The image-based multimodal automatic speech recognition (ASR) model enhances speech recognition performance by incorporating audio-related image. However, some works suggest that introducing image information to model does not help improving ASR performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach effectively utilizing audio-related image information and set up VHASR, a multimodal speech recognition system that uses vision as hotwords to strengthen the model’s speech recognition capability. Our system utilizes a dual-stream architecture, which firstly transcribes the text on the two streams separately, and then combines the outputs. We evaluate the proposed model on four datasets: Flickr8k, ADE20k, COCO, and OpenImages. The experimental results show that VHASR can effectively utilize key information in images to enhance the model’s speech recognition ability. Its performance not only surpasses unimodal ASR, but also achieves SOTA among existing image-based multimodal ASR.

With the widespread use of language models (LMs) in NLP tasks, researchers have discovered the potential of Chain-of-thought (CoT) to assist LMs in accomplishing complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate steps. However, human thought processes are often non-linear, rather than simply sequential chains of thoughts. Therefore, we propose Graph-of-Thought (GoT) reasoning, which models human thought processes not only as a chain but also as a graph. By representing thought units as nodes and connections between them as edges, our approach captures the non-sequential nature of human thinking and allows for a more realistic modeling of thought processes. GoT adopts a two-stage framework with an additional GoT encoder for thought graph representation and fuses the graph representation with the original input representation through a gated fusion mechanism. We evaluate GoT’s performance on a text-only reasoning task (AQUA-RAT) and a multimodal reasoning task (ScienceQA). Our model achieves significant improvement over the strong CoT baseline on the AQUA-RAT test set and boosts accuracy from 85.19% to 87.59% using the T5-base model over the state-of-the-art Multimodal-CoT on the ScienceQA test set. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zoeyyao27/Graph-of-Thought

The prevalent approach for optimizing pre-trained language models in downstream tasks is fine-tuning. However, it is both time-consuming and memory-inefficient. In response, a more efficient method called Prefix Tuning, which insert learnable vectors into each Transformer layers, has been proposed and proven effective. Recent investigations reveal that prefix tokens carry context-specific information, prompting the hypothesis that enhancing their specialization can improve model performance. To address this, we propose Selective Prefix Tuning (SPT), integrating a selective mechanism inspired by selective self-attention. Additionally, we introduce Selective Loss (SL) to encourage diversity in prefix tokens. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of SPT in sentence and token classification tasks. We contribute insight into understanding the role of prefix in model adaptation.

Benchmark plays a pivotal role in assessing the advancements of large language models (LLMs). While numerous benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs’ capabilities, there is a notable absence of a dedicated benchmark for assessing their musical abilities. To address this gap, we present ZIQI-Eval, a comprehensive and large-scale music benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the music-related capabilities of LLMs.ZIQI-Eval encompasses a wide range of questions, covering 10 major categories and 56 subcategories, resulting in over 14,000 meticulously curated data entries. By leveraging ZIQI-Eval, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation over 16 LLMs to evaluate and analyze LLMs’ performance in the domain of music.Results indicate that all LLMs perform poorly on the ZIQI-Eval benchmark, suggesting significant room for improvement in their musical capabilities.With ZIQI-Eval, we aim to provide a standardized and robust evaluation framework that facilitates a comprehensive assessment of LLMs’ music-related abilities. The dataset is available at GitHub and HuggingFace.

