prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What learning models are used on the dataset?
Context 1: Introduction
Abusive language refers to any type of insult, vulgarity, or profanity that debases the target; it also can be anything that causes aggravation BIBREF0 , BIBREF1   Abusive language is often reframed as, but not limited to, offensive language BIBREF2 , cyberbullying BIBREF3 , othering language BIBREF4 , and hate speech BIBREF5  
Recently, an increasing number of users have been subjected to harassment, or have witnessed offensive behaviors online BIBREF6   Major social media companies (i e  Facebook, Twitter) have utilized multiple resources—artificial intelligence, human reviewers, user reporting processes, etc —in effort to censor offensive language, yet it seems nearly impossible to successfully resolve the issue BIBREF7 , BIBREF8  
The major reason of the failure in abusive language detection comes from its subjectivity and context-dependent characteristics BIBREF9   For instance, a message can be regarded as harmless on its own, but when taking previous threads into account it may be seen as abusive, and vice versa  This aspect makes detecting abusive language extremely laborious even for human annotators; therefore it is difficult to build a large and reliable dataset BIBREF10  
Previously, datasets openly available in abusive language detection research on Twitter ranged from 10K to 35K in size BIBREF9 , BIBREF11   This quantity is not sufficient to train the significant number of parameters in deep learning models  Due to this reason, these datasets have been mainly studied by traditional machine learning methods  Most recently, Founta et al  founta2018large introduced Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, a dataset containing 100K tweets with cross-validated labels  Although this corpus has great potential in training deep models with its significant size, there are no baseline reports to date 
This paper investigates the efficacy of different learning models in detecting abusive language  We compare accuracy using the most frequently studied machine learning classifiers as well as recent neural network models  Reliable baseline results are presented with the first comparative study on this dataset  Additionally, we demonstrate the effect of different features and variants, and describe the possibility for further improvements with the use of ensemble models 
Related Work
The research community introduced various approaches on abusive language detection  Razavi et al  razavi2010offensive applied Naïve Bayes, and Warner and Hirschberg warner2012detecting used Support Vector Machine (SVM), both with word-level features to classify offensive language  Xiang et al  xiang2012detecting generated topic distributions with Latent Dirichlet Allocation BIBREF12 , also using word-level features in order to classify offensive tweets 
More recently, distributed word representations and neural network models have been widely applied for abusive language detection  Djuric et al  djuric2015hate used the Continuous Bag Of Words model with paragraph2vec algorithm BIBREF13 to more accurately detect hate speech than that of the plain Bag Of Words models  Badjatiya et al  badjatiya2017deep implemented Gradient Boosted Decision Trees classifiers using word representations trained by deep learning models  Other researchers have investigated character-level representations and their effectiveness compared to word-level representations BIBREF14 , BIBREF15  
As traditional machine learning methods have relied on feature engineering, (i e  n-grams, POS tags, user information) BIBREF1 , researchers have proposed neural-based models with the advent of larger datasets  Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks have been applied to detect abusive language, and they have outperformed traditional machine learning classifiers such as Logistic Regression and SVM BIBREF15 , BIBREF16   However, there are no studies investigating the efficiency of neural models with large-scale datasets over 100K 
Methodology
This section illustrates our implementations on traditional machine learning classifiers and neural network based models in detail  Furthermore, we describe additional features and variant models investigated 
Traditional Machine Learning Models
We implement five feature engineering based machine learning classifiers that are most often used for abusive language detection  In data preprocessing, text sequences are converted into Bag Of Words (BOW) representations, and normalized with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) values  We experiment with word-level features using n-grams ranging from 1 to 3, and character-level features from 3 to 8-grams  Each classifier is implemented with the following specifications:
Naïve Bayes (NB): Multinomial NB with additive smoothing constant 1
Logistic Regression (LR): Linear LR with L2 regularization constant 1 and limited-memory BFGS optimization
Support Vector Machine (SVM): Linear SVM with L2 regularization constant 1 and logistic loss function
Random Forests (RF): Averaging probabilistic predictions of 10 randomized decision trees
Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT): Tree boosting with learning rate 1 and logistic loss function
Neural Network based Models
Along with traditional machine learning approaches, we investigate neural network based models to evaluate their efficacy within a larger dataset  In particular, we explore Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and their variant models  A pre-trained GloVe BIBREF17 representation is used for word-level features 
CNN: We adopt Kim's kim2014convolutional implementation as the baseline  The word-level CNN models have 3 convolutional filters of different sizes [1,2,3] with ReLU activation, and a max-pooling layer  For the character-level CNN, we use 6 convolutional filters of various sizes [3,4,5,6,7,8], then add max-pooling layers followed by 1 fully-connected layer with a dimension of 1024 
Park and Fung park2017one proposed a HybridCNN model which outperformed both word-level and character-level CNNs in abusive language detection  In order to evaluate the HybridCNN for this dataset, we concatenate the output of max-pooled layers from word-level and character-level CNN, and feed this vector to a fully-connected layer in order to predict the output 
All three CNN models (word-level, character-level, and hybrid) use cross entropy with softmax as their loss function and Adam BIBREF18 as the optimizer 
RNN: We use bidirectional RNN BIBREF19 as the baseline, implementing a GRU BIBREF20 cell for each recurrent unit  From extensive parameter-search experiments, we chose 1 encoding layer with 50 dimensional hidden states and an input dropout probability of 0 3  The RNN models use cross entropy with sigmoid as their loss function and Adam as the optimizer 
For a possible improvement, we apply a self-matching attention mechanism on RNN baseline models BIBREF21 so that they may better understand the data by retrieving text sequences twice  We also investigate a recently introduced method, Latent Topic Clustering (LTC) BIBREF22   The LTC method extracts latent topic information from the hidden states of RNN, and uses it for additional information in classifying the text data 
Feature Extension
While manually analyzing the raw dataset, we noticed that looking at the tweet one has replied to or has quoted, provides significant contextual information  We call these, “context tweets"  As humans can better understand a tweet with the reference of its context, our assumption is that computers also benefit from taking context tweets into account in detecting abusive language 
