Xiaodong Lin


2023

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CKDST: Comprehensively and Effectively Distill Knowledge from Machine Translation to End-to-End Speech Translation
Yikun Lei | Zhengshan Xue | Xiaohu Zhao | Haoran Sun | Shaolin Zhu | Xiaodong Lin | Deyi Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Distilling knowledge from a high-resource task, e.g., machine translation, is an effective way to alleviate the data scarcity problem of end-to-end speech translation. However, previous works simply use the classical knowledge distillation that does not allow for adequate transfer of knowledge from machine translation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive knowledge distillation framework for speech translation, CKDST, which is capable of comprehensively and effectively distilling knowledge from machine translation to speech translation from two perspectives: cross-modal contrastive representation distillation and simultaneous decoupled knowledge distillation. In the former, we leverage a contrastive learning objective to optmize the mutual information between speech and text representations for representation distillation in the encoder. In the later, we decouple the non-target class knowledge from target class knowledge for logits distillation in the decoder. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark dataset demonstrate that our CKDST substantially improves the baseline by 1.2 BLEU on average in all translation directions, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art end-to-end and cascaded speech translation models.

2022

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GammaE: Gamma Embeddings for Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs
Dong Yang | Peijun Qing | Yang Li | Haonan Lu | Xiaodong Lin
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Embedding knowledge graphs (KGs) for multi-hop logical reasoning is a challenging problem due to massive and complicated structures in many KGs. Recently, many promising works projected entities and queries into a geometric space to efficiently find answers. However, it remains challenging to model the negation and union operator. The negation operator has no strict boundaries, which generates overlapped embeddings and leads to obtaining ambiguous answers. An additional limitation is that the union operator is non-closure, which undermines the model to handle a series of union operators. To address these problems, we propose a novel probabilistic embedding model, namely Gamma Embeddings (GammaE), for encoding entities and queries to answer different types of FOL queries on KGs. We utilize the linear property and strong boundary support of the Gamma distribution to capture more features of entities and queries, which dramatically reduces model uncertainty. Furthermore, GammaE implements the Gamma mixture method to design the closed union operator. The performance of GammaE is validated on three large logical query datasets. Experimental results show that GammaE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on public benchmarks.

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Manifold’s English-Chinese System at WMT22 General MT Task
Chang Jin | Tingxun Shi | Zhengshan Xue | Xiaodong Lin
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

Manifold’s English-Chinese System at WMT22 is an ensemble of 4 models trained by different configurations with scheduled sampling-based fine-tuning. The four configurations are DeepBig (XenC), DeepLarger (XenC), DeepBig-TalkingHeads (XenC) and DeepBig (LaBSE). Concretely, DeepBig extends Transformer-Big to 24 encoder layers. DeepLarger has 20 encoder layers and its feed-forward network (FFN) dimension is 8192. TalkingHeads applies the talking-heads trick. For XenC configs, we selected monolingual and parallel data that is similar to the past newstest datasets using XenC, and for LaBSE, we cleaned the officially provided parallel data using LaBSE pretrained model. According to the officially released autonomic metrics leaderboard, our final constrained system ranked 1st among all others when evaluated by bleu-all, chrf-all and COMET-B, 2nd by COMET-A.