Dialogue systems can leverage large pre-trained language models and knowledge to generate fluent and informative responses. However, these models are still prone to produce hallucinated responses not supported by the input source, which greatly hinders their application. The heterogeneity between external knowledge and dialogue context challenges representation learning and source integration, which further contributes to unfaithfulness. To handle this challenge and generate more faithful responses, this paper presents RHO (ρ) utilizing the representations of linked entities and relation predicates from a knowledge graph (KG). We propose (1) local knowledge grounding to combine textual embeddings with the corresponding KG embeddings; and (2) global knowledge grounding to equip RHO with multi-hop reasoning abilities via the attention mechanism. In addition, we devise a response re-ranking technique based on walks over KG sub-graphs for better conversational reasoning. Experimental results on OpenDialKG (Moon et al., 2019) show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both automatic and human evaluation by a large margin, especially in hallucination reduction (17.54% in FeQA (Durmus et al., 2020)).

Augmenting pretrained language models (LMs) with a vision encoder (e.g., Flamingo) has obtained state-of-the-art results in image-to-text generation. However, these models store all the knowledge within their parameters, thus often requiring enormous model parameters to model the abundant visual concepts and very rich text descriptions. Additionally, they are inefficient in incorporating new data, requiring a computational-expensive fine-tuning process. In this work, we introduce a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model, Re-ViLM, built upon the Flamingo, that supports retrieving the relevant knowledge from the external database for zero and in-context few-shot image-to-text generations. By storing certain knowledge explicitly in the external database, our approach reduces the number of model parameters and can easily accommodate new data during evaluation by simply updating the database. We also construct an interleaved image and text data that facilitates in-context few-shot learning capabilities.We demonstrate that Re-ViLM significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks, especially for zero-shot and few-shot generation in out-of-domain settings with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods.

Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall we pretrain large autoregressive LMs with retrieval? To answer it, we perform a comprehensive study on a scalable pre-trained retrieval-augmented LM (i.e., RETRO) compared with standard GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT incorporated at fine-tuning or inference stages. We first provide the recipe to reproduce RETRO up to 9.5B parameters while retrieving a text corpus with 330B tokens. Based on that, we have the following novel findings: i) RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with much less degeneration (i.e., repetition), moderately higher factual accuracy, and slightly lower toxicity with a nontoxic retrieval database. ii) On the LM Evaluation Harness benchmark, RETRO largely outperforms GPT on knowledge-intensive tasks, but is on par with GPT on other tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a simple variant of the model, RETRO++, which largely improves open-domain QA results of original RETRO (e.g., EM score +8.6 on Natural Question) and significantly outperforms retrieval-augmented GPT across different model sizes. Our findings highlight the promising direction of pretraining autoregressive LMs with retrieval as future foundation models. We release our implementation at: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM/tree/main/tools/retro.

Automatic Program translation has enormous application value and hence has been attracting significant interest from AI researchers. However, we observe that current program translation models still make elementary syntax errors, particularly, when the target language does not have syntax elements in the source language. Metrics like BLUE, CodeBLUE and computation accuracy may not expose these issues. In this paper we introduce a new metrics for programming language translation and these metrics address these basic syntax errors. We develop a novel active defects probing suite called Syntactic Unit Tests (SUT) which includes a highly interpretable evaluation harness for accuracy and test scoring. Experiments have shown that even powerful models like ChatGPT still make mistakes on these basic unit tests. Specifically, compared to previous program translation task evaluation dataset, its pass rate on our unit tests has decreased by 26.15%. Further our evaluation harness reveal syntactic element errors in which these models exhibit deficiencies.

Large-scale vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models are prone to hallucinate non-existent visual objects when generating text based on visual information. In this paper, we systematically study the object hallucination problem from three aspects. First, we examine recent state-of-the-art VLP models, showing that they still hallucinate frequently and models achieving better scores on standard metrics (e.g., CIDEr) could be more unfaithful. Second, we investigate how different types of image encoding in VLP influence hallucination, including region-based, grid-based, and patch-based. Surprisingly, we find that patch-based features perform the best and smaller patch resolution yields a non-trivial reduction in object hallucination. Third, we decouple various VLP objectives and demonstrate that token-level image-text alignment and controlled generation are crucial to reducing hallucination. Based on that, we propose a simple yet effective VLP loss named ObjMLM to further mitigate object hallucination. Results show that it reduces object hallucination by up to 17.4% when tested on two benchmarks (COCO Caption for in-domain and NoCaps for out-of-domain evaluation).