As shown in the examples below, (2) is labeled abusive due to the use of vulgar language  However, the intention of the user can be better understood with its context tweet (1) 
(1) I hate when I'm sitting in front of the bus and somebody with a wheelchair get on 
INLINEFORM0 (2) I hate it when I'm trying to board a bus and there's already an as**ole on it 
Similarly, context tweet (3) is important in understanding the abusive tweet (4), especially in identifying the target of the malice 
(3) Survivors of #Syria Gas Attack Recount `a Cruel Scene' 
INLINEFORM0 (4) Who the HELL is “LIKE" ING this post? Sick people    
Huang et al  huang2016modeling used several attributes of context tweets for sentiment analysis in order to improve the baseline LSTM model  However, their approach was limited because the meta-information they focused on—author information, conversation type, use of the same hashtags or emojis—are all highly dependent on data 
In order to avoid data dependency, text sequences of context tweets are directly used as an additional feature of neural network models  We use the same baseline model to convert context tweets to vectors, then concatenate these vectors with outputs of their corresponding labeled tweets  More specifically, we concatenate max-pooled layers of context and labeled tweets for the CNN baseline model  As for RNN, the last hidden states of context and labeled tweets are concatenated 
Dataset
Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter BIBREF10 classifies tweets into 4 labels, “normal", “spam", “hateful" and “abusive"  We were only able to crawl 70,904 tweets out of 99,996 tweet IDs, mainly because the tweet was deleted or the user account had been suspended  Table shows the distribution of labels of the crawled data 
Data Preprocessing
In the data preprocessing steps, user IDs, URLs, and frequently used emojis are replaced as special tokens  Since hashtags tend to have a high correlation with the content of the tweet BIBREF23 , we use a segmentation library BIBREF24 for hashtags to extract more information 
For character-level representations, we apply the method Zhang et al  zhang2015character proposed  Tweets are transformed into one-hot encoded vectors using 70 character dimensions—26 lower-cased alphabets, 10 digits, and 34 special characters including whitespace 
Training and Evaluation
In training the feature engineering based machine learning classifiers, we truncate vector representations according to the TF-IDF values (the top 14,000 and 53,000 for word-level and character-level representations, respectively) to avoid overfitting  For neural network models, words that appear only once are replaced as unknown tokens 
Since the dataset used is not split into train, development, and test sets, we perform 10-fold cross validation, obtaining the average of 5 tries; we divide the dataset randomly by a ratio of 85:5:10, respectively  In order to evaluate the overall performance, we calculate the weighted average of precision, recall, and F1 scores of all four labels, “normal”, “spam”, “hateful”, and “abusive” 
Empirical Results
As shown in Table , neural network models are more accurate than feature engineering based models (i e  NB, SVM, etc ) except for the LR model—the best LR model has the same F1 score as the best CNN model 
Among traditional machine learning models, the most accurate in classifying abusive language is the LR model followed by ensemble models such as GBT and RF  Character-level representations improve F1 scores of SVM and RF classifiers, but they have no positive effect on other models 
For neural network models, RNN with LTC modules have the highest accuracy score, but there are no significant improvements from its baseline model and its attention-added model  Similarly, HybridCNN does not improve the baseline CNN model  For both CNN and RNN models, character-level features significantly decrease the accuracy of classification 
The use of context tweets generally have little effect on baseline models, however they noticeably improve the scores of several metrics  For instance, CNN with context tweets score the highest recall and F1 for “hateful" labels, and RNN models with context tweets have the highest recall for “abusive" tweets 
Discussion and Conclusion
While character-level features are known to improve the accuracy of neural network models BIBREF16 , they reduce classification accuracy for Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter  We conclude this is because of the lack of labeled data as well as the significant imbalance among the different labels  Unlike neural network models, character-level features in traditional machine learning classifiers have positive results because we have trained the models only with the most significant character elements using TF-IDF values 
Variants of neural network models also suffer from data insufficiency  However, these models show positive performances on “spam" (14%) and “hateful" (4%) tweets—the lower distributed labels  The highest F1 score for “spam" is from the RNN-LTC model (0 551), and the highest for “hateful" is CNN with context tweets (0 309)  Since each variant model excels in different metrics, we expect to see additional improvements with the use of ensemble models of these variants in future works 
In this paper, we report the baseline accuracy of different learning models as well as their variants on the recently introduced dataset, Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter  Experimental results show that bidirectional GRU networks with LTC provide the most accurate results in detecting abusive language  Additionally, we present the possibility of using ensemble models of variant models and features for further improvements 
Acknowledgments
K  Jung is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, ASRI, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea  This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No  2016M3C4A7952632), the Technology Innovation Program (10073144) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea) 
We would also like to thank Yongkeun Hwang and Ji Ho Park for helpful discussions and their valuable insights 
Context 3: Introduction
Automatically answering questions, especially in the open-domain setting (i e , where minimal or no contextual knowledge is explicitly provided), requires bringing to bear considerable amount of background knowledge and reasoning abilities  For example, knowing the answers to the two questions in Figure FIGREF1 requires identifying a specific ISA relation (i e , that cooking is a type of learned behavior) as well as recalling the definition of a concept (i e , that global warming is defined as a worldwide increase in temperature)  In the multiple-choice setting, which is the variety of question-answering (QA) that we focus on in this paper, there is also pragmatic reasoning involved in selecting optimal answer choices (e g , while greenhouse effect might in some other context be a reasonable answer to the second question in Figure FIGREF1, global warming is a preferable candidate) 
Recent successes in QA, driven largely by the creation of new resources BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5 and advances in model pre-training BIBREF6, BIBREF7, raise a natural question: do state-of-the-art multiple-choice QA (MCQA) models that excel at standard tasks really have basic knowledge and reasoning skills?