The burgeoning size of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to enhanced capabilities in generating responses, albeit at the expense of increased inference times and elevated resource demands. Existing methods of acceleration, predominantly hinged on knowledge distillation, generally necessitate fine-tuning of considerably large models, such as Llama-7B, posing a challenge for average users. Furthermore, present techniques for expediting inference and reducing costs operate independently. To address these issues, we introduce a novel and intuitive Guidance-based Knowledge Transfer (GKT) framework. This approach leverages a larger LLM as a ”teacher” to create guidance prompts, paired with a smaller ”student” model to finalize responses. Remarkably, GKT requires no fine-tuning and doesn’t necessitate the teacher and student models to have the same vocabulary, allowing for extensive batch generation to accelerate the process while ensuring user customization. GKT can be seamlessly integrated into cloud-edge collaboration architectures, and is versatile enough for plug-and-play application across various models. It excels in both efficiency and affordability, epitomizing a ”cheap and cheerful” solution. GKT achieves a maximum accuracy improvement of 14.18%, along with a 10.72 times speed-up on GSM8K and an accuracy improvement of 14.00 % along with a 7.73 times speed-up in CSQA. When utilizing ChatGPT as teacher model and Llama2-70B as the student model, we can achieve 95.00% of ChatGPT’s performance at 52% of the cost. The results highlight substantial enhancements in accuracy and processing speed on the GSM8K and CSQA datasets, surpassing the performance of using either the student or teacher models in isolation.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent in various domains, their ability to process inputs of any length and maintain a degree of memory becomes essential. However, the one-off input of overly long texts is limited, as studies have shown that when input lengths exceed the LLMs’ pre-trained text length, there is a dramatic decline in text generation capabilities. Moreover, simply extending the length of pre-training texts is impractical due to the difficulty in obtaining long text data and the substantial memory consumption costs this would entail for LLMs. Recent efforts have employed streaming inputs to alleviate the pressure of excessively long text inputs, but this approach can significantly impair the model’s long-term memory capabilities.Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Streaming Infinite Retentive LLM (SirLLM), which allows LLMs to maintain longer memory during infinite-length dialogues without the need for fine-tuning. SirLLM utilizes the Token Entropy metric and a memory decay mechanism to filter key phrases, endowing LLMs with both long-lasting and flexible memory. We designed three distinct tasks and constructed three datasets to measure the effectiveness of SirLLM from various angles: (1) DailyDialog; (2) Grocery Shopping; (3) Rock-Paper-Scissors. Our experimental results robustly demonstrate that SirLLM can achieve stable and significant improvements across different LLMs and tasks, compellingly proving its effectiveness. When having a coversation, “A sir could forget himself,” but SirLLM never does! Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zoeyyao27/SirLLMhttps://github.com/Zoeyyao27/SirLLM

Semantic entity recognition is an important task in the field of visually-rich document understanding. It distinguishes the semantic types of text by analyzing the position relationship between text nodes and the relation between text content. The existing document understanding models mainly focus on entity categories while ignoring the extraction of entity boundaries. We build a novel hypergraph attention document semantic entity recognition framework, HGA, which uses hypergraph attention to focus on entity boundaries and entity categories at the same time. It can conduct a more detailed analysis of the document text representation analyzed by the upstream model and achieves a better performance of semantic information. We apply this method on the basis of GraphLayoutLM to construct a new semantic entity recognition model HGALayoutLM. Our experiment results on FUNSD, CORD, XFUND and SROIE show that our method can effectively improve the performance of semantic entity recognition tasks based on the original model. The results of HGALayoutLM on FUNSD and XFUND reach the new state-of-the-art results.

The chain-of-thought technique has been received well in multi-modal tasks. It is a step-by-step linear reasoning process that adjusts the length of the chain to improve the performance of generated prompts. However, human thought processes are predominantly non-linear, as they encompass multiple aspects simultaneously and employ dynamic adjustment and updating mechanisms. Therefore, we propose a novel Aggregation-Graph-of-Thought (AGoT) mechanism for soft-prompt tuning in multi-modal representation learning. The proposed AGoT models the human thought process not only as a chain but also models each step as a reasoning aggregation graph to cope with the overlooked multiple aspects of thinking in single-step reasoning. This turns the entire reasoning process into prompt aggregation and prompt flow operations. Experiments show that our multi-modal model enhanced with AGoT soft-prompting achieves good results in several tasks such as text-image retrieval, visual question answering, and image recognition. In addition, we demonstrate that it has good domain generalization performance due to better reasoning.

