Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) enhances neural machine translation (NMT) models but demands substantial computational resources. Successive halving, a multi-fidelity HPO method, mitigates this by early stopping unpromising models and allocating more resources to promising ones. This method is particularly relevant for NMT and large language models, which are computationally intensive. However, successive halving relies on a noisy estimation of model performance and assumes that early performance is highly correlated with final performance. We introduce a table lookup benchmark dataset to study the reliability of successive halving and propose best practices for its application in NMT and large language models.

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Retrieval-augmented language models have exhibited promising performance across various areas of natural language processing (NLP), including fact-critical tasks. However, due to the black-box nature of advanced large language models (LLMs) and the non-retrieval-oriented supervision signal of specific tasks, the training of retrieval model faces significant challenges under the setting of black-box LLM. We propose an approach leveraging Fine-grained Feedback with Reinforcement Retrieval (FFRR) to enhance fact-checking on news claims by using black-box LLM. FFRR adopts a two-level strategy to gather fine-grained feedback from the LLM, which serves as a reward for optimizing the retrieval policy, by rating the retrieved documents based on the non-retrieval ground truth of the task. We evaluate our model on two public datasets for real-world news claim verification, and the results demonstrate that FFRR achieves significant improvements over strong LLM-enabled and non-LLM baselines.

Hyperparameter optimization is an important but often overlooked process in the research of deep learning technologies. To obtain a good model, one must carefully tune hyperparameters that determine the architecture and training algorithm. Insufficient tuning may result in poor results, while inequitable tuning may lead to exaggerated differences between models. We present a hyperparameter optimization toolkit for neural machine translation (NMT) to help researchers focus their time on the creative rather than the mundane. The toolkit is implemented as a wrapper on top of the open-source Sockeye NMT software. Using the Asynchronous Successive Halving Algorithm (ASHA), we demonstrate that it is possible to discover near-optimal models under a computational budget with little effort. Code: https://github.com/kevinduh/sockeye-recipes3Video demo: https://cs.jhu.edu/kevinduh/j/demo.mp4

The majority of existing work on sign language recognition encodes signed videos without explicitly acknowledging the phonological attributes of signs. Given that handshape is a vital parameter in sign languages, we explore the potential of handshape-aware sign language recognition. We augment the PHOENIX14T dataset with gloss-level handshape labels, resulting in the new PHOENIX14T-HS dataset. Two unique methods are proposed for handshape-inclusive sign language recognition: a single-encoder network and a dual-encoder network, complemented by a training strategy that simultaneously optimizes both the CTC loss and frame-level cross-entropy loss. The proposed methodology consistently outperforms the baseline performance. The dataset and code can be accessed at: www.anonymous.com.

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is an emerging field that has potential to impact how we build models in NLP. As an umbrella term that includes topics like hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search, AutoML has recently become mainstream at major conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR. What does this mean to NLP? Currently, models are often built in an ad hoc process: we might borrow default hyperparameters from previous work and try a few variant architectures, but it is never guaranteed that final trained model is optimal. Automation can introduce rigor in this model-building process. This tutorial will summarize the main AutoML techniques and illustrate how to apply them to improve the NLP model-building process.

While large language models have made remarkable advancements in natural language generation, their potential in machine translation, especially when fine-tuned, remains under-explored. In our study, we conduct comprehensive experiments, evaluating 15 publicly available language models on machine translation tasks. We compare the performance across three methodologies: zero-shot prompting, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning. Central to our approach is the use of QLoRA, an efficient fine-tuning method. On French-English, QLoRA fine-tuning outperforms both few-shot learning and models trained from scratch. This superiority is highlighted in both sentence-level and document-level translations, with a significant BLEU score improvement of 28.93 over the prompting method. Impressively, with QLoRA, the enhanced performance is achieved by fine-tuning a mere 0.77% of the model’s parameters.