To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. The existing methods tackle the knowledge grounding challenge by retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augmenting the dialogues with explicit extra information. Despite their success, however, the existing works have drawbacks on the inference efficiency. This paper proposes KnowExpert, an end-to-end framework to bypass the explicit retrieval process and inject knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters and adapt to the knowledge-grounded dialogue task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this challenge without retrieval in this task under an open-domain chit-chat scenario. The experimental results show that KnowExpert performs comparably with some retrieval-based baselines while being time-efficient in inference, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Self-supervised pre-training methods have brought remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of text, image, and speech. Recent developments in genomics has also adopted these pre-training methods for genome understanding. However, they focus only on understanding haploid sequences, which hinders their applicability towards understanding genetic variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which is crucial for genome-wide association study. In this paper, we introduce SNP2Vec, a scalable self-supervised pre-training approach for understanding SNP. We apply SNP2Vec to perform long-sequence genomics modeling, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on predicting Alzheimer’s disease risk in a Chinese cohort. Our approach significantly outperforms existing polygenic risk score methods and all other baselines, including the model that is trained entirely with haploid sequences.

Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems typically use finetuned versions of a pretrained language model (LM) and large-scale knowledge bases. These models typically fail to generalize on topics outside of the knowledge base, and require maintaining separate potentially large checkpoints each time finetuning is needed. In this paper, we aim to address these limitations by leveraging the inherent knowledge stored in the pretrained LM as well as its powerful generation ability. We propose a multi-stage prompting approach to generate knowledgeable responses from a single pretrained LM. We first prompt the LM to generate knowledge based on the dialogue context. Then, we further prompt it to generate responses based on the dialogue context and the previously generated knowledge. Results show that our knowledge generator outperforms the state-of-the-art retrieval-based model by 5.8% when combining knowledge relevance and correctness. In addition, our multi-stage prompting outperforms the finetuning-based dialogue model in terms of response knowledgeability and engagement by up to 10% and 5%, respectively. Furthermore, we scale our model up to 530 billion parameters and demonstrate that larger LMs improve the generation correctness score by up to 10%, and response relevance, knowledgeability and engagement by up to 10%. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM.

Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation. Despite the spontaneous nature of code-switching in conversational spoken language, most existing works collect code-switching data from read speech instead of spontaneous speech. ASCEND (A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset) is a high-quality Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus built on spontaneous multi-turn conversational dialogue sources collected in Hong Kong. We report ASCEND’s design and procedure for collecting the speech data, including annotations. ASCEND consists of 10.62 hours of clean speech, collected from 23 bilingual speakers of Chinese and English. Furthermore, we conduct baseline experiments using pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models, achieving a best performance of 22.69% character error rate and 27.05% mixed error rate.

Cross-domain sentiment analysis aims to predict the sentiment of texts in the target domain using the model trained on the source domain to cope with the scarcity of labeled data. Previous studies are mostly cross-entropy-based methods for the task, which suffer from instability and poor generalization. In this paper, we explore contrastive learning on the cross-domain sentiment analysis task. We propose a modified contrastive objective with in-batch negative samples so that the sentence representations from the same class can be pushed close while those from the different classes become further apart in the latent space. Experiments on two widely used datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both cross-domain and multi-domain sentiment analysis tasks. Meanwhile, visualizations demonstrate the effectiveness of transferring knowledge learned in the source domain to the target domain and the adversarial test verifies the robustness of our model.

The stance detection task aims to classify the stance toward given documents and topics. Since the topics can be implicit in documents and unseen in training data for zero-shot settings, we propose to boost the transferability of the stance detection model by using sentiment and commonsense knowledge, which are seldom considered in previous studies. Our model includes a graph autoencoder module to obtain commonsense knowledge and a stance detection module with sentiment and commonsense. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the zero-shot and few-shot benchmark dataset–VAST. Meanwhile, ablation studies prove the significance of each module in our model. Analysis of the relations between sentiment, common sense, and stance indicates the effectiveness of sentiment and common sense.

Existing works in multimodal affective computing tasks, such as emotion recognition and personality recognition, generally adopt a two-phase pipeline by first extracting feature representations for each single modality with hand crafted algorithms, and then performing end-to-end learning with extracted features. However, the extracted features are fixed and cannot be further fine-tuned on different target tasks, and manually finding feature extracting algorithms does not generalize or scale well to different tasks, which can lead to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we develop a fully end-to-end model that connects the two phases and optimizes them jointly. In addition, we restructure the current datasets to enable the fully end-to-end training. Furthermore, to reduce the computational overhead brought by the end-to-end model, we introduce a sparse cross-modal attention mechanism for the feature extraction. Experimental results show that our fully end-to-end model significantly surpasses the current state-of-the-art models based on the two-phase pipeline. Moreover, by adding the sparse cross-modal attention, our model can maintain the performance with around half less computation in the feature extraction part of the model.