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has been introduced as a unified framework for various Information Extraction (IE) tasks and has achieved widespread success. Despite this, UIE models have limitations. For example, they rely heavily on span boundaries in the data during training, which does not reflect the reality of span annotation challenges. Slight adjustments to positions can also meet requirements. Additionally, UIE models lack attention to the limited span length feature in IE. To address these deficiencies, we propose the Fuzzy Span Universal Information Extraction (FSUIE) framework. Specifically, our contribution consists of two concepts: fuzzy span loss and fuzzy span attention. Our experimental results on a series of main IE tasks show significant improvement compared to the baseline, especially in terms of fast convergence and strong performance with small amounts of data and training epochs. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of FSUIE in different tasks, settings, and scenarios.

Despite the rapid development of neural-based models, syntax still plays a crucial role in modern natural language processing. However, few studies have incorporated syntactic information into ancient Chinese understanding tasks due to the lack of syntactic annotation. This paper explores the role of syntax in ancient Chinese understanding based on the noisy syntax trees from unsupervised derivation and modern Chinese syntax parsers. On top of that, we propose a novel syntax encoding component – confidence-based syntax encoding network (cSEN) to alleviate the side effects from the existing noise caused by unsupervised syntax derivation and the incompatibility between ancient and modern Chinese. Experiments on two typical ancient Chinese understanding tasks, ancient poetry theme classification and ancient-modern Chinese translation, demonstrate that syntactic information can effectively enhance the understanding of ancient Chinese over strong baselines, and that the proposed cSEN plays an important role in noisy scenarios.

Overlapping frequently occurs in paired texts in natural language processing tasks like text editing and semantic similarity evaluation. Better evaluation of the semantic distance between the overlapped sentences benefits the language system’s understanding and guides the generation. Since conventional semantic metrics are based on word representations, they are vulnerable to the disturbance of overlapped components with similar representations. This paper aims to address the issue with a mask-and-predict strategy. We take the words in the longest common sequence (LCS) as neighboring words and use masked language modeling (MLM) from pre-trained language models (PLMs) to predict the distributions in their positions. Our metric, Neighboring Distribution Divergence (NDD), represents the semantic distance by calculating the divergence between distributions in the overlapped parts. Experiments on Semantic Textual Similarity show NDD to be more sensitive to various semantic differences, especially on highly overlapped paired texts. Based on the discovery, we further implement an unsupervised and training-free method for text compression, leading to a significant improvement on the previous perplexity-based method. The high compression rate controlling ability of our method even enables NDD to outperform the supervised state-of-the-art in domain adaption by a huge margin. Further experiments on syntax and semantics analyses verify the awareness of internal sentence structures, indicating the high potential of NDD for further studies.

Researchers are witnessing knowledge-inspired natural language processing shifts the focus from entity-level to event-level, whereas event coreference resolution is one of the core challenges. This paper proposes a novel model for within-document event coreference resolution. On the basis of event but not entity as before, our model learns and integrates multiple representations from both event alone and event pair. For the former, we introduce multiple linguistics-motivated event alone features for more discriminative event representations. For the latter, we consider multiple similarity measures to capture the distinction of event pair. Our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art on the ACE 2005 benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Restricted machine translation incorporates human prior knowledge into translation. It restricts the flexibility of the translation to satisfy the demands of translation in specific scenarios. Existing work typically imposes constraints on beam search decoding. Although this can satisfy the requirements overall, it usually requires a larger beam size and far longer decoding time than unrestricted translation, which limits the concurrent processing ability of the translation model in deployment, and thus its practicality. In this paper, we propose a general training framework that allows a model to simultaneously support both unrestricted and restricted translation by adopting an additional auxiliary training process without constraining the decoding process. This maintains the benefits of restricted translation but greatly reduces the extra time overhead of constrained decoding, thus improving its practicality. The effectiveness of our proposed training framework is demonstrated by experiments on both original (WAT21 En↔Ja) and simulated (WMT14 En→De and En→Fr) restricted translation benchmarks.

