Code retrieval aims to identify code from extensive codebases that semantically aligns with a given query code snippet. Collecting a broad and high-quality set of query and code pairs is crucial to the success of this task. However, existing data collection methods struggle to effectively balance scalability and annotation quality. In this paper, we first analyze the factors influencing the quality of function annotations generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We find that the invocation of intra-repository functions and third-party APIs plays a significant role. Building on this insight, we propose a novel annotation method that enhances the annotation context by incorporating the content of functions called within the repository and information on third-party API functionalities. Additionally, we integrate LLMs with a novel sorting method to address the multi-level function call relationships within repositories. Furthermore, by applying our proposed method across a range of repositories, we have developed the Query4Code dataset. The quality of this synthesized dataset is validated through both model training and human evaluation, demonstrating high-quality annotations. Moreover, cost analysis confirms the scalability of our annotation method.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in question-answering (QA) systems but often generate information with hallucinations. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential remedy, yet the uneven retrieval quality and irrelevant contents may distract LLMs.In this work, we address these issues at the generation phase by treating RAG as a multi-document QA task.We propose a novel decoding strategy, Dynamic Contrastive Decoding, which dynamically amplifies knowledge from selected documents during the generation phase. involves constructing inputs batchwise, designing new selection criteria to identify documents worth amplifying, and applying contrastive decoding with a specialized weight calculation to adjust the final logits used for sampling answer tokens. Zero-shot experimental results on ALCE-ASQA, NQ, TQA and PopQA benchmarks show that our method outperforms other decoding strategies. Additionally, we conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of our selection criteria, weight calculation, and general multi-document scenarios. Our method requires no training and can be integrated with other methods to improve the RAG performance. Our codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/JulieJin-km/Dynamic_Contrastive_Decoding.

The detection of machine-generated text, especially from large language models (LLMs), is crucial in preventing serious social problems resulting from their misuse. Some methods train dedicated detectors on specific datasets but fall short in generalizing to unseen test data, while other zero-shot ones often yield suboptimal performance. Although the recent DetectGPT has shown promising detection performance, it suffers from significant inefficiency issues, as detecting a single candidate requires querying the source LLM with hundreds of its perturbations. This paper aims to bridge this gap. Concretely, we propose to incorporate a Bayesian surrogate model, which allows us to select typical samples based on Bayesian uncertainty and interpolate scores from typical samples to other samples, to improve query efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches under a low query budget. Notably, when detecting the text generated by LLaMA family models, our method with just 2 or 3 queries can outperform DetectGPT with 200 queries.

Large Language Models (LLM) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), improving state-of-the-art and exhibiting emergent capabilities across various tasks. However, their application in extracting information from visually rich documents, which is at the core of many document processing workflows and involving the extraction of key entities from semi-structured documents, has not yet been successful. The main obstacles to adopting LLMs for this task include the absence of layout encoding within LLMs, which is critical for high quality extraction, and the lack of a grounding mechanism to localize the predicted entities within the document. In this paper, we introduce Language Model-based Document Information EXtraction and Localization (LMDX), a methodology to reframe the document information extraction task for a LLM. LMDX enables extraction of singular, repeated, and hierarchical entities, both with and without training data, while providing grounding guarantees and localizing the entities within the document. Finally, we apply LMDX to the PaLM 2-S and Gemini Pro LLMs and evaluate it on VRDU and CORD benchmarks, setting a new state-of-the-art and showing how LMDX enables the creation of high quality, data-efficient parsers.

Long document question answering (DocQA) aims to answer questions from long documents over 10k words. They usually contain content structures such as sections, sub-sections, and paragraph demarcations. However, the indexing methods of long documents remain under-explored, while existing systems generally employ fixed-length chunking. As they do not consider content structures, the resultant chunks can exclude vital information or include irrelevant content. Motivated by this, we propose the **M**ulti-view **C**ontent-aware indexing (**MC-indexing**) for more effective long DocQA via (i) segment structured document into content chunks, and (ii) represent each content chunk in raw-text, keywords, and summary views. We highlight that MC-indexing requires neither training nor fine-tuning. Having plug-and-play capability, it can be seamlessly integrated with any retrievers to boost their performance. Besides, we propose a long DocQA dataset that includes not only question-answer pair, but also document structure and answer scope. When compared to state-of-art chunking schemes, MC-indexing has significantly increased the recall by **42.8%**, **30.0%**, **23.9%**, and **16.3%** via top k = 1.5, 3, 5, and 10 respectively. These improved scores are the average of 8 widely used retrievers (2 sparse and 6 dense) via extensive experiments.

