This paper presents our approach to the DSTC11 Track 5 selection task, which focuses on retrieving appropriate natural language knowledge sources for task-oriented dialogue. We propose typologically diverse back-translation method with typo noise, which could generate various structured user inquries. Through our noised back translation, we augmented inquiries by combining three different typologies of language sources with five different typo noise injections. Our experiments demonstrate that typological variety and typo noise aids the model in generalizing to diverse user inquiries in dialogue. In the competition, where 14 teams participated, our approach achieved the 5th rank for exact matching metric.

We tackle the problem of self-training networks for NLU in low-resource environment—few labeled data and lots of unlabeled data. The effectiveness of self-training is a result of increasing the amount of training data while training. Yet it becomes less effective in low-resource settings due to unreliable labels predicted by the teacher model on unlabeled data. Rules of grammar, which describe the grammatical structure of data, have been used in NLU for better explainability. We propose to use rules of grammar in self-training as a more reliable pseudo-labeling mechanism, especially when there are few labeled data. We design an effective algorithm that constructs and expands rules of grammar without human involvement. Then we integrate the constructed rules as a pseudo-labeling mechanism into self-training. There are two possible scenarios regarding data distribution: it is unknown or known in prior to training. We empirically demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in three benchmark datasets for both scenarios.

In this paper, we describe the neural machine translation (NMT) system submitted by the Kangwon National University and HYUNDAI (KNU-HYUNDAI) team to the translation tasks of the 6th workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2019). We participated in all tasks of ASPEC and JPC2, which included those of Chinese-Japanese, English-Japanese, and Korean->Japanese. We submitted our transformer-based NMT system with built using the following methods: a) relative positioning method for pairwise relationships between the input elements, b) back-translation and multi-source translation for data augmentation, c) right-to-left (r2l)-reranking model robust against error propagation in autoregressive architectures such as decoders, and d) checkpoint ensemble models, which selected the top three models with the best validation bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) . We have reported the translation results on the two aforementioned tasks. We performed well in both the tasks and were ranked first in terms of the BLEU scores in all the JPC2 subtasks we participated in.