State-of-the-art abstractive summarization models generally rely on extensive labeled data, which lowers their generalization ability on domains where such data are not available. In this paper, we present a study of domain adaptation for the abstractive summarization task across six diverse target domains in a low-resource setting. Specifically, we investigate the second phase of pre-training on large-scale generative models under three different settings: 1) source domain pre-training; 2) domain-adaptive pre-training; and 3) task-adaptive pre-training. Experiments show that the effectiveness of pre-training is correlated with the similarity between the pre-training data and the target domain task. Moreover, we find that continuing pre-training could lead to the pre-trained model’s catastrophic forgetting, and a learning method with less forgetting can alleviate this issue. Furthermore, results illustrate that a huge gap still exists between the low-resource and high-resource settings, which highlights the need for more advanced domain adaptation methods for the abstractive summarization task.

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained language models (e.g., multilingual BERT) to downstream cross-lingual tasks has shown promising results. However, the fine-tuning process inevitably changes the parameters of the pre-trained model and weakens its cross-lingual ability, which leads to sub-optimal performance. To alleviate this problem, we leverage continual learning to preserve the original cross-lingual ability of the pre-trained model when we fine-tune it to downstream tasks. The experimental result shows that our fine-tuning methods can better preserve the cross-lingual ability of the pre-trained model in a sentence retrieval task. Our methods also achieve better performance than other fine-tuning baselines on the zero-shot cross-lingual part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition tasks.

Task-oriented compositional semantic parsing (TCSP) handles complex nested user queries and serves as an essential component of virtual assistants. Current TCSP models rely on numerous training data to achieve decent performance but fail to generalize to low-resource target languages or domains. In this paper, we present X2Parser, a transferable Cross-lingual and Cross-domain Parser for TCSP. Unlike previous models that learn to generate the hierarchical representations for nested intents and slots, we propose to predict intents and slots separately and cast both prediction tasks into sequence labeling problems. After that, we further propose a fertility-based slot predictor that first learns to detect the number of labels for each token, and then predicts the slot types. Experimental results illustrate that our model can significantly outperform existing strong baselines in cross-lingual and cross-domain settings, and our model can also achieve a good generalization ability on target languages of target domains. Furthermore, we show that our model can reduce the latency by up to 66% compared to the generation-based model.

Multilingual language models have shown decent performance in multilingual and cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. However, the power of these multilingual models in code-switching tasks has not been fully explored. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of multilingual language models to understand their capability and adaptability to the mixed-language setting by considering the inference speed, performance, and number of parameters to measure their practicality. We conduct experiments in three language pairs on named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging and compare them with existing methods, such as using bilingual embeddings and multilingual meta-embeddings. Our findings suggest that pre-trained multilingual models do not necessarily guarantee high-quality representations on code-switching, while using meta-embeddings achieves similar results with significantly fewer parameters.

Information-seeking dialogue systems, including knowledge identification and response generation, aim to respond to users with fluent, coherent, and informative responses based on users’ needs, which. To tackle this challenge, we utilize data augmentation methods and several training techniques with the pre-trained language models to learn a general pattern of the task and thus achieve promising performance. In DialDoc21 competition, our system achieved 74.95 F1 score and 60.74 Exact Match score in subtask 1, and 37.72 SacreBLEU score in subtask 2. Empirical analysis is provided to explain the effectiveness of our approaches.

Multimodal abstractive summarization (MAS) models that summarize videos (vision modality) and their corresponding transcripts (text modality) are able to extract the essential information from massive multimodal data on the Internet. Recently, large-scale generative pre-trained language models (GPLMs) have been shown to be effective in text generation tasks. However, existing MAS models cannot leverage GPLMs’ powerful generation ability. To fill this research gap, we aim to study two research questions: 1) how to inject visual information into GPLMs without hurting their generation ability; and 2) where is the optimal place in GPLMs to inject the visual information? In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method to construct vision guided (VG) GPLMs for the MAS task using attention-based add-on layers to incorporate visual information while maintaining their original text generation ability. Results show that our best model significantly surpasses the prior state-of-the-art model by 5.7 ROUGE-1, 5.3 ROUGE-2, and 5.1 ROUGE-L scores on the How2 dataset, and our vision guidance method contributes 83.6% of the overall improvement. Furthermore, we conduct thorough ablation studies to analyze the effectiveness of various modality fusion methods and fusion locations.