Most existing MCQA datasets are constructed through either expensive crowd-sourcing BIBREF8 or hand engineering effort, in the former case making it possible to collect large amounts of data at the cost of losing systematic control over the semantics of the target questions  Hence, doing a controlled experiment to answer such a question for QA is difficult given a lack of targeted challenge datasets 
Having definitive empirical evidence of model competence on any given phenomenon requires constructing a wide range of systematic tests  For example, in measuring competence of definitions, not only do we want to see that the model can handle individual questions such as Figure FIGREF1 1 inside of benchmark tasks, but that it can answer a wider range of questions that exhaustively cover a broad set of concepts and question perturbations (i e , systematic adjustments to how the questions are constructed)  The same applies to ISA reasoning; not only is it important to recognize in the question in Figure FIGREF1 1 that cooking is a learned behavior, but also that cooking is a general type of behavior or, through a few more inferential steps, a type of human activity 
In this paper, we look at systematically constructing such tests by exploiting the vast amounts of structured information contained in various types of expert knowledge such as knowledge graphs and lexical taxonomies  Our general methodology works as illustrated in Figure FIGREF1: given any MCQA model trained on a set of benchmark tasks, we systematically generate a set of synthetic dataset probes (i e , MCQA renderings of the target information) from information in expert knowledge sources  We then use these probes to ask two empirical questions: 1) how well do models trained on benchmark tasks perform on these probing tasks and; 2) can such models be re-trained to master new challenges with minimal performance loss on their original tasks?
While our methodology is amenable to any knowledge source and set of models/benchmark tasks, we focus on probing state-of-the-art transformer models BIBREF7, BIBREF9 in the domain of science MCQA  For sources of expert knowledge, we use WordNet, a comprehensive lexical ontology, and other publicly available dictionary resources  We devise probes that measure model competence in definition and taxonomic knowledge in different settings (including hypernymy, hyponymy, and synonymy detection, and word sense disambiguation)  This choice is motivated by fact that the science domain is considered particularly challenging for QA BIBREF10, BIBREF11, BIBREF12, and existing science benchmarks are known to involve widespread use of such knowledge (see BIBREF1, BIBREF13 for analysis), which is also arguably fundamental to more complex forms of reasoning 
We show that accurately probing QA models via synthetic datasets is not straightforward, as unexpected artifacts can easily arise in such data  This motivates our carefully constructed baselines and close data inspection to ensure probe quality 
Our results confirm that transformer-based QA models have a remarkable ability to recognize certain types of knowledge captured in our probes—even without additional fine-tuning  Such models can even outperform strong task-specific models trained directly on our probing tasks (e g , on definitions, our best model achieves 77% test accuracy without specialized training, as opposed to 51% for a task-specific LSTM-based model)  We also show that the same models can be effectively re-fine-tuned on small samples (even 100 examples) of probe data, and that high performance on the probes tends to correlate with a smaller drop in the model's performance on the original QA task 
Our comprehensive assessment reveals several interesting nuances to the overall positive trend  For example, the performance of even the best QA models degrades substantially on our hyponym probes (by 8-15%) when going from 1-hop links to 2-hops  Further, the accuracy of even our best models on the WordNetQA probe drops by 14-44% under our cluster-based analysis, which assesses whether a model knows several facts about each individual concept, rather than just being good at answering isolated questions  State-of-the-art QA models thus have much room to improve even in some fundamental building blocks, namely definitions and taxonomic hierarchies, of more complex forms of reasoning 
Related Work
We follow recent work on constructing challenge datasets for probing neural models, which has primarily focused on the task of natural language inference (NLI) BIBREF14, BIBREF15, BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18  Most of this work looks at constructing data through adversarial generation methods, which have also been found useful for creating stronger models BIBREF19  There has also been work on using synthetic data of the type we consider in this paper BIBREF20, BIBREF21, BIBREF22  We closely follow the methodology of BIBREF22, who use hand-constructed linguistic fragments to probe NLI models and study model re-training using a variant of the inoculation by fine-tuning strategy of BIBREF23  In contrast, we focus on probing open-domain MCQA models (see BIBREF24 for a related study in the reading comprehension setting) as well as constructing data from much larger sources of structured knowledge 
Our main study focuses on probing the BERT model and fine-tuning approach of BIBREF7, and other variants thereof, which are all based on the transformer architecture of BIBREF25  Related to our efforts, there have been recent studies into the types of relational knowledge contained in large-scale knowledge models BIBREF26, BIBREF27, BIBREF28, which, similar to our work, probe models using structured knowledge sources  This prior work, however, primarily focuses on unearthing the knowledge contained in the underlying language models as is without further training, using simple (single token) cloze-style probing tasks and templates (similar to what we propose in Section SECREF3)  In contrast, we focus on understanding the knowledge contained in language models after they have been trained for a QA end-task using benchmark datasets in which such knowledge is expected to be widespread  Further, our evaluation is done before and after these models are fine-tuned on our probe QA tasks, using a more complex set of QA templates and target inferences 
The use of lexical resources and knowledge graphs such as WordNet to construct datasets has a long history, and has recently appeared in work on adversarial attacks BIBREF14, BIBREF29 and general task construction BIBREF30, BIBREF31  In the area of MCQA, there is related work on constructing questions from tuples BIBREF32, BIBREF3, both of which involve standard crowd annotation to elicit question-answer pairs (see also BIBREF33, BIBREF34)  In contrast to this work, we focus on generating data in an entirely automatic fashion, which obviates the need for expensive annotation and gives us the flexibility to construct much larger datasets that control a rich set of semantic aspects of the target questions 
