Having been trained on massive pretraining data, large language models have shown excellent performance on many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, pretraining data tends to contain misleading and even conflicting information, and it is intriguing to understand how LLMs handle these noisy data during training. In this study, we systematically analyze LLMs’ learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge. We find that pretrained LLMs establish learning preferences similar to humans, i.e., preferences towards formal texts and texts with fewer spelling errors, resulting in faster learning and more favorable treatment of knowledge in data with such features when facing conflicts. This finding is generalizable across models and languages and is more evident in larger models. An in-depth analysis reveals that LLMs tend to trust data with features that signify consistency with the majority of data, and it is possible to instill new preferences and erase old ones by manipulating the degree of consistency with the majority data.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, while most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages. Multilingual alignment based on the translation parallel data is an effective method to enhance LLMs’ multilingual capabilities. In this work, we first discover and comprehensively investigate the spontaneous multilingual alignment of LLMs. Firstly, we find that LLMs instruction-tuned on the question translation data (i.e. without annotated answers) are able to encourage the alignment between English and a wide range of languages, even including those unseen during instruction-tuning. Additionally, we utilize different settings and mechanistic interpretability methods to analyze the LLM’s performance in the multilingual scenario comprehensively. Our work suggests that LLMs have enormous potential for improving multilingual alignment efficiently with great language generalization and task generalization.

Large language models demonstrate reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. However, the spontaneous multilingual alignment in these models is shown to be weak, leading to unsatisfactory cross-lingual transfer and knowledge sharing. Previous works attempt to address this issue by explicitly injecting multilingual alignment information during or after pretraining. Thus for the early stage in pretraining, the alignment is weak for sharing information or knowledge across languages. In this paper, we propose PreAlign, a framework that establishes multilingual alignment prior to language model pretraining. PreAlign injects multilingual alignment by initializing the model to generate similar representations of aligned words and preserves this alignment using a code-switching strategy during pretraining. Extensive experiments in a synthetic English to English-Clone setting demonstrate that PreAlign significantly outperforms standard multilingual joint training in language modeling, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and cross-lingual knowledge application. Further experiments in real-world scenarios further validate PreAlign’s effectiveness across various model sizes.

Large-scale pretrained language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown strong abilities in multilingual translation, without being explicitly trained on parallel corpora. It is intriguing how the LLMs obtain their ability to carry out translation instructions for different languages. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis by finetuning a multilingual pretrained language model, XGLM-7.5B, to perform multilingual translation following given instructions. Firstly, we show that multilingual LLMs have stronger translation abilities than previously demonstrated. For a certain language, the translation performance depends on its similarity to English and the amount of data used in the pretraining phase. Secondly, we find that LLMs’ ability to carry out translation instructions relies on the understanding of translation instructions and the alignment among different languages. With multilingual finetuning with translation instructions, LLMs could learn to perform the translation task well even for those language pairs unseen during the instruction tuning phase.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling multilingual machine translation (MMT). In this paper, we systematically investigate the advantages and challenges of LLMs for MMT by answering two questions: 1) How well do LLMs perform in translating massive languages? 2) Which factors affect LLMs’ performance in translation? We thoroughly evaluate eight popular LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our empirical results show that translation capabilities of LLMs are continually involving. GPT-4 has beat the strong supervised baseline NLLB in 40.91% of translation directions but still faces a large gap towards the commercial translation system like Google Translate, especially on low-resource languages. Through further analysis, we discover that LLMs exhibit new working patterns when used for MMT. First, LLM can acquire translation ability in a resource-efficient way and generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages. Second, instruction semantics can surprisingly be ignored when given in-context exemplars. Third, cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resource translation than exemplars in the same language pairs. Code will be released at: https://github.com/NJUNLP/MMT-LLM.

This study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage source and reference data in machine translation evaluation task, aiming to better understand the mechanisms behind their remarkable performance in this task.We design the controlled experiments across various input modes and model types, and employ both coarse-grained and fine-grained prompts to discern the utility of source versus reference information.We find that reference information significantly enhances the evaluation accuracy, while surprisingly, source information sometimes is counterproductive, indicating LLMs’ inability to fully leverage the cross-lingual capability when evaluating translations.Further analysis of the fine-grained evaluation and fine-tuning experiments show similar results.These findings also suggest a potential research direction for LLMs that fully exploits the cross-lingual capability of LLMs to achieve better performance in machine translation evaluation tasks.

Large language models show compelling performance on reasoning tasks but they tend to perform much worse in languages other than English. This is unsurprising given that their training data largely consists of English text and instructions. A typical solution is to translate instruction data into all languages of interest, and then train on the resulting multilingual data, which is called translate-training. This approach not only incurs high cost, but also results in poorly translated data due to the non-standard formatting of mathematical chain-of-thought. In this paper, we explore the benefits of question alignment, where we train the model to translate reasoning questions into English by finetuning on X-English parallel question data. In this way we perform targeted, in-domain language alignment which makes best use of English instruction data to unlock the LLMs’ multilingual reasoning abilities. Experimental results on LLaMA2-13B show that question alignment leads to consistent improvements over the translate-training approach: an average improvement of 11.3% and 16.1% accuracy across ten languages on the MGSM and MSVAMP multilingual reasoning benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge and strong capabilities in performing in-context reasoning. However, previous work challenges their out-of-context reasoning ability, i.e., the ability to infer information from their training data, instead of from the context or prompt. This paper focuses on a significant aspect of out-of-context reasoning: Out-of-Context Knowledge Reasoning (OCKR), which is to combine multiple knowledge to infer new knowledge. We designed a synthetic dataset with seven representative OCKR tasks to systematically assess the OCKR capabilities of LLMs. Using this dataset, we evaluated several LLMs and discovered that their proficiency in this aspect is limited, regardless of whether the knowledge is trained in a separate or adjacent training settings. Moreover, training the model to reason with reasoning examples does not result in significant improvement, while training the model to perform explicit knowledge retrieval helps for retrieving attribute knowledge but not the relation knowledge, indicating that the model’s limited OCKR capabilities are due to difficulties in knowledge retrieval. Furthermore, we treat cross-lingual knowledge transfer as a distinct form of OCKR, and evaluate this ability. Our results show that the evaluated model also exhibits limited ability in transferring knowledge across languages.