We study Comparative Preference Classification (CPC) which aims at predicting whether a preference comparison exists between two entities in a given sentence and, if so, which entity is preferred over the other. High-quality CPC models can significantly benefit applications such as comparative question answering and review-based recommendation. Among the existing approaches, non-deep learning methods suffer from inferior performances. The state-of-the-art graph neural network-based ED-GAT (Ma et al., 2020) only considers syntactic information while ignoring the critical semantic relations and the sentiments to the compared entities. We propose Sentiment Analysis Enhanced COmparative Network (SAECON) which improves CPC accuracy with a sentiment analyzer that learns sentiments to individual entities via domain adaptive knowledge transfer. Experiments on the CompSent-19 (Panchenko et al., 2019) dataset present a significant improvement on the F1 scores over the best existing CPC approaches.

Personalized dialogue systems are an essential step toward better human-machine interaction. Existing personalized dialogue agents rely on properly designed conversational datasets, which are mostly monolingual (e.g., English), which greatly limits the usage of conversational agents in other languages. In this paper, we propose a multi-lingual extension of Persona-Chat, namely XPersona. Our dataset includes persona conversations in six different languages other than English for evaluating multilingual personalized agents. We experiment with both multilingual and cross-lingual trained baselines and evaluate them against monolingual and translation-pipeline models using both automatic and human evaluation. Experimental results show that the multilingual trained models outperform the translation pipeline and that they are on par with the monolingual models, with the advantage of having a single model across multiple languages. On the other hand, the state-of-the-art cross-lingual trained models achieve inferior performance to the other models, showing that cross-lingual conversation modeling is a challenging task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will accelerate research in multilingual dialogue systems.

Despite the recent achievements made in the multi-modal emotion recognition task, two problems still exist and have not been well investigated: 1) the relationship between different emotion categories are not utilized, which leads to sub-optimal performance; and 2) current models fail to cope well with low-resource emotions, especially for unseen emotions. In this paper, we propose a modality-transferable model with emotion embeddings to tackle the aforementioned issues. We use pre-trained word embeddings to represent emotion categories for textual data. Then, two mapping functions are learned to transfer these embeddings into visual and acoustic spaces. For each modality, the model calculates the representation distance between the input sequence and target emotions and makes predictions based on the distances. By doing so, our model can directly adapt to the unseen emotions in any modality since we have their pre-trained embeddings and modality mapping functions. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on most of the emotion categories. Besides, our model also outperforms existing baselines in the zero-shot and few-shot scenarios for unseen emotions.

Existing models for cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) rely on numerous unlabeled corpus or labeled NER training data in target domains. However, collecting data for low-resource target domains is not only expensive but also time-consuming. Hence, we propose a cross-domain NER model that does not use any external resources. We first introduce a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) by adding a new objective function to detect whether tokens are named entities or not. We then introduce a framework called Mixture of Entity Experts (MoEE) to improve the robustness for zero-resource domain adaptation. Finally, experimental results show that our model outperforms strong unsupervised cross-domain sequence labeling models, and the performance of our model is close to that of the state-of-the-art model which leverages extensive resources.

Nowadays, offensive content in social media has become a serious problem, and automatically detecting offensive language is an essential task. In this paper, we build an offensive language detection system, which combines multi-task learning with BERT-based models. Using a pre-trained language model such as BERT, we can effectively learn the representations for noisy text in social media. Besides, to boost the performance of offensive language detection, we leverage the supervision signals from other related tasks. In the OffensEval-2020 competition, our model achieves 91.51% F1 score in English Sub-task A, which is comparable to the first place (92.23%F1). An empirical analysis is provided to explain the effectiveness of our approaches.

As an essential task in task-oriented dialog systems, slot filling requires extensive training data in a certain domain. However, such data are not always available. Hence, cross-domain slot filling has naturally arisen to cope with this data scarcity problem. In this paper, we propose a Coarse-to-fine approach (Coach) for cross-domain slot filling. Our model first learns the general pattern of slot entities by detecting whether the tokens are slot entities or not. It then predicts the specific types for the slot entities. In addition, we propose a template regularization approach to improve the adaptation robustness by regularizing the representation of utterances based on utterance templates. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in slot filling. Furthermore, our model can also be applied to the cross-domain named entity recognition task, and it achieves better adaptation performance than other existing baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/zliucr/coach.