Dataset Probes and Construction
Our probing methodology starts by constructing challenge datasets (Figure FIGREF1, yellow box) from a target set of knowledge resources  Each of our probing datasets consists of multiple-choice questions that include a question $\textbf {q}$ and a set of answer choices or candidates $\lbrace a_{1},   a_{N}\rbrace $  This section describes in detail the 5 different datasets we build, which are drawn from two sources of expert knowledge, namely WordNet BIBREF35 and the GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English (GCIDE)  We describe each resource in turn, and explain how the resulting dataset probes, which we call WordNetQA and DictionaryQA, are constructed 
For convenience, we will describe each source of expert knowledge as a directed, edge-labeled graph $G$  The nodes of this graph are $\mathcal {V} = \mathcal {C} \cup \mathcal {W} \cup \mathcal {S} \cup \mathcal {D}$, where $\mathcal {C}$ is a set of atomic concepts, $\mathcal {W}$ a set of words, $\mathcal {S}$ a set of sentences, and $\mathcal {D}$ a set of definitions (see Table TABREF4 for details for WordNet and GCIDE)  Each edge of $G$ is directed from an atomic concept in $\mathcal {C}$ to another node in $V$, and is labeled with a relation, such as hypernym or isa$^\uparrow $, from a set of relations $\mathcal {R}$ (see Table TABREF4) 
When defining our probe question templates, it will be useful to view $G$ as a set of (relation, source, target) triples $\mathcal {T} \subseteq \mathcal {R} \times \mathcal {C} \times \mathcal {V}$  Due to their origin in an expert knowledge source, such triples preserve semantic consistency  For instance, when the relation in a triple is def, the corresponding edge maps a concept in $\mathcal {C}$ to a definition in $\mathcal {D}$ 
To construct probe datasets, we rely on two heuristic functions, defined below for each individual probe: $\textsc {gen}_{\mathcal {Q}}(\tau )$, which generates gold question-answer pairs $(\textbf {q},\textbf {a})$ from a set of triples $\tau \subseteq \mathcal {T}$ and question templates $\mathcal {Q}$, and $\textsc {distr}(\tau ^{\prime })$, which generates distractor answers choices $\lbrace a^{\prime }_{1},   a^{\prime }_{N-1} \rbrace $ based on another set of triples $\tau ^{\prime }$ (where usually $\tau \subset \tau ^{\prime }$)  For brevity, we will use $\textsc {gen}(\tau )$ to denote $\textsc {gen}_{\mathcal {Q}}(\tau )$, leaving question templates $\mathcal {Q}$ implicit 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA
WordNet is an English lexical database consisting of around 117k concepts, which are organized into groups of synsets that each contain a gloss (i e , a definition of the target concept), a set of representative English words (called lemmas), and, in around 33k synsets, example sentences  In addition, many synsets have ISA links to other synsets that express complex taxonomic relations  Figure FIGREF6 shows an example and Table TABREF4 summarizes how we formulate WordNet as a set of triples $\mathcal {T}$ of various types  These triples together represent a directed, edge-labeled graph $G$  Our main motivation for using WordNet, as opposed to a resource such as ConceptNet BIBREF36, is the availability of glosses ($\mathcal {D}$) and example sentences ($\mathcal {S}$), which allows us to construct natural language questions that contextualize the types of concepts we want to probe 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA ::: Example Generation @!START@$\textsc {gen}(\tau )$@!END@ 
We build 4 individual datasets based on semantic relations native to WordNet (see BIBREF37): hypernymy (i e , generalization or ISA reasoning up a taxonomy, ISA$^\uparrow $), hyponymy (ISA$^{\downarrow }$), synonymy, and definitions  To generate a set of questions in each case, we employ a number of rule templates $\mathcal {Q}$ that operate over tuples  A subset of such templates is shown in Table TABREF8  The templates were designed to mimic naturalistic questions we observed in our science benchmarks 
For example, suppose we wish to create a question $\textbf {q}$ about the definition of a target concept $c \in \mathcal {C}$  We first select a question template from $\mathcal {Q}$ that first introduces the concept $c$ and its lemma $l \in \mathcal {W}$ in context using the example sentence $s \in \mathcal {S}$, and then asks to identify the corresponding WordNet gloss $d \in \mathcal {D}$, which serves as the gold answer $\textbf {a}$  The same is done for ISA reasoning; each question about a hypernym/hyponym relation between two concepts $c \rightarrow ^{\uparrow /\downarrow } c^{\prime } \in \mathcal {T}_{i}$ (e g , $\texttt {dog} \rightarrow ^{\uparrow /\downarrow } \texttt {animal/terrier}$) first introduces a context for $c$ and then asks for an answer that identifies $c^{\prime }$ (which is also provided with a gloss so as to contain all available context) 
In the latter case, the rules $(\texttt {isa}^{r},c,c^{\prime }) \in \mathcal {T}_i$ in Table TABREF8 cover only direct ISA links from $c$ in direction $r \in \lbrace \uparrow ,\downarrow \rbrace $  In practice, for each $c$ and direction $r$, we construct tests that cover the set HOPS$(c,r)$ of all direct as well as derived ISA relations of $c$:
This allows us to evaluate the extent to which models are able to handle complex forms of reasoning that require several inferential steps or hops 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA ::: Distractor Generation: @!START@$\textsc {distr}(\tau ^{\prime })$@!END@ 
An example of how distractors are generated is shown in Figure FIGREF6, which relies on similar principles as above  For each concept $c$, we choose 4 distractor answers that are close in the WordNet semantic space  For example, when constructing hypernymy tests for $c$ from the set hops$(c,\uparrow )$, we build distractors by drawing from $\textsc {hops}(c,\downarrow )$ (and vice versa), as well as from the $\ell $-deep sister family of $c$, defined as follows  The 1-deep sister family is simply $c$'s siblings or sisters, i

ground_truth: Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forests (RF), Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT),  Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forests (RF), Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT), CNN, RNN

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What are the baselines?