Decoding by contrasting layers (DoLa), is designed to improve the generation quality of large language models (LLMs) by contrasting the prediction probabilities between an early exit output (amateur logits) and the final output (expert logits).However, we find that this approach does not work well on non-English tasks.Inspired by previous interpretability work on language transition during the model’s forward pass, we discover that this issue arises from a language mismatch between early exit output and final output.In this work, we propose an improved contrastive decoding algorithm that is effective for diverse languages beyond English.To obtain more helpful amateur logits, we devise two strategies to skip a set of bottom, language-agnostic layers based on our preliminary analysis.Experimental results on multilingual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous contrastive decoding baselines and substantially improves LLM’s chain-of-thought reasoning accuracy across 11 languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are designed to provide useful and safe responses. However, adversarial prompts known as ‘jailbreaks’ can circumvent safeguards, leading LLMs to generate potentially harmful content. Exploring jailbreak prompts can help to better reveal the weaknesses of LLMs and further steer us to secure them. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak methods either suffer from intricate manual design or require optimization on other white-box models, which compromises either generalization or efficiency. In this paper, we generalize jailbreak prompt attacks into two aspects: (1) Prompt Rewriting and (2) Scenario Nesting. Based on this, we propose ReNeLLM, an automatic framework that leverages LLMs themselves to generate effective jailbreak prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReNeLLM significantly improves the attack success rate while greatly reducing the time cost compared to existing baselines. Our study also reveals the inadequacy of current defense methods in safeguarding LLMs. Finally, we analyze the failure of LLMs defense from the perspective of prompt execution priority, and propose corresponding defense strategies. We hope that our research can catalyze both the academic community and LLMs developers towards the provision of safer and more regulated LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/ReNeLLM.

LLMs (Large Language Models) usually interact with users in the form of dialogue and generate responses following their instructions, which naturally require dialogue comprehension abilities. However, dialogue comprehension is a general language ability which is hard to be evaluated directly. In this work, we propose to perform the evaluation focusing on the factual consistency issue with the help of the dialogue summarization task. Besides evaluating and analyzing the dialogue summarization performance (DIAC-Sum) of different LLMs, we also derive factual questions from the generated summaries and use them as a more flexible measurement of dialogue comprehension (DIAC-FactQA). Our evaluation shows that, on average, 26.8% of the summaries generated by LLMs contain factual inconsistency. Even ChatGPT, the strongest model evaluated, has such errors in 16% of its summaries. For answering the factual questions, which is more challenging, the average error rate of all evaluated LLMs is 36.1%. Both results indicate serious deficiencies. Detailed analysis shows that the understanding of subject/object of the conversation is still challenging for LLMs. Furthermore, to stimulate and enhance the dialogue comprehension ability of LLMs, we propose a fine-tuning paradigm with auto-constructed multi-task data, which achieved a relative error rate reduction of 11% on DIAC-FactQA.

Despite their strong ability to retrieve knowledge in English, current large language models show imbalance abilities in different languages. Two approaches are proposed to address this, i.e., multilingual pretraining and multilingual instruction tuning. However, whether and how do such methods contribute to the cross-lingual knowledge alignment inside the models is unknown. In this paper, we propose CLiKA, a systematic framework to assess the cross-lingual knowledge alignment of LLMs in the Performance, Consistency and Conductivity levels, and explored the effect of multilingual pretraining and instruction tuning on the degree of alignment. Results show that: while both multilingual pretraining and instruction tuning are beneficial for cross-lingual knowledge alignment, the training strategy needs to be carefully designed. Namely, continued pretraining improves the alignment of the target language at the cost of other languages, while mixed pretraining affect other languages less. Also, the overall cross-lingual knowledge alignment, especially in the conductivity level, is unsatisfactory for all tested LLMs, and neither multilingual pretraining nor instruction tuning can substantially improve the cross-lingual knowledge conductivity.

Large Language Models (LLM) have demonstrated their strong ability in the field of machine translation, yet they suffer from high computational cost and latency. Therefore, transferring translation knowledge from giant LLMs to medium-sized machine translation models is a promising research direction. However, traditional knowledge distillation methods ignore the capability of student and teacher models, therefore repeatedly teaching student models on the knowledge they have learned, and failing to extend to novel contexts and knowledge. In this paper, we propose a framework called MT-Patcher, which transfers knowledge from LLMs to existing MT models in a selective, comprehensive and proactive manner. Considering the current translation ability of student MT models, we only identify and correct their translation errors, instead of distilling the whole translation from the teacher. Leveraging the strong language abilities of LLMs, we instruct LLM teachers to synthesize diverse contexts and anticipate more potential errors for the student. Experiment results on translating both specific language phenomena and general MT benchmarks demonstrate that finetuning the MT model on about 10% examples can achieve comparable results to the traditional knowledge distillation method, and synthesized potential errors and diverse contexts further improve MT performances on unseen contexts and words.