Mixture of experts (MoE) has become the standard for constructing production-level large language models (LLMs) due to its promise to boost model capacity without causing significant overheads. Nevertheless, existing MoE methods usually enforce a constant top-k routing for all tokens, which is arguably restrictive because various tokens (e.g., "<EOS>” vs. “apple”) may require various numbers of experts for feature abstraction. Lifting such a constraint can help make the most of limited resources and unleash the potential of the model for downstream tasks. In this sense, we introduce **AdaMoE** to realize token-adaptive routing for MoE, where different tokens are permitted to select a various number of experts. AdaMoE makes minimal modifications to the vanilla MoE with top-k routing—it simply introduces a fixed number of *null experts*, which do not consume any FLOPs, to the expert set and increases the value of k. AdaMoE does not force each token to occupy a fixed number of null experts but ensures the average usage of the null experts with a load-balancing loss, leading to an adaptive number of null/true experts used by each token. AdaMoE exhibits a strong resemblance to MoEs with expert choice routing while allowing for trivial auto-regressive modeling. AdaMoE is easy to implement and can be effectively applied to pre-trained (MoE-)LLMs. Extensive studies show that AdaMoE can reduce average expert load (FLOPs) while achieving superior performance. For example, on the ARC-C dataset, applying our method to fine-tuning Mixtral-8x7B can reduce FLOPs by 14.5% while increasing accuracy by 1.69%.Code is available at [this link](https://github.com/CengZihao/AdaMoE).

Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) is crucial in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). It involves identifying a text’s aspect,sentiment, opinion, and category. Existing methods have insufficiently explored how to effectively leverage the knowledge of pre-trainedlanguage models (PLMs) to handle implicit aspects and opinions, particularly in combinations such as implicit aspect & explicit opinion, explicit aspect & implicit opinion, and implicit aspect & implicit opinion. We introduce ITSCL, a framework leveraging Instruction Tuning and Supervised Contrastive Learning to improve aspect sentiment quad predictions, especially for implicit aspects and opinions. Implementing this approach presents several challenges. First, designing effective instructions and prompts to optimize the model’s training is difficult. Second, creating sentiment combination vectors with contrastive learning to enhance the model’s discrimination requires further investigation. To address these challenges, ITSCL combines instruction tuning with aligned PLM templates, enabling better knowledge acquisition and identification of implicit sentiments. Additionally, the contrastive learning framework enhances performance by using four fully connected layers to combine sentiments, aspects, opinions, and combinations, maximizing similarity for same-label representationsand minimizing it for different labels. Experimental results show our method significantly outperforms previous methods on benchmark datasets.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items’ semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumber-some training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in code-generation tasks. However, under enterprise scenarios where private APIs are pre-built, general LLMs often fail to meet expectations. Existing approaches are confronted with drawbacks of high resource consumption and inadequate handling of multi-API tasks. To address these challenges, we propose EpiGEN, an Efficient multi-Api code GENeration framework under enterprise scenario. It consists of three core modules: Task Decomposition Module (TDM), API Retrieval Module (ARM), and Code Generation Module (CGM), in which Langchain played an important role. Through a series of experiments, EpiGEN shows good acceptability and readability, compared to fully fine-tuned LLM with a larger number of parameters. Particularly, in medium and hard level tasks, the performance of EpiGEN on a single-GPU machine even surpasses that of a fully fine-tuned LLM that requires multi-GPU configuration. Generally, EpiGEN is model-size agnostic, facilitating a balance between the performance of code generation and computational requirements.

Self-supervised models have demonstrated remarkable performance in speech processing by learning latent representations from large amounts of unlabeled data. Although these models yield promising results on low-resource languages, the computational expense of fine-tuning all model parameters is prohibitively high. Adapters offer a solution by incorporating lightweight bottleneck structures into pre-trained models, enabling efficient parameter adaptation for downstream tasks. However, randomly initialized adapters often underperform in low-resource scenarios, limiting their applicability in low-resource languages. To address this issue, we develop the Meta-Adapter for self-supervised models to obtain meta-initialized parameters that facilitate quick adaptation to low-resource languages. Extensive experiments on the Common Voice and FLEURS datasets demonstrate the superior performance of Meta-Adapters on 12 low-resource languages spanning four different language families. Moreover, Meta-adapters show better generalization and extensibility than traditional pretraining methods.