Discontinuous constituency parsing is still kept developing for its efficiency and accuracy are far behind its continuous counterparts. Motivated by the observation that a discontinuous constituent tree can be simply transformed into a pseudo-continuous one by artificially reordering words in the sentence, we propose a novel reordering method, thereby construct fast and accurate discontinuous constituency parsing systems working in continuous way. Specifically, we model the relative position changes of words as a list of actions. By parsing and performing this actions, the corresponding pseudo-continuous sequence is derived. Discontinuous parse tree can be further inferred via integrating a high-performance pseudo-continuous constituency parser. Our systems are evaluated on three classical discontinuous constituency treebanks, achieving new state-of-the-art on two treebanks and showing a distinct advantage in speed.

Deep learning has demonstrated performance advantages in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, including neural machine translation (NMT). Transformer NMT models are typically strengthened by deeper encoder layers, but deepening their decoder layers usually results in failure. In this paper, we first identify the cause of the failure of the deep decoder in the Transformer model. Inspired by this discovery, we then propose approaches to improving it, with respect to model structure and model training, to make the deep decoder practical in NMT. Specifically, with respect to model structure, we propose a cross-attention drop mechanism to allow the decoder layers to perform their own different roles, to reduce the difficulty of deep-decoder learning. For model training, we propose a collapse reducing training approach to improve the stability and effectiveness of deep-decoder training. We experimentally evaluated our proposed Transformer NMT model structure modification and novel training methods on several popular machine translation benchmarks. The results showed that deepening the NMT model by increasing the number of decoder layers successfully prevented the deepened decoder from degrading to an unconditional language model. In contrast to prior work on deepening an NMT model on the encoder, our method can deepen the model on both the encoder and decoder at the same time, resulting in a deeper model and improved performance.

As a fundamental natural language processing task and one of core knowledge extraction techniques, named entity recognition (NER) is widely used to extract information from texts for downstream tasks. Nested NER is a branch of NER in which the named entities (NEs) are nested with each other. However, most of the previous studies on nested NER usually apply linear structure to model the nested NEs which are actually accommodated in a hierarchical structure. Thus in order to address this mismatch, this work models the full nested NEs in a sentence as a holistic structure, then we propose a holistic structure parsing algorithm to disclose the entire NEs once for all. Besides, there is no research on applying corpus-level information to NER currently. To make up for the loss of this information, we introduce Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) and other frequency features from corpus-aware statistics for even better performance by holistic modeling from sentence-level to corpus-level. Experiments show that our model yields promising results on widely-used benchmarks which approach or even achieve state-of-the-art. Further empirical studies show that our proposed corpus-aware features can substantially improve NER domain adaptation, which demonstrates the surprising advantage of our proposed corpus-level holistic structure modeling.

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) offers a unified semantic representation for natural language sentences. Thus transformation between AMR and text yields two transition tasks in opposite directions, i.e., Text-to-AMR parsing and AMR-to-Text generation. Existing AMR studies only focus on one-side improvements despite the duality of the two tasks, and their improvements are greatly attributed to the inclusion of large extra training data or complex structure modifications which harm the inference speed. Instead, we propose data-efficient Bidirectional Bayesian learning (BiBL) to facilitate bidirectional information transition by adopting a single-stage multitasking strategy so that the resulting model may enjoy much lighter training at the same time. Evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that our proposed BiBL outperforms strong previous seq2seq refinements without the help of extra data which is indispensable in existing counterpart models. We release the codes of BiBL at: https://github.com/KHAKhazeus/BiBL.

