Yutong Shen


2022

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Data Augmentation for Low-resource Word Segmentation and POS Tagging of Ancient Chinese Texts
Yutong Shen | Jiahuan Li | Shujian Huang | Yi Zhou | Xiaopeng Xie | Qinxin Zhao
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

Automatic word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging of ancient books can help relevant researchers to study ancient texts. In recent years, pre-trained language models have achieved significant improvements on text processing tasks. SikuRoberta is a pre-trained language model specially designed for automatic analysis of ancient Chinese texts. Although SikuRoberta significantly boosts performance on WSG and POS tasks on ancient Chinese texts, the lack of labeled data still limits the performance of the model. In this paper, to alleviate the problem of insufficient training data, We define hybrid tags to integrate WSG and POS tasks and design Roberta-CRF model to predict tags for each Chinese characters. Moreover, We generate synthetic labeled data based on the LSTM language model. To further mine knowledge in SikuRoberta, we generate the synthetic unlabeled data based on the Masked LM. Experiments show that the performance of the model is improved with the synthetic data, indicating that the effectiveness of the data augmentation methods.

2021

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When is Char Better Than Subword: A Systematic Study of Segmentation Algorithms for Neural Machine Translation
Jiahuan Li | Yutong Shen | Shujian Huang | Xinyu Dai | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Subword segmentation algorithms have been a de facto choice when building neural machine translation systems. However, most of them need to learn a segmentation model based on some heuristics, which may produce sub-optimal segmentation. This can be problematic in some scenarios when the target language has rich morphological changes or there is not enough data for learning compact composition rules. Translating at fully character level has the potential to alleviate the issue, but empirical performances of character-based models has not been fully explored. In this paper, we present an in-depth comparison between character-based and subword-based NMT systems under three settings: translating to typologically diverse languages, training with low resource, and adapting to unseen domains. Experiment results show strong competitiveness of character-based models. Further analyses show that compared to subword-based models, character-based models are better at handling morphological phenomena, generating rare and unknown words, and more suitable for transferring to unseen domains.