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2023 Task 9 Multilingual Tweet Intimacy Analysis. There are two key challenges in this task: the complexity of multilingual and zero-shot cross-lingual learning, and the difficulty of semantic mining of tweet intimacy. To solve the above problems, our system extracts contextual representations from the pretrained language models, XLM-T, and employs various optimization methods, including adversarial training, data augmentation, ordinal regression loss and special training strategy. Our system ranked 14th out of 54 participating teams on the leaderboard and ranked 10th on predicting languages not in the training data. Our code is available on Github.

Sexism is an injustice afflicting women and has become a common form of oppression in social media. In recent years, the automatic detection of sexist instances has been utilized to combat this oppression. The Subtask A of SemEval-2023 Task 10, Explainable Detection of Online Sexism, aims to detect whether an English-language post is sexist. In this paper, we describe our system for the competition. The structure of the classification model is based on RoBERTa, and we further pre-train it on the domain corpus. For fine-tuning, we adopt Unsupervised Data Augmentation (UDA), a semi-supervised learning approach, to improve the robustness of the system. Specifically, we employ Easy Data Augmentation (EDA) method as the noising operation for consistency training. We train multiple models based on different hyperparameter settings and adopt the majority voting method to predict the labels of test entries. Our proposed system achieves a Macro-F1 score of 0.8352 and a ranking of 41/84 on the leaderboard of Subtask A.

Given a text query, the task of Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) is to localize a temporal moment in an untrimmed video that semantically matches the query. In this paper, we adopt a proposal-based solution that generates proposals (i.e. candidate moments) and then select the best matching proposal. On top of modeling the cross-modal interaction between candidate moments and the query, our proposed Moment Sampling DETR (MS-DETR) enables efficient moment-moment relation modeling. The core idea is to sample a subset of moments guided by the learnable templates with an adopted DETR framework. To achieve this, we design a multi-scale visual-linguistic encoder, and an anchor-guided moment decoder paired with a set of learnable templates. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MS-DETR.

The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.

The continuous development of Question Answering (QA) datasets has drawn the research community’s attention toward multi-domain models. A popular approach is to use multi-dataset models, which are models trained on multiple datasets to learn their regularities and prevent overfitting to a single dataset. However, with the proliferation of QA models in online repositories such as GitHub or Hugging Face, an alternative is becoming viable. Recent works have demonstrated that combining expert agents can yield large performance gains over multi-dataset models. To ease research in multi-agent models, we extend UKP-SQuARE, an online platform for QA research, to support three families of multi-agent systems: i) agent selection, ii) early-fusion of agents, and iii) late-fusion of agents. We conduct experiments to evaluate their inference speed and discuss the performance vs. speed trade-off compared to multi-dataset models. UKP-SQuARE is open-source and publicly available.

Zero-shot transfer learning for document understanding is a crucial yet under-investigated scenario to help reduce the high cost involved in annotating document entities. We present a novel query-based framework, QueryForm, that extracts entity values from form-like documents in a zero-shot fashion. QueryForm contains a dual prompting mechanism that composes both the document schema and a specific entity type into a query, which is used to prompt a Transformer model to perform a single entity extraction task. Furthermore, we propose to leverage large-scale query-entity pairs generated from form-like webpages with weak HTML annotations to pre-train QueryForm. By unifying pre-training and fine-tuning into the same query-based framework, QueryForm enables models to learn from structured documents containing various entities and layouts, leading to better generalization to target document types without the need for target-specific training data. QueryForm sets new state-of-the-art average F1 score on both the XFUND (+4.6% 10.1%) and the Payment (+3.2% 9.5%) zero-shot benchmark, with a smaller model size and no additional image input.