An increasing number of people in the world today speak a mixed-language as a result of being multilingual. However, building a speech recognition system for code-switching remains difficult due to the availability of limited resources and the expense and significant effort required to collect mixed-language data. We therefore propose a new learning method, meta-transfer learning, to transfer learn on a code-switched speech recognition system in a low-resource setting by judiciously extracting information from high-resource monolingual datasets. Our model learns to recognize individual languages, and transfer them so as to better recognize mixed-language speech by conditioning the optimization on the code-switching data. Based on experimental results, our model outperforms existing baselines on speech recognition and language modeling tasks, and is faster to converge.

Task-oriented dialogue systems are either modularized with separate dialogue state tracking (DST) and management steps or end-to-end trainable. In either case, the knowledge base (KB) plays an essential role in fulfilling user requests. Modularized systems rely on DST to interact with the KB, which is expensive in terms of annotation and inference time. End-to-end systems, instead, use the KB directly as input, but they cannot scale when the KB is larger than a few hundred entries. In this paper, we propose a method to embed the KB, of any size, directly into the model parameters. The resulting model does not require any DST or template responses, nor the KB as input, and it can dynamically update its KB via fine-tuning. We evaluate our solution in five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KB size. Our experiments show that end-to-end models can effectively embed knowledge bases in their parameters and achieve competitive performance in all evaluated datasets.

Despite the promising results of current cross-lingual models for spoken language understanding systems, they still suffer from imperfect cross-lingual representation alignments between the source and target languages, which makes the performance sub-optimal. To cope with this issue, we propose a regularization approach to further align word-level and sentence-level representations across languages without any external resource. First, we regularize the representation of user utterances based on their corresponding labels. Second, we regularize the latent variable model (Liu et al., 2019) by leveraging adversarial training to disentangle the latent variables. Experiments on the cross-lingual spoken language understanding task show that our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, and our model, trained on a few-shot setting with only 3% of the target language training data, achieves comparable performance to the supervised training with all the training data.

This paper describes our system that has been submitted to SemEval-2019 Task 4: Hyperpartisan News Detection. We focus on removing the noise inherent in the hyperpartisanship dataset from both data-level and model-level by leveraging semi-supervised pseudo-labels and the state-of-the-art BERT model. Our model achieves 75.8% accuracy in the final by-article dataset without ensemble learning.

Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented dialogue system to low-resource languages. To tackle this challenge, we first use a set of very few parallel word pairs to refine the aligned cross-lingual word-level representations. We then employ a latent variable model to cope with the variance of similar sentences across different languages, which is induced by imperfect cross-lingual alignments and inherent differences in languages. Finally, the experimental results show that even though we utilize much less external resources, our model achieves better adaptation performance for natural language understanding task (i.e., the intent detection and slot filling) compared to the current state-of-the-art model in the zero-shot scenario.

In countries that speak multiple main languages, mixing up different languages within a conversation is commonly called code-switching. Previous works addressing this challenge mainly focused on word-level aspects such as word embeddings. However, in many cases, languages share common subwords, especially for closely related languages, but also for languages that are seemingly irrelevant. Therefore, we propose Hierarchical Meta-Embeddings (HME) that learn to combine multiple monolingual word-level and subword-level embeddings to create language-agnostic lexical representations. On the task of Named Entity Recognition for English-Spanish code-switching data, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the multilingual settings. We also show that, in cross-lingual settings, our model not only leverages closely related languages, but also learns from languages with different roots. Finally, we show that combining different subunits are crucial for capturing code-switching entities.

With a large number of datasets being released and new techniques being proposed, Question answering (QA) systems have witnessed great breakthroughs in reading comprehension (RC)tasks. However, most existing methods focus on improving in-domain performance, leaving open the research question of how these mod-els and techniques can generalize to out-of-domain and unseen RC tasks. To enhance the generalization ability, we propose a multi-task learning framework that learns the shared representation across different tasks. Our model is built on top of a large pre-trained language model, such as XLNet, and then fine-tuned on multiple RC datasets. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our methods, with an average Exact Match score of 56.59 and an average F1 score of 68.98, which significantly improves the BERT-Large baseline by8.39 and 7.22, respectively

This paper describes CAiRE’s submission to the unsupervised machine translation track of the WMT’19 news shared task from German to Czech. We leverage a phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) model and a pre-trained language model to combine word-level neural machine translation (NMT) and subword-level NMT models without using any parallel data. We propose to solve the morphological richness problem of languages by training byte-pair encoding (BPE) embeddings for German and Czech separately, and they are aligned using MUSE (Conneau et al., 2018). To ensure the fluency and consistency of translations, a rescoring mechanism is proposed that reuses the pre-trained language model to select the translation candidates generated through beam search. Moreover, a series of pre-processing and post-processing approaches are applied to improve the quality of final translations.