Context 2: Introduction
Speech-to-Text translation (ST) is essential for a wide range of scenarios: for example in emergency calls, where agents have to respond emergent requests in a foreign language BIBREF0; or in online courses, where audiences and speakers use different languages BIBREF1  To tackle this problem, existing approaches can be categorized into cascaded method BIBREF2, BIBREF3, where a machine translation (MT) model translates outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system into target language, and end-to-end method BIBREF4, BIBREF5, where a single model learns acoustic frames to target word sequence mappings in one step towards the final objective of interest  Although the cascaded model remains the dominant approach due to its better performance, the end-to-end method becomes more and more popular because it has lower latency by avoiding inferences with two models and rectifies the error propagation in theory 
Since it is hard to obtain a large-scale ST dataset, multi-task learning BIBREF5, BIBREF6 and pre-training techniques BIBREF7 have been applied to end-to-end ST model to leverage large-scale datasets of ASR and MT  A common practice is to pre-train two encoder-decoder models for ASR and MT respectively, and then initialize the ST model with the encoder of the ASR model and the decoder of the MT model  Subsequently, the ST model is optimized with the multi-task learning by weighing the losses of ASR, MT, and ST  This approach, however, causes a huge gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, which are summarized into three folds:
Subnet Waste: The ST system just reuses the ASR encoder and the MT decoder, while discards other pre-trained subnets, such as the MT encoder  Consequently, valuable semantic information captured by the MT encoder cannot be inherited by the final ST system 
Role Mismatch: The speech encoder plays different roles in pre-training and fine-tuning  The encoder is a pure acoustic model in pre-training, while it has to extract semantic and linguistic features additionally in fine-tuning, which significantly increases the learning difficulty 
Non-pre-trained Attention Module: Previous work BIBREF6 trains attention modules for ASR, MT and ST respectively, hence, the attention module of ST does not benefit from the pre-training 
To address these issues, we propose a Tandem Connectionist Encoding Network (TCEN), which is able to reuse all subnets in pre-training, keep the roles of subnets consistent, and pre-train the attention module  Concretely, the TCEN consists of three components, a speech encoder, a text encoder, and a target text decoder  Different from the previous work that pre-trains an encoder-decoder based ASR model, we only pre-train an ASR encoder by optimizing the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) BIBREF8 objective function  In this way, the additional decoder of ASR is not required while keeping the ability to read acoustic features into the source language space by the speech encoder  Besides, the text encoder and decoder can be pre-trained on a large MT dataset  After that, we employ common used multi-task learning method to jointly learn ASR, MT and ST tasks 
Compared to prior works, the encoder of TCEN is a concatenation of an ASR encoder and an MT encoder and our model does not have an ASR decoder, so the subnet waste issue is solved  Furthermore, the two encoders work at tandem, disentangling acoustic feature extraction and linguistic feature extraction, ensuring the role consistency between pre-training and fine-tuning  Moreover, we reuse the pre-trained MT attention module in ST, so we can leverage the alignment information learned in pre-training 
Since the text encoder consumes word embeddings of plausible texts in MT task but uses speech encoder outputs in ST task, another question is how one guarantees the speech encoder outputs are consistent with the word embeddings  We further modify our model to achieve semantic consistency and length consistency  Specifically, (1) the projection matrix at the CTC classification layer for ASR is shared with the word embedding matrix, ensuring that they are mapped to the same latent space, and (2) the length of the speech encoder output is proportional to the length of the input frame, so it is much longer than a natural sentence  To bridge the length gap, source sentences in MT are lengthened by adding word repetitions and blank tokens to mimic the CTC output sequences 
We conduct comprehensive experiments on the IWSLT18 speech translation benchmark BIBREF1, demonstrating the effectiveness of each component  Our model is significantly better than previous methods by 3 6 and 2 2 BLEU scores for the subword-level decoding and character-level decoding strategies, respectively 
Our contributions are three-folds: 1) we shed light on why previous ST models cannot sufficiently utilize the knowledge learned from the pre-training process; 2) we propose a new ST model, which alleviates shortcomings in existing methods; and 3) we empirically evaluate the proposed model on a large-scale public dataset 
Background ::: Problem Formulation
End-to-end speech translation aims to translate a piece of audio into a target-language translation in one step  The raw speech signals are usually converted to sequences of acoustic features, e g  Mel filterbank features  Here, we define the speech feature sequence as $\mathbf {x} = (x_1, \cdots , x_{T_x})$ The transcription and translation sequences are denoted as $\mathbf {y^{s}} = (y_1^{s}, \cdots , y_{T_s}^{s})$, and $\mathbf {y^{t}} = (y_1^{t}, \cdots , y_{T_t}^{t})$ repectively  Each symbol in $\mathbf {y^{s}}$ or $\mathbf {y^{t}}$ is an integer index of the symbol in a vocabulary $V_{src}$ or $V_{trg}$ respectively (e g  $y^s_i=k, k\in [0, |V_{src}|-1]$)  In this work, we suppose that an ASR dataset, an MT dataset, and a ST dataset are available, denoted as $\mathcal {A} = \lbrace (\mathbf {x_i}, \mathbf {y^{s}_i})\rbrace _{i=0}^I$, $\mathcal {M} =\lbrace (\mathbf {y^{s}_j}, \mathbf {y^{t}_j})\rbrace _{j=0}^J$ and $ \mathcal {S} =\lbrace (\mathbf {x_l}, \mathbf {y^{t}_l})\rbrace _{l=0}^L$ respectively  Given a new piece of audio $\mathbf {x}$, our goal is to learn an end to end model to generate a translation sentence $\mathbf {y^{t}}$ without generating an intermediate result $\mathbf {y^{s}}$ 
Background ::: Multi-Task Learning and Pre-training for ST
To leverage large scale ASR and MT data, multi-task learning and pre-training techniques are widely employed to improve the ST system  As shown in Figure FIGREF4, there are three popular multi-task strategies for ST, including 1) one-to-many setting, in which a speech encoder is shared between ASR and ST tasks; 2) many-to-one setting in which a decoder is shared between MT and ST tasks; and 3) many-to-many setting where both the encoder and decoder are shared 