Large-scale datasets in the real world inevitably involve label noise. Deep models can gradually overfit noisy labels and thus degrade model generalization. To mitigate the effects of label noise, learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods are designed to achieve better generalization performance. Due to the lack of suitable datasets, previous studies have frequently employed synthetic label noise to mimic real-world label noise. However, synthetic noise is not instance-dependent, making this approximation not always effective in practice. Recent research has proposed benchmarks for learning with real-world noisy labels. However, the noise sources within may be single or fuzzy, making benchmarks different from data with heterogeneous label noises in the real world. To tackle these issues, we contribute NoisywikiHow, the largest NLP benchmark built with minimal supervision. Specifically, inspired by human cognition, we explicitly construct multiple sources of label noise to imitate human errors throughout the annotation, replicating real-world noise, whose corruption is affected by both ground-truth labels and instances. Moreover, we provide a variety of noise levels to support controlled experiments on noisy data, enabling us to evaluate LNL methods systematically and comprehensively. After that, we conduct extensive multi-dimensional experiments on a broad range of LNL methods, obtaining new and intriguing findings.

One challenge in speech translation is that plenty of spoken content is long-form, but short units are necessary for obtaining high-quality translations. To address this mismatch, we adapt large language models (LLMs) to split long ASR transcripts into segments that can be independently translated so as to maximize the overall translation quality. We overcome the tendency of hallucination in LLMs by incorporating finite-state constraints during decoding; these eliminate invalid outputs without requiring additional training. We discover that LLMs are adaptable to transcripts containing ASR errors through prompt-tuning or fine-tuning. Relative to a state-of-the-art automatic punctuation baseline, our best LLM improves the average BLEU by 2.9 points for English–German, English–Spanish, and English–Arabic TED talk translation in 9 test sets, just by improving segmentation.

Structured dropout approaches, such as attention dropout and DropHead, have been investigated to regularize the multi-head attention mechanism in Transformers. In this paper, we propose a new regularization scheme based on token-level rather than structure-level to reduce overfitting. Specifically, we devise a novel Token-Level Masking (TLM) training strategy for Transformers to regularize the connections of self-attention, which consists of two masking techniques that are effective and easy to implement. The underlying idea is to manipulate the connections between tokens in the multi-head attention via masking, where the networks are forced to exploit partial neighbors’ information to produce a meaningful representation. The generality and effectiveness of TLM are thoroughly evaluated via extensive experiments on 4 diversified NLP tasks across 18 datasets, including natural language understanding benchmark GLUE, ChineseGLUE, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction, and data-to-text generation. The results indicate that TLM can consistently outperform attention dropout and DropHead, e.g., it increases by 0.5 points relative to DropHead with BERT-large on GLUE. Moreover, TLM can establish a new record on the data-to-text benchmark Rotowire (18.93 BLEU). Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Young1993/tlm.

Translate-train is a general training approach to multilingual tasks. The key idea is to use the translator of the target language to generate training data to mitigate the gap between the source and target languages. However, its performance is often hampered by the artifacts in the translated texts (translationese). We discover that such artifacts have common patterns in different languages and can be modeled by deep learning, and subsequently propose an approach to conduct translate-train using Translationese Embracing the effect of Artifacts (TEA). TEA learns to mitigate such effect on the training data of a source language (whose original and translationese are both available), and applies the learned module to facilitate the inference on the target language. Extensive experiments on the multilingual QA dataset TyDiQA demonstrate that TEA outperforms strong baselines.

Pre-trained language models (LMs), such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) and its variants, have led to significant improvements on various NLP tasks in past years. However, a theoretical framework for studying their relationships is still missing. In this paper, we fill this gap by investigating the linear dependency between pre-trained LMs. The linear dependency of LMs is defined analogously to the linear dependency of vectors. We propose Language Model Decomposition (LMD) to represent a LM using a linear combination of other LMs as basis, and derive the closed-form solution. A goodness-of-fit metric for LMD similar to the coefficient of determination is defined and used to measure the linear dependency of a set of LMs. In experiments, we find that BERT and eleven (11) BERT-like LMs are 91% linearly dependent. This observation suggests that current state-of-the-art (SOTA) LMs are highly “correlated”. To further advance SOTA we need more diverse and novel LMs that are less dependent on existing LMs.

