cases, languages share common subwords, especially for closely related languages, but also for languages that are seemingly irrelevant. Therefore, we propose Hierarchical Meta-Embeddings (HME) that learn to combine multiple monolingual word-level and subword-level embeddings to create language-agnostic lexical representations. On the task of Named Entity Recognition for English-Spanish code-switching data, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the multilingual settings. We also show that, in cross-lingual settings, our model not only leverages closely related languages, but also learns from languages with different roots. Finally, we show that combining different subunits are crucial for capturing code-switching entities.

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Generalizing Question Answering System with Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning
Dan Su | Yan Xu | Genta Indra Winata | Peng Xu | Hyeondey Kim | Zihan Liu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

With a large number of datasets being released and new techniques being proposed, Question answering (QA) systems have witnessed great breakthroughs in reading comprehension (RC)tasks. However, most existing methods focus on improving in-domain performance, leaving open the research question of how these mod-els and techniques can generalize to out-of-domain and unseen RC tasks. To enhance the generalization ability, we propose a multi-task learning framework that learns the shared representation across different tasks. Our model is built on top of a large pre-trained language model, such as XLNet, and then fine-tuned on multiple RC datasets. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our methods, with an average Exact Match score of 56.59 and an average F1 score of 68.98, which significantly improves the BERT-Large baseline by8.39 and 7.22, respectively

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Learning Multilingual Meta-Embeddings for Code-Switching Named Entity Recognition
Genta Indra Winata | Zhaojiang Lin | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2019)

In this paper, we propose Multilingual Meta-Embeddings (MME), an effective method to learn multilingual representations by leveraging monolingual pre-trained embeddings. MME learns to utilize information from these embeddings via a self-attention mechanism without explicit language identification. We evaluate the proposed embedding method on the code-switching English-Spanish Named Entity Recognition dataset in a multilingual and cross-lingual setting. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multilingual setting, and it has the ability to generalize to an unseen language task.

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Incorporating Word and Subword Units in Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Language Model Rescoring
Zihan Liu | Yan Xu | Genta Indra Winata | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

This paper describes CAiRE’s submission to the unsupervised machine translation track of the WMT’19 news shared task from German to Czech. We leverage a phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) model and a pre-trained language model to combine word-level neural machine translation (NMT) and subword-level NMT models without using any parallel data. We propose to solve the morphological richness problem of languages by training byte-pair encoding (BPE) embeddings for German and Czech separately, and they are aligned using MUSE (Conneau et al., 2018). To ensure the fluency and consistency of translations, a rescoring mechanism is proposed that reuses the pre-trained language model to select the translation candidates generated through beam search. Moreover, a series of pre-processing and post-processing approaches are applied to improve the quality of final translations.

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Learning to Learn Sales Prediction with Social Media Sentiment
Zhaojiang Lin | Andrea Madotto | Genta Indra Winata | Zihan Liu | Yan Xu | Cong Gao | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing

2018

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Code-Switching Language Modeling using Syntax-Aware Multi-Task Learning
Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Chien-Sheng Wu | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

Lack of text data has been the major issue on code-switching language modeling. In this paper, we introduce multi-task learning based language model which shares syntax representation of languages to leverage linguistic information and tackle the low resource data issue. Our model jointly learns both language modeling and Part-of-Speech tagging on code-switched utterances. In this way, the model is able to identify the location of code-switching points and improves the prediction of next word. Our approach outperforms standard LSTM based language model, with an improvement of 9.7% and 7.4% in perplexity on SEAME Phase I and Phase II dataset respectively.

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Bilingual Character Representation for Efficiently Addressing Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Code-Switching Named Entity Recognition
Genta Indra Winata | Chien-Sheng Wu | Andrea Madotto | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

We propose an LSTM-based model with hierarchical architecture on named entity recognition from code-switching Twitter data. Our model uses bilingual character representation and transfer learning to address out-of-vocabulary words. In order to mitigate data noise, we propose to use token replacement and normalization. In the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching Shared Task, we achieved second place with 62.76% harmonic mean F1-score for English-Spanish language pair without using any gazetteer and knowledge-based information.
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