Nikhil Prabhu


2020

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Making a Point: Pointer-Generator Transformers for Disjoint Vocabularies
Nikhil Prabhu | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop

Explicit mechanisms for copying have improved the performance of neural models for sequence-to-sequence tasks in the low-resource setting. However, they rely on an overlap between source and target vocabularies. Here, we propose a model that does not: a pointer-generator transformer for disjoint vocabularies. We apply our model to a low-resource version of the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) task, and show that it outperforms a standard transformer by an average of 5.1 WER over 15 languages. While our model does not beat the the best performing baseline, we demonstrate that it provides complementary information to it: an oracle that combines the best outputs of the two models improves over the strongest baseline by 7.7 WER on average in the low-resource setting. In the high-resource setting, our model performs comparably to a standard transformer.

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Frustratingly Easy Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion
Nikhil Prabhu | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

In this paper, we describe two CU-Boulder submissions to the SIGMORPHON 2020 Task 1 on multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P). Inspired by the high performance of a standard transformer model (Vaswani et al., 2017) on the task, we improve over this approach by adding two modifications: (i) Instead of training exclusively on G2P, we additionally create examples for the opposite direction, phoneme-to-grapheme conversion (P2G). We then perform multi-task training on both tasks. (ii) We produce ensembles of our models via majority voting. Our approaches, though being conceptually simple, result in systems that place 6th and 8th amongst 23 submitted systems, and obtain the best results out of all systems on Lithuanian and Modern Greek, respectively.