Noisy labels are ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Existing work, namely learning with noisy labels in NLP, is often limited to dedicated tasks or specific training procedures, making it hard to be widely used. To address this issue, SGD noise has been explored to provide a more general way to alleviate the effect of noisy labels by involving benign noise in the process of stochastic gradient descent. However, previous studies exert identical perturbation for all samples, which may cause overfitting on incorrect ones or optimizing correct ones inadequately. To facilitate this, we propose a novel stochastic tailor-made gradient noise (STGN), mitigating the effect of inherent label noise by introducing tailor-made benign noise for each sample. Specifically, we investigate multiple principles to precisely and stably discriminate correct samples from incorrect ones and thus apply different intensities of perturbation to them. A detailed theoretical analysis shows that STGN has good properties, beneficial for model generalization. Experiments on three different NLP tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of STGN. Also, STGN can boost existing robust training methods.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) settings are used to measure a model’s performance when the distribution of the test data is different from that of the training data. NLU models are known to suffer in OOD. We study this issue from the perspective of causality, which sees confounding bias as the reason for models to learn spurious correlations. While a common solution is to perform intervention, existing methods handle only known and single confounder, but in many NLU tasks the confounders can be both unknown and multifactorial. In this paper, we propose a novel interventional training method called Bottom-up Automatic Intervention (BAI) that performs multi-granular intervention with identified multifactorial confounders. Our experiments on three NLU tasks, namely, natural language inference, fact verification and paraphrase identification, show the effectiveness of BAI for tackling OOD settings.

It is notoriously difficult to implement end-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST) model because of the task complexity and data scarcity. Existing techniques often attempt to carry out implicit knowledge transfer from machine translation (MT) to ST model by imposing various constraints. However, in this transfer scenario, a significant problem is that the performance of the MT will drop significantly and the final transfer effect is also restricted. In this article, we recommend Fine and Coarse Granularity Contrastive Learning (FCGCL), which conduct explicit knowledge transfer from MT to ST model. Specially, we ensure through multi granularity contrastive learning that inputs with similar semantic between different modalities are encoded closely in the shared semantic space while inputs with different semantics are kept apart. Experiments on the MuST-C datasets on all 8 languages and further analysis show that our method can effectively improve the E2E-ST performance and achieves an average BLEU of 29.0.

Question Answering (QA) systems are increasingly deployed in applications where they support real-world decisions. However, state-of-the-art models rely on deep neural networks, which are difficult to interpret by humans. Inherently interpretable models or post hoc explainability methods can help users to comprehend how a model arrives at its prediction and, if successful, increase their trust in the system. Furthermore, researchers can leverage these insights to develop new methods that are more accurate and less biased. In this paper, we introduce SQuARE v2, the new version of SQuARE, to provide an explainability infrastructure for comparing models based on methods such as saliency maps and graph-based explanations. While saliency maps are useful to inspect the importance of each input token for the model’s prediction, graph-based explanations from external Knowledge Graphs enable the users to verify the reasoning behind the model prediction. In addition, we provide multiple adversarial attacks to compare the robustness of QA models. With these explainability methods and adversarial attacks, we aim to ease the research on trustworthy QA models. SQuARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.

Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) towards vulnerable communities in general media has been shown to have potentially harmful effects. Due to its subtlety and the good intentions behind its use, the audience is not aware of the language’s toxicity. In this paper, we present our method for the SemEval-2022 Task4 titled “Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection”. In Subtask A, a binary classification task, we introduce adversarial training based on Fast Gradient Method (FGM) and employ pre-trained model in a unified architecture. For Subtask B, framed as a multi-label classification problem, we utilize various improved multi-label cross-entropy loss functions and analyze the performance of our method. In the final evaluation, our system achieved official rankings of 17/79 and 16/49 on Subtask A and Subtask B, respectively. In addition, we explore the relationship between PCL and emotional polarity and intensity it contains.

The joint multiple Intent Detection (ID) and Slot Filling (SF) is a significant challenge in spoken language understanding. Because the slots in an utterance may relate to multi-intents, most existing approaches focus on utilizing task-specific components to capture the relations between intents and slots. The customized networks restrict models from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for broader applications. To address the above issue, we propose a Unified Generative framework (UGEN) based on a prompt-based paradigm, and formulate the task as a question-answering problem. Specifically, we design 5-type templates as instructional prompts, and each template includes a question that acts as the driver to teach UGEN to grasp the paradigm, options that list the candidate intents or slots to reduce the answer search space, and the context denotes original utterance. Through the instructional prompts, UGEN is guided to understand intents, slots, and their implicit correlations. On two popular multi-intent benchmark datasets, experimental results demonstrate that UGEN achieves new SOTA performances on full-data and surpasses the baselines by a large margin on 5-shot (28.1%) and 10-shot (23%) scenarios, which verify that UGEN is robust and effective.

