Next-token prediction serves as the dominant component in current neural language models.During the training phase, the model employs teacher forcing, which predicts tokens based on all preceding ground truth tokens.However, this approach has been found to create shortcuts, utilizing the revealed prefix to spuriously fit future tokens, potentially compromising the accuracy of the next-token predictor.In this paper, we introduce Semformer, a novel method of training a Transformer language model that explicitly models the semantic planning of response.Specifically, we incorporate a sequence of planning tokens into the prefix, guiding the planning token representations to predict the latent semantic representations of the response, which are induced by an autoencoder.In a minimal planning task (i.e., graph path-finding), our model exhibits near-perfect performance and effectively mitigates shortcut learning, a feat that standard training methods and baseline models have been unable to accomplish.Furthermore, we pretrain Semformer from scratch with 125M parameters, demonstrating its efficacy through measures of perplexity, in-context learning, and fine-tuning on summarization tasks.

Recent advances have made non-autoregressive (NAT) translation comparable to autoregressive methods (AT). However, their evaluation using BLEU has been shown to weakly correlate with human annotations. Limited research compares non-autoregressive translation and autoregressive translation comprehensively, leaving uncertainty about the true proximity of NAT to AT. To address this gap, we systematically evaluate four representative NAT methods across various dimensions, including human evaluation. Our empirical results demonstrate that despite narrowing the performance gap, state-of-the-art NAT still underperforms AT under more reliable evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we discover that explicitly modeling dependencies is crucial for generating natural language and generalizing to out-of-distribution sequences.

Contemporary translation engines based on the encoder-decoder framework have made significant strides in development.However, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has disrupted their position by presenting the potential for achieving superior translation quality.To uncover the circumstances in which LLMs excel and explore how their strengths can be harnessed to enhance translation quality,we first conduct a comprehensive analysis to assess the strengths and limitations of various commercial NMT systems and MT-oriented LLMs. Our findings indicate that neither NMT nor MT-oriented LLMs alone can effectively address all the translation issues, but MT-oriented LLMs show promise as a complementary solution to NMT systems.Building upon these insights, we propose Cooperative Decoding (CoDec), which treats NMT systems as a pretranslation model and MT-oriented LLMs as a supplemental solution to handle complex scenarios beyond the capability of NMT alone.Experimental results on the WMT22 test sets and a newly collected test set WebCrawl demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CoDec, highlighting its potential as a robust solution for combining NMT systems with MT-oriented LLMs in the field of machine translation.

This paper explores the application of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) in text generation, focusing on overcoming challenges like posterior collapse and the limitations of simplistic prior distributions. We investigate a transition from VAE to text autoencoders (AE), which model a compact latent space and preserves the capability of the language model itself. Our method involves layer-wise latent vectors regularized by orthogonal constraints to encourage distinct semantic spaces. In particular, we estimate an empirical prior online from the learned latent vectors to support sampling during generation like VAE. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the autoencoders generate higher quality and more diverse text than the VAE-based Transformer baselines, offering an effective alternative for generative language modeling.

The fine-tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) for machine translation has recently received considerable attention, marking a shift towards data-centric research from traditional neural machine translation. However, the area of data collection for instruction fine-tuning in machine translation remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we present LexMatcher, a simple yet effective method for data curation,the design of which is driven by the coverage of senses found in bilingual dictionaries. The construction process comprises data retrieval from an existing corpus and data augmentation that supplements the infrequent senses of polysemous words. Utilizing LLaMA2 as our base model, our method outperforms the established baselines on the WMT2022 test sets and also exhibits remarkable performance in tasks related to word sense disambiguation and specialized terminology translation. Our method is also applicable to other pre-trained models, and complements the method of continual pre-training using monolingual data, demonstrating the effectiveness of LexMatcher in enhancing LLM-based machine translation.

Existing neural models have difficulty generalizing to unseen combinations of seen components. To achieve compositional generalization, models are required to consistently interpret (sub)expressions across contexts. Without modifying model architectures, we improve the capability of Transformer on compositional generalization through consistency regularization training, which promotes representation consistency across samples and prediction consistency for a single sample. Experimental results on semantic parsing and machine translation benchmarks empirically demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our method. In addition, we find that the prediction consistency scores on in-distribution validation sets can be an alternative for evaluating models during training, when commonly-used metrics are not informative.

Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typologyfrom the source language or when pre-training data is limited in size. In this paper, we propose XLM-P, a method that contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. Our space-efficient and model-agnostic XLM-P approach enables (1) lightweight modeling of language-invariant and language-specific knowledge across languages, and (2) easy integration with other multilingual pre-training methods. On the tasks of XTREME, which include text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval, both base- and large-size language models pre-trained with our proposed method exhibit consistent performance improvement. Furthermore, it provides substantial advantages for low-resource languages in unsupervised sentence retrieval and for target languages that differ greatly from the source language in cross-lingual transfer.

Most existing text generation models follow the sequence-to-sequence paradigm. Generative Grammar suggests that humans generate natural language texts by learning language grammar. We propose a syntax-guided generation schema, which generates the sequence guided by a constituency parse tree in a top-down direction. The decoding process can be decomposed into two parts: (1) predicting the infilling texts for each constituent in the lexicalized syntax context given the source sentence; (2) mapping and expanding each constituent to construct the next-level syntax context. Accordingly, we propose a structural beam search method to find possible syntax structures hierarchically. Experiments on paraphrase generation and machine translation show that the proposed method outperforms autoregressive baselines, while also demonstrating effectiveness in terms of interpretability, controllability, and diversity.

Despite low latency, non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) suffers severe performance deterioration due to the naive independence assumption. This assumption is further strengthened by cross-entropy loss, which encourages a strict match between the hypothesis and the reference token by token. To alleviate this issue, we propose multi-granularity optimization for NAT, which collects model behaviours on translation segments of various granularities and integrates feedback for backpropagation. Experiments on four WMT benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline models trained with cross-entropy loss, and achieves the best performance on WMT’16 En⇔Ro and highly competitive results on WMT’14 En⇔De for fully non-autoregressive translation.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has obtained significant performance improvement over the recent years. However, NMT models still face various challenges including fragility and lack of style flexibility. Moreover, current methods for instance-level constraints are limited in that they are either constraint-specific or model-specific. To this end, we propose prompt-driven neural machine translation to incorporate prompts for enhancing translation control and enriching flexibility. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both prompt responding and translation quality. Through human evaluation, we further show the flexibility of prompt control and the efficiency in human-in-the-loop translation.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus are typically fine-tuned on task-specific downstream datasets, which have produced state-of-the-art results on various NLP tasks. However, the data discrepancy issue in domain and scale makes fine-tuning fail to efficiently capture task-specific patterns, especially in low data regime. To address this issue, we propose Task-guided Disentangled Tuning (TDT) for PLMs, which enhances the generalization of representations by disentangling task-relevant signals from the entangled representations. For a given task, we introduce a learnable confidence model to detect indicative guidance from context, and further propose a disentangled regularization to mitigate the over-reliance problem. Experimental results on GLUE and CLUE benchmarks show that TDT gives consistently better results than fine-tuning with different PLMs, and extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/lemon0830/TDT.

We present DualNER, a simple and effective framework to make full use of both annotated source language corpus and unlabeled target language text for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER). In particular, we combine two complementary learning paradigms of NER, i.e., sequence labeling and span prediction, into a unified multi-task framework. After obtaining a sufficient NER model trained on the source data, we further train it on the target data in a dual-teaching manner, in which the pseudo-labels for one task are constructed from the prediction of the other task. Moreover, based on the span prediction, an entity-aware regularization is proposed to enhance the intrinsic cross-lingual alignment between the same entities in different languages. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our DualNER.

Contrastive learning has become a new paradigm for unsupervised sentence embeddings.Previous studies focus on instance-wise contrastive learning, attempting to construct positive pairs with textual data augmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrastive learning method with Prompt-derived Virtual semantic Prototypes (ConPVP). Specifically, with the help of prompts, we construct virtual semantic prototypes to each instance, and derive negative prototypes by using the negative form of the prompts.Using a prototypical contrastive loss, we enforce the anchor sentence embedding to be close to its corresponding semantic prototypes, and far apart from the negative prototypes as well as the prototypes of other sentences.Extensive experimental results on semantic textual similarity, transfer, and clustering tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to strong baselines.Code is available at https://github.com/lemon0830/promptCSE.