Augmenting the base neural model with a token-level symbolic datastore is a novel generation paradigm and has achieved promising results in machine translation (MT). In this paper, we introduce a unified framework kNN-BOX, which enables quick development and visualization for this novel paradigm. kNN-BOX decomposes the datastore-augmentation approach into three modules: datastore, retriever and combiner, thus putting diverse kNN generation methods into a unified way. Currently, kNN-BOX has provided implementation of seven popular kNN-MT variants, covering research from performance enhancement to efficiency optimization. It is easy for users to reproduce these existing work or customize their own models. Besides, users can interact with their kNN generation systems with kNN-BOX to better understand the underlying inference process in a visualized way. In experiment section, we apply kNN-BOX for machine translation and three other seq2seq generation tasks (text simplification, paraphrase generation and question generation). Experiment results show that augmenting the base neural model with kNN-BOX can bring large performance improvement in all these tasks. The code and document of kNN-BOX is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/knn-box. The demo can be accessed at http://nlp.nju.edu.cn/demo/knn-box/. The introduction video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0eJldHVR3w.

Intuitively, reasoning abilities are considered language-agnostic. However, existing LLMs exhibit inconsistent reasoning abilities across different languages, e.g., reasoning in the dominant language like English is superior to other languages due to the imbalance of multilingual training data. To enhance reasoning abilities in non-dominant languages, we propose a Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization framework (MAPO) to align the reasoning processes in other languages with the dominant language. Specifically, we harness an off-the-shelf translation model for the consistency between answers in non-dominant and dominant languages, which we adopt as the preference for optimization, e.g., Direct Preference Optimization(DPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experiments show that MAPO stably achieves significant improvements in the multilingual reasoning of various models on all three benchmarks (MSVAMP +16.2%, MGSM +6.1%, and MNumGLUESub +13.3%), with improved reasoning consistency across languages. The project is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/MAPO.

The process of meaning composition, wherein smaller units like morphemes or words combine to form the meaning of phrases and sentences, is essential for human sentence comprehension. Despite extensive neurolinguistic research into the brain regions involved in meaning composition, a computational metric to quantify the extent of composition is still lacking. Drawing on the key-value memory interpretation of transformer feed-forward network blocks, we introduce the Composition Score, a novel model-based metric designed to quantify the degree of meaning composition during sentence comprehension. Experimental findings show that this metric correlates with brain clusters associated with word frequency, structural processing, and general sensitivity to words, suggesting the multifaceted nature of meaning composition during human sentence comprehension.

Relation extraction is a critical task in the field of natural language processing with numerous real-world applications. Existing research primarily focuses on monolingual relation extraction or cross-lingual enhancement for relation extraction. Yet, there remains a significant gap in understanding relation extraction in the mix-lingual (or code-switching) scenario, where individuals intermix contents from different languages within sentences, generating mix-lingual content. Due to the lack of a dedicated dataset, the effectiveness of existing relation extraction models in such a scenario is largely unexplored. To address this issue, we introduce a novel task of considering relation extraction in the mix-lingual scenario called MixRE and constructing the human-annotated dataset MixRED to support this task. In addition to constructing the MixRED dataset, we evaluate both state-of-the-art supervised models and large language models (LLMs) on MixRED, revealing their respective advantages and limitations in the mix-lingual scenario. Furthermore, we delve into factors influencing model performance within the MixRE task and uncover promising directions for enhancing the performance of both supervised models and LLMs in this novel task.

Automatic metrics play a crucial role in machine translation. Despite the widespread use of n-gram-based metrics, there has been a recent surge in the development of pre-trained model-based metrics that focus on measuring sentence semantics. However, these neural metrics, while achieving higher correlations with human evaluations, are often considered to be black boxes with potential biases that are difficult to detect. In this study, we systematically analyze and compare various mainstream and cutting-edge automatic metrics from the perspective of their guidance for training machine translation systems. Through Minimum Risk Training (MRT), we find that certain metrics exhibit robustness defects, such as the presence of universal adversarial translations in BLEURT and BARTScore. In-depth analysis suggests two main causes of these robustness deficits: distribution biases in the training datasets, and the tendency of the metric paradigm. By incorporating token-level constraints, we enhance the robustness of evaluation metrics, which in turn leads to an improvement in the performance of machine translation systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/powerpuffpomelo/fairseq_mrt.

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks. However, limitations in interpretability have hindered their applications in the real world. This work proposes to interpret neural networks by linear decomposition and finds that the ReLU-activated Transformer can be considered as a linear model on a single input. We further leverage the linearity of the model and propose a linear decomposition of the model output to generate local explanations. Our evaluation of sentiment classification and machine translation shows that our method achieves competitive performance in efficiency and fidelity of explanation. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of our approach in applications with examples of error analysis on multiple tasks.