A many-to-many multi-task model contains two encoders as well as two decoders  It can be jointly trained on ASR, MT, and ST tasks  As the attention module is task-specific, three attentions are defined 
Usually, the size of $\mathcal {A}$ and $\mathcal {M}$ is much larger than $\mathcal {S}$  Therefore, the common training practice is to pre-train the model on ASR and MT tasks and then fine-tune it with a multi-task learning manner  However, as aforementioned, this method suffers from subnet waste, role mismatch and non-pre-trained attention issues, which severely limits the end-to-end ST performance 
Our method
In this section, we first introduce the architecture of TCEN, which consists of two encoders connected in tandem, and one decoder with an attention module  Then we give the pre-training and fine-tuning strategy for TCEN  Finally, we propose our solutions for semantic and length inconsistency problems, which are caused by multi-task learning 
Our method ::: TCEN Architecture
Figure FIGREF5 sketches the overall architecture of TCEN, including a speech encoder $enc_s$, a text encoder $enc_t$ and a decoder $dec$ with an attention module $att$  During training, the $enc_s$ acts like an acoustic model which reads the input $\mathbf {x}$ to word or subword representations $\mathbf {h^s}$, then $enc_t$ learns high-level linguistic knowledge into hidden representations $\mathbf {h^t}$  Finally, the $dec$ defines a distribution probability over target words  The advantage of our architecture is that two encoders disentangle acoustic feature extraction and linguistic feature extraction, making sure that valuable knowledge learned from ASR and MT tasks can be effectively leveraged for ST training  Besides, every module in pre-training can be utilized in fine-tuning, alleviating the subnet waste problem 
Follow BIBREF9 inaguma2018speech, we use CNN-BiLSTM architecture to build our model  Specifically, the input features $\mathbf {x}$ are organized as a sequence of feature vectors in length $T_x$  Then, $\mathbf {x}$ is passed into a stack of two convolutional layers followed by max-pooling:
where $\mathbf {v}^{(l-1)}$ is feature maps in last layer and $\mathbf {W}^{(l)}$ is the filter  The max-pooling layers downsample the sequence in length by a total factor of four  The down-sampled feature sequence is further fed into a stack of five bidirectional $d$-dimensional LSTM layers:
where $[;]$ denotes the vector concatenation  The final output representation from the speech encoder is denoted as $\mathbf {h^s}=(h^s_1, \cdots , h^s_{\frac{T_x}{4}})$, where $h_i^s \in \mathbb {R}^d$ 
The text encoder $enc_t$ consists of two bidirectional LSTM layers  In ST task, $enc_t$ accepts speech encoder output $\mathbf {h}^s$ as input  While in MT, $enc_t$ consumes the word embedding representation $\mathbf {e^s}$ derived from $\mathbf {y^s}$, where each element $e^s_i$ is computed by choosing the $y_i^s$-th vector from the source embedding matrix $W_{E^s}$  The goal of $enc_t$ is to extract high-level linguistic features like syntactic features or semantic features from lower level subword representations $\mathbf {h}^s$ or $\mathbf {e}^s$  Since $\mathbf {h}^s$ and $\mathbf {e}^s$ belong to different latent space and have different lengths, there remain semantic and length inconsistency problems  We will provide our solutions in Section SECREF21  The output sequence of $enc_t$ is denoted as $\mathbf {h}^t$ 
The decoder is defined as two unidirectional LSTM layers with an additive attention $att$  It predicts target sequence $\mathbf {y^{t}}$ by estimating conditional probability $P(\mathbf {y^{t}}|\mathbf {x})$:
Here, $z_k$ is the the hidden state of the deocder RNN at $k$ step and $c_k$ is a time-dependent context vector computed by the attention $att$ 
Our method ::: Training Procedure
Following previous work, we split the training procedure to pre-training and fine-tuning stages  In pre-training stage, the speech encoder $enc_s$ is trained towards CTC objective using dataset $\mathcal {A}$, while the text encoder $enc_t$ and the decoder $dec$ are trained on MT dataset $\mathcal {M}$  In fine-tuning stage, we jointly train the model on ASR, MT, and ST tasks 
Our method ::: Training Procedure ::: Pre-training
To sufficiently utilize the large dataset $\mathcal {A}$ and $\mathcal {M}$, the model is pre-trained on CTC-based ASR task and MT task in the pre-training stage 
For ASR task, in order to get rid of the requirement for decoder and enable the $enc_s$ to generate subword representation, we leverage connectionist temporal classification (CTC) BIBREF8 loss to train the speech encoder 
Given an input $\mathbf {x}$, $enc_s$ emits a sequence of hidden vectors $\mathbf {h^s}$, then a softmax classification layer predicts a CTC path $\mathbf {\pi }$, where $\pi _t \in V_{src} \cup $ {`-'} is the observing label at particular RNN step $t$, and `-' is the blank token representing no observed labels:
where $W_{ctc} \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times (|V_{src}|+1)}$ is the weight matrix in the classification layer and $T$ is the total length of encoder RNN 
A legal CTC path $\mathbf {\pi }$ is a variation of the source transcription $\mathbf {y}^s$ by allowing occurrences of blank tokens and repetitions, as shown in Table TABREF14  For each transcription $\mathbf {y}$, there exist many legal CTC paths in length $T$  The CTC objective trains the model to maximize the probability of observing the golden sequence $\mathbf {y}^s$, which is calculated by summing the probabilities of all possible legal paths:
where $\Phi _T(y)$ is the set of all legal CTC paths for sequence $\mathbf {y}$ with length $T$  The loss can be easily computed using forward-backward algorithm  More details about CTC are provided in supplementary material 
For MT task, we use the cross-entropy loss as the training objective  During training, $\mathbf {y^s}$ is converted to embedding vectors $\mathbf {e^s}$ through embedding layer $W_{E^s}$, then $enc_t$ consumes $\mathbf {e^s}$ and pass the output $\mathbf {h^t}$ to decoder  The objective function is defined as:
Our method ::: Training Procedure ::: Fine-tune
In fine-tune stage, we jointly update the model on ASR, MT, and ST tasks  The training for ASR and MT follows the same process as it was in pre-training stage 
For ST task, the $enc_s$ reads the input $\mathbf {x}$ and generates $\mathbf {h^s}$, then $enc_t$ learns high-level linguistic knowledge into $\mathbf {h^t}$  Finally, the $dec$ predicts the target sentence  The ST loss function is defined as:
Following the update strategy proposed by BIBREF11 luong2015multi, we allocate a different training ratio $\alpha _i$ for each task  When switching between tasks, we select randomly a new task $i$ with probability $\frac{\alpha _i}{\sum _{j}\alpha _{j}}$ 