Hyperparameter tuning is important for achieving high accuracy in deep learning models, yet little interpretability work has focused on hyperparameters. We propose to use the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), a glassbox method, as a post-hoc analysis tool for understanding how hyperparameters influence model accuracy. We present a case study on Transformer models in machine translation to illustrate the kinds of insights that may be gleaned, and perform extensive analysis to test the robustness of EBM under different data conditions.

A cascaded Sign Language Translation system first maps sign videos to gloss annotations and then translates glosses into a spoken languages. This work focuses on the second-stage gloss translation component, which is challenging due to the scarcity of publicly available parallel data. We approach gloss translation as a low-resource machine translation task and investigate two popular methods for improving translation quality: hyperparameter search and backtranslation. We discuss the potentials and pitfalls of these methods based on experiments on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset.

Hyperparameter selection is a crucial part of building neural machine translation (NMT) systems across both academia and industry. Fine-grained adjustments to a model’s architecture or training recipe can mean the difference between a positive and negative research result or between a state-of-the-art and underperforming system. While recent literature has proposed methods for automatic hyperparameter optimization (HPO), there has been limited work on applying these methods to neural machine translation (NMT), due in part to the high costs associated with experiments that train large numbers of model variants. To facilitate research in this space, we introduce a lookup-based approach that uses a library of pre-trained models for fast, low cost HPO experimentation. Our contributions include (1) the release of a large collection of trained NMT models covering a wide range of hyperparameters, (2) the proposal of targeted metrics for evaluating HPO methods on NMT, and (3) a reproducible benchmark of several HPO methods against our model library, including novel graph-based and multiobjective methods.

Text simplification is an important branch of natural language processing. At present, methods used to evaluate the semantic retention of text simplification are mostly based on string matching. We propose the SEMA (text Simplification Evaluation Measure through Semantic Alignment), which is based on semantic alignment. Semantic alignments include complete alignment, partial alignment and hyponymy alignment. Our experiments show that the evaluation results of SEMA have a high consistency with human evaluation for the simplified corpus of Chinese and English news texts.

We introduce a curriculum learning approach to adapt generic neural machine translation models to a specific domain. Samples are grouped by their similarities to the domain of interest and each group is fed to the training algorithm with a particular schedule. This approach is simple to implement on top of any neural framework or architecture, and consistently outperforms both unadapted and adapted baselines in experiments with two distinct domains and two language pairs.

Bilingual lexicons are valuable resources used by professional human translators. While these resources can be easily incorporated in statistical machine translation, it is unclear how to best do so in the neural framework. In this work, we present the HABLex dataset, designed to test methods for bilingual lexicon integration into neural machine translation. Our data consists of human generated alignments of words and phrases in machine translation test sets in three language pairs (Russian-English, Chinese-English, and Korean-English), resulting in clean bilingual lexicons which are well matched to the reference. We also present two simple baselines - constrained decoding and continued training - and an improvement to continued training to address overfitting.

This paper describes the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Kyoto University submissions to the Speech Translation evaluation campaign at IWSLT2018. Our end-to-end speech translation systems are based on ESPnet and implements an attention-based encoder-decoder model. As comparison, we also experiment with a pipeline system that uses independent neural network systems for both the speech transcription and text translation components. We find that a transfer learning approach that bootstraps the end-to-end speech translation system with speech transcription system’s parameters is important for training on small datasets.

To extract structured representations of newsworthy events from Twitter, unsupervised models typically assume that tweets involving the same named entities and expressed using similar words are likely to belong to the same event. Hence, they group tweets into clusters based on the co-occurrence patterns of named entities and topical keywords. However, there are two main limitations. First, they require the number of events to be known beforehand, which is not realistic in practical applications. Second, they don’t recognise that the same named entity might be referred to by multiple mentions and tweets using different mentions would be wrongly assigned to different events. To overcome these limitations, we propose a non-parametric Bayesian mixture model with word embeddings for event extraction, in which the number of events can be inferred automatically and the issue of lexical variations for the same named entity can be dealt with properly. Our model has been evaluated on three datasets with sizes ranging between 2,499 and over 60 million tweets. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the baseline approach on all datasets by 5-8% in F-measure.