Neural machine translation has achieved promising results on many translation tasks. However, previous studies have shown that neural models induce a non-smooth representation space, which harms its generalization results. Recently, kNN-MT has provided an effective paradigm to smooth the prediction based on neighbor representations during inference. Despite promising results, kNN-MT usually requires large inference overhead. We propose an effective training framework INK to directly smooth the representation space via adjusting representations of kNN neighbors with a small number of new parameters. The new parameters are then used to refresh the whole representation datastore to get new kNN knowledge asynchronously. This loop keeps running until convergence. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that INK achieves average gains of 1.99 COMET and 1.0 BLEU, outperforming the state-of-the-art kNN-MT system with 0.02x memory space and 1.9x inference speedup.

kNN-MT presents a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore, which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. As a result, the constructed datastore is usually large and possibly redundant. In this paper, we investigate the interpretability issue of this approach: what knowledge does the NMT model need? We propose the notion of local correctness (LAC) as a new angle, which describes the potential translation correctness for a single entry and for a given neighborhood. Empirical study shows that our investigation successfully finds the conditions where the NMT model could easily fail and need related knowledge. Experiments on six diverse target domains and two language-pairs show that pruning according to local correctness brings a light and more explainable memory for kNN-MT domain adaptation.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have revealed strong abilities to understand natural language. Since most of them share the same basic structure, i.e. the transformer block, possible contributors to their success in the training process are scaling and instruction tuning. However, how these factors affect the models’ language perception is unclear. This work compares the self-attention of several existing LLMs (LLaMA, Alpaca and Vicuna) in different sizes (7B, 13B, 30B, 65B), together with eye saccade, an aspect of human reading attention, to assess the effect of scaling and instruction tuning on language perception. Results show that scaling enhances the human resemblance and improves the effective attention by reducing the trivial pattern reliance, while instruction tuning does not. However, instruction tuning significantly enhances the models’ sensitivity to instructions. We also find that current LLMs are consistently closer to non-native than native speakers in attention, suggesting a sub-optimal language perception of all models. Our code and data used in the analysis is available on GitHub.

Machine translation (MT) quality estimation (QE) is a crucial task to estimate the quality of MT outputs when reference translations are unavailable. Many studies focus on generating pseudo data using large parallel corpus and achieve remarkable success in the supervised setting. However, pseudo data solutions are less satisfying in unsupervised scenarios because the pseudo labels are inaccurate or the pseudo translations differ from the real ones. To address these problems, we propose to generate pseudo data using the MT model with constrained beam search (CBSQE). CBSQE preserves the reference parts with high MT probabilities as correct translations, while the rest parts as the wrong ones for MT generation. Therefore, CBSQE can reduce the false negative labels caused by synonyms. Overall, beam search will prefer a more real hypothesis with a higher MT generation likelihood. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CBSQE outperforms strong baselines in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Analyses further show the superiority of CBSQE. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe.

We present IMTLab, an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation (IMT) system platform that enables researchers to quickly build IMT systems with state-of-the-art models, perform an end-to-end evaluation, and diagnose the weakness of systems. IMTLab treats the whole interactive translation process as a task-oriented dialogue with a human-in-the-loop setting, in which human interventions can be explicitly incorporated to produce high-quality, error-free translations. To this end, a general communication interface is designed to support the flexible IMT architectures and user policies. Based on the proposed design, we construct a simulated and real interactive environment to achieve end-to-end evaluation and leverage the framework to systematically evaluate previous IMT systems. Our simulated and manual experiments show that the prefix-constrained decoding approach still gains the lowest editing cost in the end-to-end evaluation, while BiTIIMT achieves comparable editing cost with a better interactive experience.

We introduce the submissions of the NJUNLP team to the WMT 2023 Quality Estimation (QE) shared task. Our team submitted predictions for the English-German language pair on all two sub-tasks: (i) sentence- and word-level quality prediction; and (ii) fine-grained error span detection. This year, we further explore pseudo data methods for QE based on NJUQE framework (https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe). We generate pseudo MQM data using parallel data from the WMT translation task. We pre-train the XLMR large model on pseudo QE data, then fine-tune it on real QE data. At both stages, we jointly learn sentence-level scores and word-level tags. Empirically, we conduct experiments to find the key hyper-parameters that improve the performance. Technically, we propose a simple method that covert the word-level outputs to fine-grained error span results. Overall, our models achieved the best results in English-German for both word-level and fine-grained error span detection sub-tasks by a considerable margin.

Interactive neural machine translation (INMT) is able to guarantee high-quality translations by taking human interactions into account. Existing IMT systems relying on lexical constrained decoding (LCD) enable humans to translate in a flexible translation order beyond the left-to-right. However, they typically suffer from two significant limitations in translation efficiency and quality due to the reliance on LCD. In this work, we propose a novel BiTIIMT system, Bilingual Text-Infilling for Interactive Neural Machine Translation. The key idea to BiTIIMT is Bilingual Text-infilling (BiTI) which aims to fill missing segments in a manually revised translation for a given source sentence. We propose a simple yet effective solution by casting this task as a sequence-to-sequence task. In this way, our system performs decoding without explicit constraints and makes full use of revised words for better translation prediction. Experiment results show that BiTiIMT performs significantly better and faster than state-of-the-art LCD-based IMT on three translation tasks.

Recently, parallel text generation has received widespread attention due to its success in generation efficiency. Although many advanced techniques are proposed to improve its generation quality, they still need the help of an autoregressive model for training to overcome the one-to-many multi-modal phenomenon in the dataset, limiting their applications. In this paper, we propose GLAT, which employs the discrete latent variables to capture word categorical information and invoke an advanced curriculum learning technique, alleviating the multi-modality problem. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines without the help of an autoregressive model, which further broadens the application scenarios of the parallel decoding paradigm.