Our method ::: Subnet-Consistency
Our model keeps role consistency between pre-training and fine-tuning by connecting two encoders for ST task  However, this leads to some new problems: 1) The text encoder consumes $\mathbf {e^s}$ during MT training, while it accepts $\mathbf {h^s}$ during ST training  However, $\mathbf {e^s}$ and $\mathbf {h^s}$ may not follow the same distribution, resulting in the semantic inconsistency  2) Besides, the length of $\mathbf {h^s}$ is not the same order of magnitude with the length of $\mathbf {e^s}$, resulting in the length inconsistency 
In response to the above two challenges, we propose two countermeasures: 1) We share weights between CTC classification layer and source-end word embedding layer during training of ASR and MT, encouraging $\mathbf {e^s}$ and $\mathbf {h^s}$ in the same space  2)We feed the text encoder source sentences in the format of CTC path, which are generated from a seq2seq model, making it more robust toward long inputs 
Our method ::: Subnet-Consistency ::: Semantic Consistency
As shown in Figure FIGREF5, during multi-task training, two different hidden features will be fed into the text encoder $enc_t$: the embedding representation $\mathbf {e}^s$ in MT task, and the $enc_s$ output $\mathbf {h^s}$ in ST task  Without any regularization, they may belong to different latent spaces  Due to the space gap, the $enc_t$ has to compromise between two tasks, limiting its performance on individual tasks 
To bridge the space gap, our idea is to pull $\mathbf {h^s}$ into the latent space where $\mathbf {e}^s$ belong  Specifically, we share the weight $W_{ctc}$ in CTC classification layer with the source embedding weights $W_{E^s}$, which means $W_{ctc} = W_{E^s}$  In this way, when predicting the CTC path $\mathbf {\pi }$, the probability of observing the particular label $w_i \in V_{src}\cup ${`-'} at time step $t$, $p(\pi _t=w_i|\mathbf {x})$, is computed by normalizing the product of hidden vector $h_t^s$ and the $i$-th vector in $W_{E^s}$:
The loss function closes the distance between $h^s_t$ and golden embedding vector, encouraging $\mathbf {h}^s$ have the same distribution with $\mathbf {e}^s$ 
Our method ::: Subnet-Consistency ::: Length Consistency
Another existing problem is length inconsistency  The length of the sequence $\mathbf {h^s}$ is proportional to the length of the input frame $\mathbf {x}$, which is much longer than the length of $\mathbf {e^s}$  To solve this problem, we train an RNN-based seq2seq model to transform normal source sentences to noisy sentences in CTC path format, and replace standard MT with denoising MT for multi-tasking 
Specifically, we first train a CTC ASR model based on dataset $\mathcal {A} = \lbrace (\mathbf {x}_i, \mathbf {y}^s_i)\rbrace _{i=0}^{I}$, and generate a CTC-path $\mathbf {\pi }_i$ for each audio $\mathbf {x}_i$ by greedy decoding  Then we define an operation $S(\cdot )$, which converts a CTC path $\mathbf {\pi }$ to a sequence of the unique tokens $\mathbf {u}$ and a sequence of repetition times for each token $\mathbf {l}$, denoted as $S(\mathbf {\pi }) = (\mathbf {u}, \mathbf {l})$  Notably, the operation is reversible, meaning that $S^{-1} (\mathbf {u}, \mathbf {l})=\mathbf {\pi }$  We use the example $\mathbf {\pi _1}$ in Table TABREF14 and show the corresponding $\mathbf {u}$ and $\mathbf {l}$ in Table TABREF24 
Then we build a dataset $\mathcal {P} = \lbrace (\mathbf {y^s}_i, \mathbf {u}_i, \mathbf {l}_i)\rbrace _{i=0}^{I}$ by decoding all the audio pieces in $\mathcal {A}$ and transform the resulting path by the operation $S(\cdot )$  After that, we train a seq2seq model, as shown in Figure FIGREF25, which takes $ \mathbf {y^s}_i$ as input and decodes $\mathbf {u}_i, \mathbf {l}_i$ as outputs  With the seq2seq model, a noisy MT dataset $\mathcal {M}^{\prime }=\lbrace (\mathbf {\pi }_l, \mathbf {y^t}_l)\rbrace _{l=0}^{L}$ is obtained by converting every source sentence $\mathbf {y^s}_i \in \mathcal {M}$ to $\mathbf {\pi _i}$, where $\mathbf {\pi }_i = S^{-1}(\mathbf {u}_i, \mathbf {l}_i)$  We did not use the standard seq2seq model which takes $\mathbf {y^s}$ as input and generates $\mathbf {\pi }$ directly, since there are too many blank tokens `-' in $\mathbf {\pi }$ and the model tends to generate a long sequence with only blank tokens  During MT training, we randomly sample text pairs from $\mathcal {M}^{\prime }$ and $\mathcal {M}$ according to a hyper-parameter $k$  After tuning on the validation set, about $30\%$ pairs are sampled from $\mathcal {M}^{\prime }$  In this way, the $enc_t$ is more robust toward the longer inputs given by the $enc_s$ 
Experiments
We conduct experiments on the IWSLT18 speech translation task BIBREF1  Since IWSLT participators use different data pre-processing methods, we reproduce several competitive baselines based on the ESPnet BIBREF12 for a fair comparison 
Experiments ::: Dataset ::: Speech translation data:
The organizer provides a speech translation corpus extracting from the TED talk (ST-TED), which consists of raw English wave files, English transcriptions, and aligned German translations  The corpus contains 272 hours of English speech with 171k segments  We split 2k segments from the corpus as dev set and tst2010, tst2013, tst2014, tst2015 are used as test sets 
Speech recognition data: Aside from ST-TED, TED-LIUM2 corpus BIBREF13 is provided as speech recognition data, which contains 207 hours of English speech and 93k transcript sentences 
Text translation data: We use transcription and translation pairs in the ST-TED corpus and WIT3 as in-domain MT data, which contains 130k and 200k sentence pairs respectively  WMT2018 is used as out-of-domain training data which consists of 41M sentence pairs 
Data preprocessing: For speech data, the utterances are segmented into multiple frames with a 25 ms window size and a 10 ms step size  Then we extract 80-channel log-Mel filter bank and 3-dimensional pitch features using Kaldi BIBREF14, resulting in 83-dimensional input features  We normalize them by the mean and the standard deviation on the whole training set  The utterances with more than 3000 frames are discarded  The transcripts in ST-TED are in true-case with punctuation while in TED-LIUM2, transcripts are in lower-case and unpunctuated  Thus, we lowercase all the sentences and remove the punctuation to keep consistent  To increase the amount of training data, we perform speed perturbation on the raw signals with speed factors 0 9 and 1 1  For the text translation data, sentences longer than 80 words or shorter than 10 words are removed  Besides, we discard pairs whose length ratio between source and target sentence is smaller than 0 5 or larger than 2 0  Word tokenization is performed using the Moses scripts and both English and German words are in lower-case 