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks. However, they have recently been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the translation of atoms (e.g., words) and their semantic composition (e.g., modification) from seen compounds (e.g., phrases), and thus suffering from significantly weakened translation performance on unseen compounds during inference. We address this issue by introducing categorization to the source contextualized representations. The main idea is to enhance generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting, which is achieved by finding prototypes of token representations over the training set and integrating their embeddings into the source encoding. Experiments on a dedicated MT dataset (i.e., CoGnition) show that our method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24% error reduction. In addition, our conceptually simple method gives consistently better results than the Transformer baseline on a range of general MT datasets.

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks such as WMT. However, there still exist significant issues such as robustness, domain generalization, etc. In this paper, we study NMT models from the perspective of compositional generalization by building a benchmark dataset, CoGnition, consisting of 216k clean and consistent sentence pairs. We quantitatively analyze effects of various factors using compound translation error rate, then demonstrate that the NMT model fails badly on compositional generalization, although it performs remarkably well under traditional metrics.

Recent research questions the importance of the dot-product self-attention in Transformer models and shows that most attention heads learn simple positional patterns. In this paper, we push further in this research line and propose a novel substitute mechanism for self-attention: Recurrent AtteNtion (RAN) . RAN directly learns attention weights without any token-to-token interaction and further improves their capacity by layer-to-layer interaction. Across an extensive set of experiments on 10 machine translation tasks, we find that RAN models are competitive and outperform their Transformer counterpart in certain scenarios, with fewer parameters and inference time. Particularly, when apply RAN to the decoder of Transformer, there brings consistent improvements by about +0.5 BLEU on 6 translation tasks and +1.0 BLEU on Turkish-English translation task. In addition, we conduct extensive analysis on the attention weights of RAN to confirm their reasonableness. Our RAN is a promising alternative to build more effective and efficient NMT models.

Multi-modal neural machine translation (NMT) aims to translate source sentences into a target language paired with images. However, dominant multi-modal NMT models do not fully exploit fine-grained semantic correspondences between semantic units of different modalities, which have potential to refine multi-modal representation learning. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel graph-based multi-modal fusion encoder for NMT. Specifically, we first represent the input sentence and image using a unified multi-modal graph, which captures various semantic relationships between multi-modal semantic units (words and visual objects). We then stack multiple graph-based multi-modal fusion layers that iteratively perform semantic interactions to learn node representations. Finally, these representations provide an attention-based context vector for the decoder. We evaluate our proposed encoder on the Multi30K datasets. Experimental results and in-depth analysis show the superiority of our multi-modal NMT model.

Previous studies on the domain adaptation for neural machine translation (NMT) mainly focus on the one-pass transferring out-of-domain translation knowledge to in-domain NMT model. In this paper, we argue that such a strategy fails to fully extract the domain-shared translation knowledge, and repeatedly utilizing corpora of different domains can lead to better distillation of domain-shared translation knowledge. To this end, we propose an iterative dual domain adaptation framework for NMT. Specifically, we first pretrain in-domain and out-of-domain NMT models using their own training corpora respectively, and then iteratively perform bidirectional translation knowledge transfer (from in-domain to out-of-domain and then vice versa) based on knowledge distillation until the in-domain NMT model convergences. Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to the scenario of multiple out-of-domain training corpora, where the above-mentioned transfer is performed sequentially between the in-domain and each out-of-domain NMT models in the ascending order of their domain similarities. Empirical results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

With great practical value, the study of Multi-domain Neural Machine Translation (NMT) mainly focuses on using mixed-domain parallel sentences to construct a unified model that allows translation to switch between different domains. Intuitively, words in a sentence are related to its domain to varying degrees, so that they will exert disparate impacts on the multi-domain NMT modeling. Based on this intuition, in this paper, we devote to distinguishing and exploiting word-level domain contexts for multi-domain NMT. To this end, we jointly model NMT with monolingual attention-based domain classification tasks and improve NMT as follows: 1) Based on the sentence representations produced by a domain classifier and an adversarial domain classifier, we generate two gating vectors and use them to construct domain-specific and domain-shared annotations, for later translation predictions via different attention models; 2) We utilize the attention weights derived from target-side domain classifier to adjust the weights of target words in the training objective, enabling domain-related words to have greater impacts during model training. Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-French multi-domain translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Source codes of this paper are available on Github https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/WDCNMT.