As one of the challenging NLP tasks, designing math word problem (MWP) solvers has attracted increasing research attention for the past few years. In previous work, models designed by taking into account the properties of the binary tree structure of mathematical expressions at the output side have achieved better performance. However, the expressions corresponding to a MWP are often diverse (e.g., n₁+n₂ × n₃-n₄, n₃× n₂-n₄+n₁, etc.), and so are the corresponding binary trees, which creates difficulties in model learning due to the non-deterministic output space. In this paper, we propose the Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver (SUMC-Solver), which applies a tree with any M branches (M-tree) to unify the output structures. To learn the M-tree, we use a mapping to convert the M-tree into the M-tree codes, where codes store the information of the paths from tree root to leaf nodes and the information of leaf nodes themselves, and then devise a Sequence-to-Code (seq2code) model to generate the codes. Experimental results on the widely used MAWPS and Math23K datasets have demonstrated that SUMC-Solver not only outperforms several state-of-the-art models under similar experimental settings but also performs much better under low-resource conditions.

This paper does not aim at introducing a novel model for document-level neural machine translation. Instead, we head back to the original Transformer model and hope to answer the following question: Is the capacity of current models strong enough for document-level translation? Interestingly, we observe that the original Transformer with appropriate training techniques can achieve strong results for document translation, even with a length of 2000 words. We evaluate this model and several recent approaches on nine document-level datasets and two sentence-level datasets across six languages. Experiments show that document-level Transformer models outperforms sentence-level ones and many previous methods in a comprehensive set of metrics, including BLEU, four lexical indices, three newly proposed assistant linguistic indicators, and human evaluation.

Complaining is a speech act that expresses a negative inconsistency between reality and human’s expectations. While prior studies mostly focus on identifying the existence or the type of complaints, in this work, we present the first study in computational linguistics of measuring the intensity of complaints from text. Analyzing complaints from such perspective is particularly useful, as complaints of certain degrees may cause severe consequences for companies or organizations. We first collect 3,103 posts about complaints in education domain from Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform. These posts are then annotated with complaints intensity scores using Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) method. We show that complaints intensity can be accurately estimated by computational models with best mean square error achieving 0.11. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive linguistic analysis around complaints, including the connections between complaints and sentiment, and a cross-lingual comparison for complaints expressions used by Chinese and English speakers. We finally show that our complaints intensity scores can be incorporated for better estimating the popularity of posts on social media.

In recent years, vision and language pre-training (VLP) models have advanced the state-of-the-art results in a variety of cross-modal downstream tasks. Aligning cross-modal semantics is claimed to be one of the essential capabilities of VLP models. However, it still remains unclear about the inner working mechanism of alignment in VLP models. In this paper, we propose a new probing method that is based on image captioning to first empirically study the cross-modal semantics alignment of VLP models. Our probing method is built upon the fact that given an image-caption pair, the VLP models will give a score, indicating how well two modalities are aligned; maximizing such scores will generate sentences that VLP models believe are of good alignment. Analyzing these sentences thus will reveal in what way different modalities are aligned and how well these alignments are in VLP models. We apply our probing method to five popular VLP models, including UNITER, ROSITA, ViLBERT, CLIP, and LXMERT, and provide a comprehensive analysis of the generated captions guided by these models. Our results show that VLP models (1) focus more on just aligning objects with visual words, while neglecting global semantics; (2) prefer fixed sentence patterns, thus ignoring more important textual information including fluency and grammar; and (3) deem the captions with more visual words are better aligned with images. These findings indicate that VLP models still have weaknesses in cross-modal semantics alignment and we hope this work will draw researchers’ attention to such problems when designing a new VLP model.

Previous research for adapting a general neural machine translation (NMT) model into a specific domain usually neglects the diversity in translation within the same domain, which is a core problem for domain adaptation in real-world scenarios. One representative of such challenging scenarios is to deploy a translation system for a conference with a specific topic, e.g., global warming or coronavirus, where there are usually extremely less resources due to the limited schedule. To motivate wider investigation in such a scenario, we present a real-world fine-grained domain adaptation task in machine translation (FGraDA). The FGraDA dataset consists of Chinese-English translation task for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. Each sub-domain is equipped with a development set and test set for evaluation purposes. To be closer to reality, FGraDA does not employ any in-domain bilingual training data but provides bilingual dictionaries and wiki knowledge base, which can be easier obtained within a short time. We benchmark the fine-grained domain adaptation task and present in-depth analyses showing that there are still challenging problems to further improve the performance with heterogeneous resources.

This paper presents submissions of the NJUNLP team in WMT 2022Quality Estimation shared task 1, where the goal is to predict the sentence-level and word-level quality for target machine translations. Our system explores pseudo data and multi-task learning. We propose several novel methods to generate pseudo data for different annotations using the conditional masked language model and the neural machine translation model. The proposed methods control the decoding process to generate more real pseudo translations. We pre-train the XLMR-large model with pseudo data and then fine-tune this model with real data both in the way of multi-task learning. We jointly learn sentence-level scores (with regression and rank tasks) and word-level tags (with a sequence tagging task). Our system obtains competitive results on different language pairs and ranks first place on both sentence- and word-level sub-tasks of the English-German language pair.