This paper describes our system (Team ID: nictrb) for participating in the WAT’21 restricted machine translation task. In our submitted system, we designed a new training approach for restricted machine translation. By sampling from the translation target, we can solve the problem that ordinary training data does not have a restricted vocabulary. With the further help of constrained decoding in the inference phase, we achieved better results than the baseline, confirming the effectiveness of our solution. In addition, we also tried the vanilla and sparse Transformer as the backbone network of the model, as well as model ensembling, which further improved the final translation performance.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is dedicated to recognizing the semantic predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Previous studies in terms of traditional models have shown syntactic information can make remarkable contributions to SRL performance; however, the necessity of syntactic information was challenged by a few recent neural SRL studies that demonstrate impressive performance without syntactic backbones and suggest that syntax information becomes much less important for neural semantic role labeling, especially when paired with recent deep neural network and large-scale pre-trained language models. Despite this notion, the neural SRL field still lacks a systematic and full investigation on the relevance of syntactic information in SRL, for both dependency and both monolingual and multilingual settings. This paper intends to quantify the importance of syntactic information for neural SRL in the deep learning framework. We introduce three typical SRL frameworks (baselines), sequence-based, tree-based, and graph-based, which are accompanied by two categories of exploiting syntactic information: syntax pruning-based and syntax feature-based. Experiments are conducted on the CoNLL-2005, -2009, and -2012 benchmarks for all languages available, and results show that neural SRL models can still benefit from syntactic information under certain conditions. Furthermore, we show the quantitative significance of syntax to neural SRL models together with a thorough empirical survey using existing models.

In this paper, we describe our MiSS system that participated in the WMT21 news translation task. We mainly participated in the evaluation of the three translation directions of English-Chinese and Japanese-English translation tasks. In the systems submitted, we primarily considered wider networks, deeper networks, relative positional encoding, and dynamic convolutional networks in terms of model structure, while in terms of training, we investigated contrastive learning-reinforced domain adaptation, self-supervised training, and optimization objective switching training methods. According to the final evaluation results, a deeper, wider, and stronger network can improve translation performance in general, yet our data domain adaption method can improve performance even more. In addition, we found that switching to the use of our proposed objective during the finetune phase using relatively small domain-related data can effectively improve the stability of the model’s convergence and achieve better optimal performance.

Machine translation usually relies on parallel corpora to provide parallel signals for training. The advent of unsupervised machine translation has brought machine translation away from this reliance, though performance still lags behind traditional supervised machine translation. In unsupervised machine translation, the model seeks symmetric language similarities as a source of weak parallel signal to achieve translation. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory postulates that grammar is an innate form of knowledge to humans and is governed by universal principles and constraints. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to leverage such shared grammar clues to provide more explicit language parallel signals to enhance the training of unsupervised machine translation models. Through experiments on multiple typical language pairs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task consists of three typical subtasks: aspect term extraction, opinion term extraction, and sentiment polarity classification. These three subtasks are usually performed jointly to save resources and reduce the error propagation in the pipeline. However, most of the existing joint models only focus on the benefits of encoder sharing between subtasks but ignore the difference. Therefore, we propose a joint ABSA model, which not only enjoys the benefits of encoder sharing but also focuses on the difference to improve the effectiveness of the model. In detail, we introduce a dual-encoder design, in which a pair encoder especially focuses on candidate aspect-opinion pair classification, and the original encoder keeps attention on sequence labeling. Empirical results show that our proposed model shows robustness and significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on four benchmark datasets.

In this paper, we present MiSS, an assistant for multi-style simultaneous translation. Our proposed translation system has five key features: highly accurate translation, simultaneous translation, translation for multiple text styles, back-translation for translation quality evaluation, and grammatical error correction. With this system, we aim to provide a complete translation experience for machine translation users. Our design goals are high translation accuracy, real-time translation, flexibility, and measurable translation quality. Compared with the free commercial translation systems commonly used, our translation assistance system regards the machine translation application as a more complete and fully-featured tool for users. By incorporating additional features and giving the user better control over their experience, we improve translation efficiency and performance. Additionally, our assistant system combines machine translation, grammatical error correction, and interactive edits, and uses a crowdsourcing mode to collect more data for further training to improve both the machine translation and grammatical error correction models. A short video demonstrating our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGCo7KtRKd8.

