Tong Xu


2023

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The MineTrans Systems for IWSLT 2023 Offline Speech Translation and Speech-to-Speech Translation Tasks
Yichao Du | Guo Zhengsheng | Jinchuan Tian | Zhirui Zhang | Xing Wang | Jianwei Yu | Zhaopeng Tu | Tong Xu | Enhong Chen
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)

This paper presents the extscMineTrans English-to-Chinese speech translation systems developed for two challenge tracks of IWSLT 2023, i.e., Offline Speech Translation (S2T) and Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2ST). For the S2T track, extscMineTrans employs a practical cascaded system to explore the limits of translation performance in both constrained and unconstrained settings, where the whole system consists of automatic speech recognition (ASR), punctuation recognition (PC), and machine translation (MT) modules. We also investigate the effectiveness of multiple ASR architectures and explore two MT strategies: supervised in-domain fine-tuning and prompt-guided translation using a large language model. For the S2ST track, we explore a speech-to-unit (S2U) framework to build an end-to-end S2ST system. This system encodes the target speech as discrete units via our trained HuBERT. Then it leverages the standard sequence-to-sequence model to directly learn the mapping between source speech and discrete units without any auxiliary recognition tasks (i.e., ASR and MT tasks). Various efforts are made to improve the extscMineTrans’s performance, such as acoustic model pre-training on large-scale data, data filtering, data augmentation, speech segmentation, knowledge distillation, consistency training, model ensembles, etc.

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Are You Copying My Model? Protecting the Copyright of Large Language Models for EaaS via Backdoor Watermark
Wenjun Peng | Jingwei Yi | Fangzhao Wu | Shangxi Wu | Bin Bin Zhu | Lingjuan Lyu | Binxing Jiao | Tong Xu | Guangzhong Sun | Xing Xie
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in both text understanding and generation. Companies have begun to offer Embedding as a Service (EaaS) based on these LLMs, which can benefit various natural language processing (NLP) tasks for customers. However, previous studies have shown that EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which can cause significant losses for the owners of LLMs, as training these models is extremely expensive. To protect the copyright of LLMs for EaaS, we propose an Embedding Watermark method called {pasted macro ‘METHOD’} that implants backdoors on embeddings. Our method selects a group of moderate-frequency words from a general text corpus to form a trigger set, then selects a target embedding as the watermark, and inserts it into the embeddings of texts containing trigger words as the backdoor. The weight of insertion is proportional to the number of trigger words included in the text. This allows the watermark backdoor to be effectively transferred to EaaS-stealer’s model for copyright verification while minimizing the adverse impact on the original embeddings’ utility. Our extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method can effectively protect the copyright of EaaS models without compromising service quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/yjw1029/EmbMarker.

2022

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Non-Parametric Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Speech Translation
Yichao Du | Weizhi Wang | Zhirui Zhang | Boxing Chen | Tong Xu | Jun Xie | Enhong Chen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The end-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST) has received increasing attention due to the potential of its less error propagation, lower latency and fewer parameters. However, the effectiveness of neural-based approaches to this task is severely limited by the available training corpus, especially for domain adaptation where in-domain triplet data is scarce or nonexistent. In this paper, we propose a novel non-parametric method that leverages in-domain text translation corpus to achieve domain adaptation for E2E-ST systems. To this end, we first incorporate an additional encoder into the pre-trained E2E-ST model to realize text translation modeling, based on which the decoder’s output representations for text and speech translation tasks are unified by reducing the correspondent representation mismatch in available triplet training data. During domain adaptation, a k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) classifier is introduced to produce the final translation distribution using the external datastore built by the domain-specific text translation corpus, while the universal output representation is adopted to perform a similarity search. Experiments on the Europarl-ST benchmark demonstrate that when in-domain text translation data is involved only, our proposed approach significantly improves baseline by 12.82 BLEU on average in all translation directions, even outperforming the strong in-domain fine-tuning strategy.

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VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction
Dan Li | Yang Yang | Hongyin Tang | Jiahao Liu | Qifan Wang | Jingang Wang | Tong Xu | Wei Wu | Enhong Chen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Text matching is a fundamental research problem in natural language understanding. Interaction-based approaches treat the text pair as a single sequence and encode it through cross encoders, while representation-based models encode the text pair independently with siamese or dual encoders. Interaction-based models require dense computations and thus are impractical in real-world applications. Representation-based models have become the mainstream paradigm for efficient text matching. However, these models suffer from severe performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. To remedy this, we propose a Virtual InteRacTion mechanism (VIRT) for improving representation-based text matching while maintaining its efficiency. In particular, we introduce an interactive knowledge distillation module that is only applied during training. It enables deep interaction between texts by effectively transferring knowledge from the interaction-based model. A light interaction strategy is designed to fully leverage the learned interactive knowledge. Experimental results on six text matching benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over several state-of-the-art representation-based models. We further show that VIRT can be integrated into existing methods as plugins to lift their performances.

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Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach
Miao Chen | Xinjiang Lu | Tong Xu | Yanyan Li | Zhou Jingbo | Dejing Dou | Hui Xiong
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Although remarkable progress on the neural table-to-text methods has been made, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of these models due to the limited source tables. Large-scale pretrained language models sound like a promising solution to tackle such issues. However, how to effectively bridge the gap between the structured table and the text input by fully leveraging table information to fuel the pretrained model is still not well explored. Besides, another challenge of integrating the deliberation mechanism into the text-to-text pretrained model for solving the table-to-text task remains seldom studied. In this paper, to implement the table-to-text generation with pretrained language model, we propose a table structure understanding and text deliberating approach, namely TASD. To be specific, we devise a three-layered multi-head attention network to realize the table-structureaware text generation model with the help of the pretrained language model. Furthermore, a multi-pass decoder framework is adopted to enhance the capability of polishing generated text for table descriptions. The empirical studies, as well as human evaluation, on two public datasets, validate that our approach can generate faithful and fluent descriptive texts for different types of tables.

2020

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BERT-MK: Integrating Graph Contextualized Knowledge into Pre-trained Language Models
Bin He | Di Zhou | Jinghui Xiao | Xin Jiang | Qun Liu | Nicholas Jing Yuan | Tong Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Complex node interactions are common in knowledge graphs (KGs), and these interactions can be considered as contextualized knowledge exists in the topological structure of KGs. Traditional knowledge representation learning (KRL) methods usually treat a single triple as a training unit, neglecting the usage of graph contextualized knowledge. To utilize these unexploited graph-level knowledge, we propose an approach to model subgraphs in a medical KG. Then, the learned knowledge is integrated with a pre-trained language model to do the knowledge generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several medical NLP tasks, and the improvement above MedERNIE indicates that graph contextualized knowledge is beneficial.

2019

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Capsule Network with Interactive Attention for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification
Chunning Du | Haifeng Sun | Jingyu Wang | Qi Qi | Jianxin Liao | Tong Xu | Ming Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Aspect-level sentiment classification is a crucial task for sentiment analysis, which aims to identify the sentiment polarities of specific targets in their context. The main challenge comes from multi-aspect sentences, which express multiple sentiment polarities towards different targets, resulting in overlapped feature representation. However, most existing neural models tend to utilize static pooling operation or attention mechanism to identify sentimental words, which therefore insufficient for dealing with overlapped features. To solve this problem, we propose to utilize capsule network to construct vector-based feature representation and cluster features by an EM routing algorithm. Furthermore, interactive attention mechanism is introduced in the capsule routing procedure to model the semantic relationship between aspect terms and context. The iterative routing also enables encoding sentence from a global perspective. Experimental results on three datasets show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.