Multi-class unknown intent detection has made remarkable progress recently. However, it has a strong assumption that each utterance has only one intent, which does not conform to reality because utterances often have multiple intents. In this paper, we propose a more desirable task, multi-label unknown intent detection, to detect whether the utterance contains the unknown intent, in which each utterance may contain multiple intents. In this task, the unique utterances simultaneously containing known and unknown intents make existing multi-class methods easy to fail. To address this issue, we propose an intuitive and effective method to recognize whether All Intents contained in the utterance are Known (AIK). Our high-level idea is to predict the utterance’s intent number, then check whether the utterance contains the same number of known intents. If the number of known intents is less than the number of intents, it implies that the utterance also contains unknown intents. We benchmark AIK over existing methods, and empirical results suggest that our method obtains state-of-the-art performances. For example, on the MultiWOZ 2.3 dataset, AIK significantly reduces the FPR95 by 12.25% compared to the best baseline.

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multi-head attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple masking method: HeadMask, in two specific ways. Experiments show that translation improvements are achieved on multiple language pairs. Subsequent empirical analyses also support our assumption and confirm the effectiveness of the method.

Target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification (TMSC) is a new subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis, which aims to determine the sentiment polarity of the opinion target mentioned in a (sentence, image) pair. Recently, dominant works employ the attention mechanism to capture the corresponding visual representations of the opinion target, and then aggregate them as evidence to make sentiment predictions. However, they still suffer from two problems: (1) The granularity of the opinion target in two modalities is inconsistent, which causes visual attention sometimes fail to capture the corresponding visual representations of the target; (2) Even though it is captured, there are still significant differences between the visual representations expressing the same mood, which brings great difficulty to sentiment prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Knowledge-enhanced Framework (KEF) in this paper, which can successfully exploit adjective-noun pairs extracted from the image to improve the visual attention capability and sentiment prediction capability of the TMSC task. Extensive experimental results show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art works on two public datasets.

kNN-MT, recently proposed by Khandelwal et al. (2020a), successfully combines pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to improve the translation accuracy. However, the traditional kNN algorithm used in kNN-MT simply retrieves a same number of nearest neighbors for each target token, which may cause prediction errors when the retrieved neighbors include noises. In this paper, we propose Adaptive kNN-MT to dynamically determine the number of k for each target token. We achieve this by introducing a light-weight Meta-k Network, which can be efficiently trained with only a few training samples. On four benchmark machine translation datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method is able to effectively filter out the noises in retrieval results and significantly outperforms the vanilla kNN-MT model. Even more noteworthy is that the Meta-k Network learned on one domain could be directly applied to other domains and obtain consistent improvements, illustrating the generality of our method. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zhengxxn/adaptive-knn-mt.

Subword segmentation algorithms have been a de facto choice when building neural machine translation systems. However, most of them need to learn a segmentation model based on some heuristics, which may produce sub-optimal segmentation. This can be problematic in some scenarios when the target language has rich morphological changes or there is not enough data for learning compact composition rules. Translating at fully character level has the potential to alleviate the issue, but empirical performances of character-based models has not been fully explored. In this paper, we present an in-depth comparison between character-based and subword-based NMT systems under three settings: translating to typologically diverse languages, training with low resource, and adapting to unseen domains. Experiment results show strong competitiveness of character-based models. Further analyses show that compared to subword-based models, character-based models are better at handling morphological phenomena, generating rare and unknown words, and more suitable for transferring to unseen domains.

Non-autoregressive Transformer is a promising text generation model. However, current non-autoregressive models still fall behind their autoregressive counterparts in translation quality. We attribute this accuracy gap to the lack of dependency modeling among decoder inputs. In this paper, we propose CNAT, which learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables into the non-autoregressive decoding. The interaction among these categorical codes remedies the missing dependencies and improves the model capacity. Experiment results show that our model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks than several strong baselines.

Recently, kNN-MT (Khandelwal et al., 2020) has shown the promising capability of directly incorporating the pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with domain-specific token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to achieve domain adaptation without retraining. Despite being conceptually attractive, it heavily relies on high-quality in-domain parallel corpora, limiting its capability on unsupervised domain adaptation, where in-domain parallel corpora are scarce or nonexistent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences in the target language to construct an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. To this end, we first introduce an autoencoder task based on the target language, and then insert lightweight adapters into the original NMT model to map the token-level representation of this task to the ideal representation of the translation task. Experiments on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly improves the translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data, while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zhengxxn/UDA-KNN.

Large-scale multi-label text classification (LMTC) tasks often face long-tailed label distributions, where many labels have few or even no training instances. Although current methods can exploit prior knowledge to handle these few/zero-shot labels, they neglect the meta-knowledge contained in the dataset that can guide models to learn with few samples. In this paper, for the first time, this problem is addressed from a meta-learning perspective. However, the simple extension of meta-learning approaches to multi-label classification is sub-optimal for LMTC tasks due to long-tailed label distribution and coexisting of few- and zero-shot scenarios. We propose a meta-learning approach named META-LMTC. Specifically, it constructs more faithful and more diverse tasks according to well-designed sampling strategies and directly incorporates the objective of adapting to new low-resource tasks into the meta-learning phase. Extensive experiments show that META-LMTC achieves state-of-the-art performance against strong baselines and can still enhance powerful BERTlike models.

This paper describes our system of the sentence-level and word-level Quality Estimation Shared Task of WMT20. Our system is based on the QE Brain, and we simply enhance it by injecting noise at the target side. And to obtain the deep bi-directional information, we use a masked language model at the target side instead of two single directional decoders. Meanwhile, we try to use the extra QE data from the WMT17 and WMT19 to improve our system’s performance. Finally, we ensemble the features or the results from different models to get our best results. Our system finished fifth in the end at sentence-level on both EN-ZH and EN-DE language pairs.