Pre-trained multilingual language models, e.g., multilingual-BERT, are widely used in cross-lingual tasks, yielding the state-of-the-art performance. However, such models suffer from a large performance gap between source and target languages, especially in the zero-shot setting, where the models are fine-tuned only on English but tested on other languages for the same task. We tackle this issue by incorporating language-agnostic information, specifically, universal syntax such as dependency relations and POS tags, into language models, based on the observation that universal syntax is transferable across different languages. Our approach, called COunterfactual SYntax (COSY), includes the design of SYntax-aware networks as well as a COunterfactual training method to implicitly force the networks to learn not only the semantics but also the syntax. To evaluate COSY, we conduct cross-lingual experiments on natural language inference and question answering using mBERT and XLM-R as network backbones. Our results show that COSY achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both tasks, without using auxiliary training data.

Natural language processing (NLP) often faces the problem of data diversity such as different domains, themes, styles, and so on. Therefore, a single language model (LM) is insufficient to learn all knowledge from diverse samples. To solve this problem, we firstly propose an autoencoding topic model with a mixture prior (mATM) to perform clustering for the data, where the clusters defined in semantic space describes the data diversity. Having obtained the clustering assignment for each sample, we develop the ensemble LM (EnsLM) with the technique of weight modulation. Specifically, EnsLM contains a backbone that is adjusted by a few modulated weights to fit for different sample clusters. As a result, the backbone learns the shared knowledge among all clusters while modulated weights extract the cluster-specific features. EnsLM can be trained jointly with mATM with a flexible LM backbone. We evaluate the effectiveness of both mATM and EnsLM on various tasks.

We present a new human-human dialogue dataset - PhotoChat, the first dataset that casts light on the photo sharing behavior in online messaging. PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks to facilitate research on image-text modeling: a photo-sharing intent prediction task that predicts whether one intends to share a photo in the next conversation turn, and a photo retrieval task that retrieves the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. In addition, for both tasks, we provide baseline models using the state-of-the-art models and report their benchmark performances. The best image retrieval model achieves 10.4% recall@1 (out of 1000 candidates) and the best photo intent prediction model achieves 58.1% F1 score, indicating that the dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. We are releasing PhotoChat to facilitate future research work among the community.

Breaking domain names such as openresearch into component words open and research is important for applications like Text-to-Speech synthesis and web search. We link this problem to the classic problem of Chinese word segmentation and show the effectiveness of a tagging model based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) using characters as input. To compensate for the lack of training data, we propose a pre-training method on concatenated entity names in a large knowledge database. Pre-training improves the model by 33% and brings the sequence accuracy to 85%.

Given an untrimmed video and a text query, natural language video localization (NLVL) is to locate a matching span from the video that semantically corresponds to the query. Existing solutions formulate NLVL either as a ranking task and apply multimodal matching architecture, or as a regression task to directly regress the target video span. In this work, we address NLVL task with a span-based QA approach by treating the input video as text passage. We propose a video span localizing network (VSLNet), on top of the standard span-based QA framework, to address NLVL. The proposed VSLNet tackles the differences between NLVL and span-based QA through a simple and yet effective query-guided highlighting (QGH) strategy. The QGH guides VSLNet to search for matching video span within a highlighted region. Through extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed VSLNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods; and adopting span-based QA framework is a promising direction to solve NLVL.

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is one of the most challenging tasks in machine reading comprehension since it requires more advanced reading comprehension skills such as logical reasoning, summarization, and arithmetic operations. Unfortunately, most existing MCQA datasets are small in size, which increases the difficulty of model learning and generalization. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-source meta transfer (MMT) for low-resource MCQA. In this framework, we first extend meta learning by incorporating multiple training sources to learn a generalized feature representation across domains. To bridge the distribution gap between training sources and the target, we further introduce the meta transfer that can be integrated into the multi-source meta training. More importantly, the proposed MMT is independent of backbone language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MMT over state-of-the-arts, and continuous improvements can be achieved on different backbone networks on both supervised and unsupervised domain adaptation settings.