In this paper, we introduced our joint team SJTU-NICT ‘s participation in the WMT 2020 machine translation shared task. In this shared task, we participated in four translation directions of three language pairs: English-Chinese, English-Polish on supervised machine translation track, German-Upper Sorbian on low-resource and unsupervised machine translation tracks. Based on different conditions of language pairs, we have experimented with diverse neural machine translation (NMT) techniques: document-enhanced NMT, XLM pre-trained language model enhanced NMT, bidirectional translation as a pre-training, reference language based UNMT, data-dependent gaussian prior objective, and BT-BLEU collaborative filtering self-training. We also used the TF-IDF algorithm to filter the training set to obtain a domain more similar set with the test set for finetuning. In our submissions, the primary systems won the first place on English to Chinese, Polish to English, and German to Upper Sorbian translation directions.

Semantic role labeling is primarily used to identify predicates, arguments, and their semantic relationships. Due to the limitations of modeling methods and the conditions of pre-identified predicates, previous work has focused on the relationships between predicates and arguments and the correlations between arguments at most, while the correlations between predicates have been neglected for a long time. High-order features and structure learning were very common in modeling such correlations before the neural network era. In this paper, we introduce a high-order graph structure for the neural semantic role labeling model, which enables the model to explicitly consider not only the isolated predicate-argument pairs but also the interaction between the predicate-argument pairs. Experimental results on 7 languages of the CoNLL-2009 benchmark show that the high-order structural learning techniques are beneficial to the strong performing SRL models and further boost our baseline to achieve new state-of-the-art results.

Exploiting a common language as an auxiliary for better translation has a long tradition in machine translation and lets supervised learning-based machine translation enjoy the enhancement delivered by the well-used pivot language in the absence of a source language to target language parallel corpus. The rise of unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) almost completely relieves the parallel corpus curse, though UNMT is still subject to unsatisfactory performance due to the vagueness of the clues available for its core back-translation training. Further enriching the idea of pivot translation by extending the use of parallel corpora beyond the source-target paradigm, we propose a new reference language-based framework for UNMT, RUNMT, in which the reference language only shares a parallel corpus with the source, but this corpus still indicates a signal clear enough to help the reconstruction training of UNMT through a proposed reference agreement mechanism. Experimental results show that our methods improve the quality of UNMT over that of a strong baseline that uses only one auxiliary language, demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed reference language-based UNMT and establishing a good start for the community.

Both syntactic and semantic structures are key linguistic contextual clues, in which parsing the latter has been well shown beneficial from parsing the former. However, few works ever made an attempt to let semantic parsing help syntactic parsing. As linguistic representation formalisms, both syntax and semantics may be represented in either span (constituent/phrase) or dependency, on both of which joint learning was also seldom explored. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model of syntactic and semantic parsing on both span and dependency representations, which incorporates syntactic information effectively in the encoder of neural network and benefits from two representation formalisms in a uniform way. The experiments show that semantics and syntax can benefit each other by optimizing joint objectives. Our single model achieves new state-of-the-art or competitive results on both span and dependency semantic parsing on Propbank benchmarks and both dependency and constituent syntactic parsing on Penn Treebank.

This paper describes our SJTU-NICT’s system for participating in the shared task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP) at the 2019 Conference for Computational Language Learning (CoNLL). Our system uses a graph-based approach to model a variety of semantic graph parsing tasks. Our main contributions in the submitted system are summarized as follows: 1. Our model is fully end-to-end and is capable of being trained only on the given training set which does not rely on any other extra training source including the companion data provided by the organizer; 2. We extend our graph pruning algorithm to a variety of semantic graphs, solving the problem of excessive semantic graph search space; 3. We introduce multi-task learning for multiple objectives within the same framework. The evaluation results show that our system achieved second place in the overall F₁ score and achieved the best F₁ score on the DM framework.

Recently, semantic role labeling (SRL) has earned a series of success with even higher performance improvements, which can be mainly attributed to syntactic integration and enhanced word representation. However, most of these efforts focus on English, while SRL on multiple languages more than English has received relatively little attention so that is kept underdevelopment. Thus this paper intends to fill the gap on multilingual SRL with special focus on the impact of syntax and contextualized word representation. Unlike existing work, we propose a novel method guided by syntactic rule to prune arguments, which enables us to integrate syntax into multilingual SRL model simply and effectively. We present a unified SRL model designed for multiple languages together with the proposed uniform syntax enhancement. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on the CoNLL-2009 benchmarks of all seven languages. Besides, we pose a discussion on the syntactic role among different languages and verify the effectiveness of deep enhanced representation for multilingual SRL.