Recent proposed approaches have made promising progress in dialogue state tracking (DST). However, in multi-domain scenarios, ellipsis and reference are frequently adopted by users to express values that have been mentioned by slots from other domains. To handle these phenomena, we propose a Dialogue State Tracking with Slot Connections (DST-SC) model to explicitly consider slot correlations across different domains. Given a target slot, the slot connecting mechanism in DST-SC can infer its source slot and copy the source slot value directly, thus significantly reducing the difficulty of learning and reasoning. Experimental results verify the benefits of explicit slot connection modeling, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets.

Definition generation, which aims to automatically generate dictionary definitions for words, has recently been proposed to assist the construction of dictionaries and help people understand unfamiliar texts. However, previous works hardly consider explicitly modeling the “components” of definitions, leading to under-specific generation results. In this paper, we propose ESD, namely Explicit Semantic Decomposition for definition Generation, which explicitly decomposes the meaning of words into semantic components, and models them with discrete latent variables for definition generation. Experimental results show that achieves top results on WordNet and Oxford benchmarks, outperforming strong previous baselines.

Neural machine translation systems tend to fail on less decent inputs despite its significant efficacy, which may significantly harm the credibility of these systems—fathoming how and when neural-based systems fail in such cases is critical for industrial maintenance. Instead of collecting and analyzing bad cases using limited handcrafted error features, here we investigate this issue by generating adversarial examples via a new paradigm based on reinforcement learning. Our paradigm could expose pitfalls for a given performance metric, e.g., BLEU, and could target any given neural machine translation architecture. We conduct experiments of adversarial attacks on two mainstream neural machine translation architectures, RNN-search, and Transformer. The results show that our method efficiently produces stable attacks with meaning-preserving adversarial examples. We also present a qualitative and quantitative analysis for the preference pattern of the attack, demonstrating its capability of pitfall exposure.

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are widely used in natural language generation due to the regularization of the latent space. However, generating sentences from the continuous latent space does not explicitly model the syntactic information. In this paper, we propose to generate sentences from disentangled syntactic and semantic spaces. Our proposed method explicitly models syntactic information in the VAE’s latent space by using the linearized tree sequence, leading to better performance of language generation. Additionally, the advantage of sampling in the disentangled syntactic and semantic latent spaces enables us to perform novel applications, such as the unsupervised paraphrase generation and syntax transfer generation. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves similar or better performance in various tasks, compared with state-of-the-art related work.

Relation detection is a core step in many natural language process applications including knowledge base question answering. Previous efforts show that single-fact questions could be answered with high accuracy. However, one critical problem is that current approaches only get high accuracy for questions whose relations have been seen in the training data. But for unseen relations, the performance will drop rapidly. The main reason for this problem is that the representations for unseen relations are missing. In this paper, we propose a simple mapping method, named representation adapter, to learn the representation mapping for both seen and unseen relations based on previously learned relation embedding. We employ the adversarial objective and the reconstruction objective to improve the mapping performance. We re-organize the popular SimpleQuestion dataset to reveal and evaluate the problem of detecting unseen relations. Experiments show that our method can greatly improve the performance of unseen relations while the performance for those seen part is kept comparable to the state-of-the-art.

Current predominant neural machine translation (NMT) models often have a deep structure with large amounts of parameters, making these models hard to train and easily suffering from over-fitting. A common practice is to utilize a validation set to evaluate the training process and select the best checkpoint. Average and ensemble techniques on checkpoints can lead to further performance improvement. However, as these methods do not affect the training process, the system performance is restricted to the checkpoints generated in original training procedure. In contrast, we propose an online knowledge distillation method. Our method on-the-fly generates a teacher model from checkpoints, guiding the training process to obtain better performance. Experiments on several datasets and language pairs show steady improvement over a strong self-attention-based baseline system. We also provide analysis on data-limited setting against over-fitting. Furthermore, our method leads to an improvement in a machine reading experiment as well.

Opinion target extraction and opinion words extraction are two fundamental subtasks in Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Recently, many methods have made progress on these two tasks. However, few works aim at extracting opinion targets and opinion words as pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel sequence labeling subtask for ABSA named TOWE (Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction), which aims at extracting the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target. A target-fused sequence labeling neural network model is designed to perform this task. The opinion target information is well encoded into context by an Inward-Outward LSTM. Then left and right contexts of the opinion target and the global context are combined to find the corresponding opinion words. We build four datasets for TOWE based on several popular ABSA benchmarks from laptop and restaurant reviews. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the other compared methods significantly. We believe that our work may not only be helpful for downstream sentiment analysis task, but can also be used for pair-wise opinion summarization.

Distant supervision has obtained great progress on relation classification task. However, it still suffers from noisy labeling problem. Different from previous works that underutilize noisy data which inherently characterize the property of classification, in this paper, we propose RCEND, a novel framework to enhance Relation Classification by Exploiting Noisy Data. First, an instance discriminator with reinforcement learning is designed to split the noisy data into correctly labeled data and incorrectly labeled data. Second, we learn a robust relation classifier in semi-supervised learning way, whereby the correctly and incorrectly labeled data are treated as labeled and unlabeled data respectively. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Previous studies have shown that neural machine translation (NMT) models can benefit from explicitly modeling translated () and untranslated () source contents as recurrent states (CITATION). However, this less interpretable recurrent process hinders its power to model the dynamic updating of and contents during decoding. In this paper, we propose to model the dynamic principles by explicitly separating source words into groups of translated and untranslated contents through parts-to-wholes assignment. The assignment is learned through a novel variant of routing-by-agreement mechanism (CITATION), namely Guided Dynamic Routing, where the translating status at each decoding step guides the routing process to assign each source word to its associated group (i.e., translated or untranslated content) represented by a capsule, enabling translation to be made from holistic context. Experiments show that our approach achieves substantial improvements over both Rnmt and Transformer by producing more adequate translations. Extensive analysis demonstrates that our method is highly interpretable, which is able to recognize the translated and untranslated contents as expected.

