Hady Elsahar


2022

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What Language Model to Train if You Have One Million GPU Hours?
Teven Le Scao | Thomas Wang | Daniel Hesslow | Stas Bekman | M Saiful Bari | Stella Biderman | Hady Elsahar | Niklas Muennighoff | Jason Phang | Ofir Press | Colin Raffel | Victor Sanh | Sheng Shen | Lintang Sutawika | Jaesung Tae | Zheng Xin Yong | Julien Launay | Iz Beltagy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

The crystallization of modeling methods around the Transformer architecture has been a boon for practitioners. Simple, well-motivated architectural variations can transfer across tasks and scale, increasing the impact of modeling research. However, with the emergence of state-of-the-art 100B+ parameters models, large language models are increasingly expensive to accurately design and train. Notably, it can be difficult to evaluate how modeling decisions may impact emergent capabilities, given that these capabilities arise mainly from sheer scale alone. In the process of building BLOOM–the Big Science Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual language model–our goal is to identify an architecture and training setup that makes the best use of our 1,000,000 A100-GPU-hours budget. Specifically, we perform an ablation study at the billion-parameter scale comparing different modeling practices and their impact on zero-shot generalization. In addition, we study the impact of various popular pre-training corpora on zero-shot generalization. We also study the performance of a multilingual model and how it compares to the English-only one. Finally, we consider the scaling behaviour of Transformers to choose the target model size, shape, and training setup. All our models and code are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/bigscience.

2021

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Self-Supervised and Controlled Multi-Document Opinion Summarization
Hady Elsahar | Maximin Coavoux | Jos Rozen | Matthias Gallé
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

We address the problem of unsupervised abstractive summarization of collections of user generated reviews through self-supervision and control. We propose a self-supervised setup that considers an individual document as a target summary for a set of similar documents. This setting makes training simpler than previous approaches by relying only on standard log-likelihood loss and mainstream models. We address the problem of hallucinations through the use of control codes, to steer the generation towards more coherent and relevant summaries.

2020

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Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages
Wilhelmina Nekoto | Vukosi Marivate | Tshinondiwa Matsila | Timi Fasubaa | Taiwo Fagbohungbe | Solomon Oluwole Akinola | Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu | Salomey Osei | Freshia Sackey | Rubungo Andre Niyongabo | Ricky Macharm | Perez Ogayo | Orevaoghene Ahia | Musie Meressa Berhe | Mofetoluwa Adeyemi | Masabata Mokgesi-Selinga | Lawrence Okegbemi | Laura Martinus | Kolawole Tajudeen | Kevin Degila | Kelechi Ogueji | Kathleen Siminyu | Julia Kreutzer | Jason Webster | Jamiil Toure Ali | Jade Abbott | Iroro Orife | Ignatius Ezeani | Idris Abdulkadir Dangana | Herman Kamper | Hady Elsahar | Goodness Duru | Ghollah Kioko | Murhabazi Espoir | Elan van Biljon | Daniel Whitenack | Christopher Onyefuluchi | Chris Chinenye Emezue | Bonaventure F. P. Dossou | Blessing Sibanda | Blessing Bassey | Ayodele Olabiyi | Arshath Ramkilowan | Alp Öktem | Adewale Akinfaderin | Abdallah Bashir
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. ‘Low-resourced’-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. In this paper, we focus on the task of Machine Translation (MT), that plays a crucial role for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite immense improvements in MT over the past decade, MT is centered around a few high-resourced languages. As MT researchers cannot solve the problem of low-resourcedness alone, we propose participatory research as a means to involve all necessary agents required in the MT development process. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of participatory research with a case study on MT for African languages. Its implementation leads to a collection of novel translation datasets, MT benchmarks for over 30 languages, with human evaluations for a third of them, and enables participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. Benchmarks, models, data, code, and evaluation results are released at https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt.

2019

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To Annotate or Not? Predicting Performance Drop under Domain Shift
Hady Elsahar | Matthias Gallé
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Performance drop due to domain-shift is an endemic problem for NLP models in production. This problem creates an urge to continuously annotate evaluation datasets to measure the expected drop in the model performance which can be prohibitively expensive and slow. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting the performance drop of modern NLP models under domain-shift, in the absence of any target domain labels. We investigate three families of methods (-divergence, reverse classification accuracy and confidence measures), show how they can be used to predict the performance drop and study their robustness to adversarial domain-shifts. Our results on sentiment classification and sequence labelling show that our method is able to predict performance drops with an error rate as low as 2.15% and 0.89% for sentiment analysis and POS tagging respectively.

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Unsupervised Aspect-Based Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization
Maximin Coavoux | Hady Elsahar | Matthias Gallé
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

User-generated reviews of products or services provide valuable information to customers. However, it is often impossible to read each of the potentially thousands of reviews: it would therefore save valuable time to provide short summaries of their contents. We address opinion summarization, a multi-document summarization task, with an unsupervised abstractive summarization neural system. Our system is based on (i) a language model that is meant to encode reviews to a vector space, and to generate fluent sentences from the same vector space (ii) a clustering step that groups together reviews about the same aspects and allows the system to generate summary sentences focused on these aspects. Our experiments on the Oposum dataset empirically show the importance of the clustering step.

2018

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T-REx: A Large Scale Alignment of Natural Language with Knowledge Base Triples
Hady Elsahar | Pavlos Vougiouklis | Arslen Remaci | Christophe Gravier | Jonathon Hare | Frederique Laforest | Elena Simperl
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Zero-Shot Question Generation from Knowledge Graphs for Unseen Predicates and Entity Types
Hady Elsahar | Christophe Gravier | Frederique Laforest
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

We present a neural model for question generation from knowledge graphs triples in a “Zero-shot” setup, that is generating questions for predicate, subject types or object types that were not seen at training time. Our model leverages triples occurrences in the natural language corpus in a encoder-decoder architecture, paired with an original part-of-speech copy action mechanism to generate questions. Benchmark and human evaluation show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art on this task.

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Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata
Lucie-Aimée Kaffee | Hady Elsahar | Pavlos Vougiouklis | Christophe Gravier | Frédérique Laforest | Jonathon Hare | Elena Simperl
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

While Wikipedia exists in 287 languages, its content is unevenly distributed among them. In this work, we investigate the generation of open domain Wikipedia summaries in underserved languages using structured data from Wikidata. To this end, we propose a neural network architecture equipped with copy actions that learns to generate single-sentence and comprehensible textual summaries from Wikidata triples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by evaluating it against a set of baselines on two languages of different natures: Arabic, a morphological rich language with a larger vocabulary than English, and Esperanto, a constructed language known for its easy acquisition.

2017

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High Recall Open IE for Relation Discovery
Hady Elsahar | Christophe Gravier | Frederique Laforest
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Relation Discovery discovers predicates (relation types) from a text corpus relying on the co-occurrence of two named entities in the same sentence. This is a very narrowing constraint: it represents only a small fraction of all relation mentions in practice. In this paper we propose a high recall approach for Open IE, which enables covering up to 16 times more sentences in a large corpus. Comparison against OpenIE systems shows that our proposed approach achieves 28% improvement over the highest recall OpenIE system and 6% improvement in precision than the same system.