This paper describes the system of team LeisureX in the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system predicts the part-of-speech tag and dependency tree jointly. For the basic tasks, including tokenization, lemmatization and morphology prediction, we employ the official baseline model (UDPipe). To train the low-resource languages, we adopt a sampling method based on other richresource languages. Our system achieves a macro-average of 68.31% LAS F1 score, with an improvement of 2.51% compared with the UDPipe.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is dedicated to recognizing the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Previous studies have shown syntactic information has a remarkable contribution to SRL performance. However, such perception was challenged by a few recent neural SRL models which give impressive performance without a syntactic backbone. This paper intends to quantify the importance of syntactic information to dependency SRL in deep learning framework. We propose an enhanced argument labeling model companying with an extended korder argument pruning algorithm for effectively exploiting syntactic information. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the CoNLL-2008, 2009 benchmarks for both English and Chinese, showing the quantitative significance of syntax to neural SRL together with a thorough empirical survey over existing models.

Chinese pinyin input method engine (IME) lets user conveniently input Chinese into a computer by typing pinyin through the common keyboard. In addition to offering high conversion quality, modern pinyin IME is supposed to aid user input with extended association function. However, existing solutions for such functions are roughly based on oversimplified matching algorithms at word-level, whose resulting products provide limited extension associated with user inputs. This work presents the Moon IME, a pinyin IME that integrates the attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) model and Information Retrieval (IR) to offer amusive and customizable association ability. The released IME is implemented on Windows via text services framework.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is to recognize the predicate-argument structure of a sentence, including subtasks of predicate disambiguation and argument labeling. Previous studies usually formulate the entire SRL problem into two or more subtasks. For the first time, this paper introduces an end-to-end neural model which unifiedly tackles the predicate disambiguation and the argument labeling in one shot. Using a biaffine scorer, our model directly predicts all semantic role labels for all given word pairs in the sentence without relying on any syntactic parse information. Specifically, we augment the BiLSTM encoder with a non-linear transformation to further distinguish the predicate and the argument in a given sentence, and model the semantic role labeling process as a word pair classification task by employing the biaffine attentional mechanism. Though the proposed model is syntax-agnostic with local decoder, it outperforms the state-of-the-art syntax-aware SRL systems on the CoNLL-2008, 2009 benchmarks for both English and Chinese. To our best knowledge, we report the first syntax-agnostic SRL model that surpasses all known syntax-aware models.

This paper presents a sequence to sequence (seq2seq) dependency parser by directly predicting the relative position of head for each given word, which therefore results in a truly end-to-end seq2seq dependency parser for the first time. Enjoying the advantage of seq2seq modeling, we enrich a series of embedding enhancement, including firstly introduced subword and node2vec augmentation. Meanwhile, we propose a beam search decoder with tree constraint and subroot decomposition over the sequence to furthermore enhance our seq2seq parser. Our parser is evaluated on benchmark treebanks, being on par with the state-of-the-art parsers by achieving 94.11% UAS on PTB and 88.78% UAS on CTB, respectively.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to recognize the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Syntactic information has been paid a great attention over the role of enhancing SRL. However, the latest advance shows that syntax would not be so important for SRL with the emerging much smaller gap between syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic SRL. To comprehensively explore the role of syntax for SRL task, we extend existing models and propose a unified framework to investigate more effective and more diverse ways of incorporating syntax into sequential neural networks. Exploring the effect of syntactic input quality on SRL performance, we confirm that high-quality syntactic parse could still effectively enhance syntactically-driven SRL. Using empirically optimized integration strategy, we even enlarge the gap between syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic SRL. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on CoNLL-2009 benchmarks both for English and Chinese, substantially outperforming all previous models.