Abstractive document summarization is a comprehensive task including document understanding and summary generation, in which area Transformer-based models have achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Compared with Transformers, topic models are better at learning explicit document semantics, and hence could be integrated into Transformers to further boost their performance. To this end, we rearrange and explore the semantics learned by a topic model, and then propose a topic assistant (TA) including three modules. TA is compatible with various Transformer-based models and user-friendly since i) TA is a plug-and-play model that does not break any structure of the original Transformer network, making users easily fine-tune Transformer+TA based on a well pre-trained model; ii) TA only introduces a small number of extra parameters. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that TA is able to improve the performance of several Transformer-based models.

We propose a new neural transfer method termed Dual Adversarial Transfer Network (DATNet) for addressing low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER). Specifically, two variants of DATNet, i.e., DATNet-F and DATNet-P, are investigated to explore effective feature fusion between high and low resource. To address the noisy and imbalanced training data, we propose a novel Generalized Resource-Adversarial Discriminator (GRAD). Additionally, adversarial training is adopted to boost model generalization. In experiments, we examine the effects of different components in DATNet across domains and languages and show that significant improvement can be obtained especially for low-resource data, without augmenting any additional hand-crafted features and pre-trained language model.

Machine learning, including neural network techniques, have been applied to virtually every domain in natural language processing. One problem that has been somewhat resistant to effective machine learning solutions is text normalization for speech applications such as text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). In this application, one must decide, for example, that 123 is verbalized as one hundred twenty three in 123 pages but as one twenty three in 123 King Ave. For this task, state-of-the-art industrial systems depend heavily on hand-written language-specific grammars. We propose neural network models that treat text normalization for TTS as a sequence-to-sequence problem, in which the input is a text token in context, and the output is the verbalization of that token. We find that the most effective model, in accuracy and efficiency, is one where the sentential context is computed once and the results of that computation are combined with the computation of each token in sequence to compute the verbalization. This model allows for a great deal of flexibility in terms of representing the context, and also allows us to integrate tagging and segmentation into the process. These models perform very well overall, but occasionally they will predict wildly inappropriate verbalizations, such as reading 3 cm as three kilometers. Although rare, such verbalizations are a major issue for TTS applications. We thus use finite-state covering grammars to guide the neural models, either during training and decoding, or just during decoding, away from such “unrecoverable” errors. Such grammars can largely be learned from data.

Commonsense knowledge bases need to have relations that allow to predict the consequences of specific actions (say, if John stabbed Peter, Peter might be killed) and to unfold the possible actions for the specific results (Peter was killed. It could happen because of poisoning, stabbing, shooting, etc.) This kind of causal relations are established between manner verbs and result verbs: manner-result relations. We offer a procedure on how to extract manner-result relations from WordNet through the analysis of the troponym glosses. The procedure of extraction includes three steps and the results are based on the analysis of the whole set of verbs in WordNet.

Attention-based sequence-to-sequence neural network models learn to jointly align and translate. The quadratic-time attention mechanism is powerful as it is capable of handling arbitrary long-distance reordering, but computationally expensive. In this paper, towards making neural translation both accurate and efficient, we follow the traditional pre-reordering approach to decouple reordering from translation. We add a reordering RNN that shares the input encoder with the decoder. The RNNs are trained jointly with a multi-task loss function and applied sequentially at inference time. The task of the reordering model is to predict the permutation of the input words following the target language word order. After reordering, the attention in the decoder becomes more peaked and monotonic. For reordering, we adopt the Inversion Transduction Grammars (ITG) and propose a transition system to parse input to trees for reordering. We harness the ITG transition system with RNN. With the modeling power of RNN, we achieve superior reordering accuracy without any feature engineering. In experiments, we apply the model to the task of text normalization. Compared to a strong baseline of attention-based RNN, our ITG RNN re-ordering model can reach the same reordering accuracy with only 1/10 of the training data and is 2.5x faster in decoding.

The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) shared task was launched to support the development of systems able to verify claims by extracting supporting or refuting facts from raw text. The shared task organizers provide a large-scale dataset for the consecutive steps involved in claim verification, in particular, document retrieval, fact extraction, and claim classification. In this paper, we present our claim verification pipeline approach, which, according to the preliminary results, scored third in the shared task, out of 23 competing systems. For the document retrieval, we implemented a new entity linking approach. In order to be able to rank candidate facts and classify a claim on the basis of several selected facts, we introduce two extensions to the Enhanced LSTM (ESIM).