In sequence labeling, previous domain adaptation methods focus on the adaptation from the source domain to the entire target domain without considering the diversity of individual target domain samples, which may lead to negative transfer results for certain samples. Besides, an important characteristic of sequence labeling tasks is that different elements within a given sample may also have diverse domain relevance, which requires further consideration. To take the multi-level domain relevance discrepancy into account, in this paper, we propose a fine-grained knowledge fusion model with the domain relevance modeling scheme to control the balance between learning from the target domain data and learning from the source domain model. Experiments on three sequence labeling tasks show that our fine-grained knowledge fusion model outperforms strong baselines and other state-of-the-art sequence labeling domain adaptation methods.

Natural language sentences, being hierarchical, can be represented at different levels of granularity, like words, subwords, or characters. But most neural machine translation systems require the sentence to be represented as a sequence at a single level of granularity. It can be difficult to determine which granularity is better for a particular translation task. In this paper, we improve the model by incorporating multiple levels of granularity. Specifically, we propose (1) an encoder with character attention which augments the (sub)word-level representation with character-level information; (2) a decoder with multiple attentions that enable the representations from different levels of granularity to control the translation cooperatively. Experiments on three translation tasks demonstrate that our proposed models outperform the standard word-based model, the subword-based model, and a strong character-based model.

Existing neural machine translation systems do not explicitly model what has been translated and what has not during the decoding phase. To address this problem, we propose a novel mechanism that separates the source information into two parts: translated Past contents and untranslated Future contents, which are modeled by two additional recurrent layers. The Past and Future contents are fed to both the attention model and the decoder states, which provides Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems with the knowledge of translated and untranslated contents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance in Chinese-English, German-English, and English-German translation tasks. Specifically, the proposed model outperforms the conventional coverage model in terms of both the translation quality and the alignment error rate.

Pairwise ranking methods are the most widely used discriminative training approaches for structure prediction problems in natural language processing (NLP). Decomposing the problem of ranking hypotheses into pairwise comparisons enables simple and efficient solutions. However, neglecting the global ordering of the hypothesis list may hinder learning. We propose a listwise learning framework for structure prediction problems such as machine translation. Our framework directly models the entire translation list’s ordering to learn parameters which may better fit the given listwise samples. Furthermore, we propose top-rank enhanced loss functions, which are more sensitive to ranking errors at higher positions. Experiments on a large-scale Chinese-English translation task show that both our listwise learning framework and top-rank enhanced listwise losses lead to significant improvements in translation quality.

In the encoder-decoder architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), the hidden states of the recurrent structures in the encoder and decoder carry the crucial information about the sentence. These vectors are generated by parameters which are updated by back-propagation of translation errors through time. We argue that propagating errors through the end-to-end recurrent structures are not a direct way of control the hidden vectors. In this paper, we propose to use word predictions as a mechanism for direct supervision. More specifically, we require these vectors to be able to predict the vocabulary in target sentence. Our simple mechanism ensures better representations in the encoder and decoder without using any extra data or annotation. It is also helpful in reducing the target side vocabulary and improving the decoding efficiency. Experiments on Chinese-English machine translation task show an average BLEU improvement by 4.53, respectively.

Neural parsers have benefited from automatically labeled data via dependency-context word embeddings. We investigate training character embeddings on a word-based context in a similar way, showing that the simple method improves state-of-the-art neural word segmentation models significantly, beating tri-training baselines for leveraging auto-segmented data.

Most neural machine translation (NMT) models are based on the sequential encoder-decoder framework, which makes no use of syntactic information. In this paper, we improve this model by explicitly incorporating source-side syntactic trees. More specifically, we propose (1) a bidirectional tree encoder which learns both sequential and tree structured representations; (2) a tree-coverage model that lets the attention depend on the source-side syntax. Experiments on Chinese-English translation demonstrate that our proposed models outperform the sequential attentional model as well as a stronger baseline with a bottom-up tree encoder and word coverage.

In typical neural machine translation (NMT), the decoder generates a sentence word by word, packing all linguistic granularities in the same time-scale of RNN. In this paper, we propose a new type of decoder for NMT, which splits the decode state into two parts and updates them in two different time-scales. Specifically, we first predict a chunk time-scale state for phrasal modeling, on top of which multiple word time-scale states are generated. In this way, the target sentence is translated hierarchically from chunks to words, with information in different granularities being leveraged. Experiments show that our proposed model significantly improves the translation performance over the state-of-the-art NMT model.

Greedy transition-based parsers are appealing for their very fast speed, with reasonably high accuracies. In this paper, we build a fast shift-reduce neural constituent parser by using a neural network to make local decisions. One challenge to the parsing speed is the large hidden and output layer sizes caused by the number of constituent labels and branching options. We speed up the parser by using a hierarchical output layer, inspired by the hierarchical log-bilinear neural language model. In standard WSJ experiments, the neural parser achieves an almost 2.4 time speed up (320 sen/sec) compared to a non-hierarchical baseline without significant accuracy loss (89.06 vs 89.13 F-score).