We use two different sets of vocabulary for our experiments  For the subword experiments, both English and German vocabularies are generated using sentencepiece BIBREF15 with a fixed size of 5k tokens  BIBREF9 inaguma2018speech show that increasing the vocabulary size is not helpful for ST task  For the character experiments, both English and German sentences are represented in the character level 
For evaluation, we segment each audio with the LIUM SpkDiarization tool BIBREF16 and then perform MWER segmentation with RWTH toolkit BIBREF17  We use lowercase BLEU as evaluation metric 
Experiments ::: Baseline Models and Implementation
We compare our method with following baselines 
Vanilla ST baseline: The vanilla ST BIBREF9 has only a speech encoder and a decoder  It is trained from scratch on the ST-TED corpus 
Pre-training baselines: We conduct three pre-training baseline experiments: 1) encoder pre-training, in which the ST encoder is initialized from an ASR model; 2) decoder pre-training, in which the ST decoder is initialized from an MT model; and 3) encoder-decoder pre-training, where both the encoder and decoder are pre-trained  The ASR model has the same architecture with vanilla ST model, trained on the mixture of ST-TED and TED-LIUM2 corpus  The MT model has a text encoder and decoder with the same architecture of which in TCEN  It is first trained on WMT data (out-of-domain) and then fine-tuned on in-domain data 
Multi-task baselines: We also conduct three multi-task baseline experiments including one-to-many setting, many-to-one setting, and many-to-many setting  In the first two settings, we train the model with $\alpha _{st}=0 75$ while $\alpha _{asr}=0 25$ or $\alpha _{mt}=0 25$  For many-to-many setting, we use $\alpha _{st}=0 6, \alpha _{asr}=0 2$ and $\alpha _{mt}=0 2$   For MT task, we use only in-domain data 
Many-to-many+pre-training: We train a many-to-many multi-task model where the encoders and decoders are derived from pre-trained ASR and MT models  Triangle+pre-train: BIBREF18 DBLP:conf/naacl/AnastasopoulosC18 proposed a triangle multi-task strategy for speech translation  Their model solves the subnet waste issue by concatenating an ST decoder to an ASR encoder-decoder model  Notably, their ST decoder can consume representations from the speech encoder as well as the ASR decoder  For a fair comparison, the speech encoder and the ASR decoder are initialized from the pre-trained ASR model  The Triangle model is fine-tuned under their multi-task manner 
All our baselines as well as TCEN are implemented based on ESPnet BIBREF12, the RNN size is set as $d=1024$ for all models  We use a dropout of 0 3 for embeddings and encoders, and train using Adadelta with initial learning rate of 1 0 for a maximum of 10 epochs 
For training of TCEN, we set $\alpha _{asr}=0 2$ and $\alpha _{mt}=0 8$ in the pre-training stage, since the MT dataset is much larger than ASR dataset  For fine-tune, we use $\alpha _{st}=0 6, \alpha _{asr}=0 2$ and $\alpha _{mt}=0 2$, same as the `many-to-many' baseline 
For testing, we select the model with the best accuracy on speech translation task on dev set  At inference time, we use a beam size of 10, and the beam scores include length normalization with a weight of 0 2 
Experiments ::: Experimental Results
Table TABREF29 shows the results on four test sets as well as the average performance  Our method significantly outperforms the strong `many-to-many+pretrain' baseline by 3 6 and 2 2 BLEU scores respectively, indicating the proposed method is very effective that substantially improves the translation quality  Besides, both pre-training and multi-task learning can improve translation quality, and the pre-training settings (2nd-4th rows) are more effective compared to multi-task settings (5th-8th rows)  We observe a performance degradation in the `triangle+pretrain' baseline  Compared to our method, where the decoder receives higher-level syntactic and semantic linguistic knowledge extracted from text encoder, their ASR decoder can only provide lower word-level linguistic information  Besides, since their model lacks text encoder and the architecture of ST decoder is different from MT decoder, their model cannot utilize the large-scale MT data in all the training stages  Interestingly, we find that the char-level models outperform the subword-level models in all settings, especially in vanilla baseline  A similar phenomenon is observed by BIBREF6 berard2018end  A possible explanation is that learning the alignments between speech frames and subword units in another language is notoriously difficult  Our method can bring more gains in the subword setting since our model is good at learning the text-to-text alignment and the subword-level alignment is more helpful to the translation quality 
Experiments ::: Discussion ::: Ablation Study
To better understand the contribution of each component, we perform an ablation study on subword-level experiments  The results are shown in Table TABREF37  In `-MT noise' setting, we do not add noise to source sentences for MT  In `-weight sharing' setting, we use different parameters in CTC classification layer and source embedding layer  These two experiments prove that both weight sharing and using noisy MT input benefit to the final translation quality  Performance degrades more in `-weight sharing', indicating the semantic consistency contributes more to our model  In the `-pretrain' experiment, we remove the pre-training stage and directly update the model on three tasks, leading to a dramatic decrease on BLEU score, indicating the pre-training is an indispensable step for end-to-end ST 
Experiments ::: Discussion ::: Learning Curve
It is interesting to investigate why our method is superior to baselines  We find that TCEN achieves a higher final result owing to a better start-point in fine-tuning  Figure FIGREF39 provides learning curves of subword accuracy on validation set  The x-axis denotes the fine-tuning training steps  The vanilla model starts at a low accuracy, because its networks are not pre-trained on the ASR and MT data  The trends of our model and `many-to-many+pretrain' are similar, but our model outperforms it about five points in the whole fine-tuning process  It indicates that the gain comes from bridging the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning rather than a better fine-tuning process 
Experiments ::: Discussion ::: Compared with a Cascaded System
Table TABREF29 compares our model with end-to-end baselines  Here, we compare our model with cascaded systems  We build a cascaded system by combining the ASR model and MT model used in pre-training baseline  Word error rate (WER) of the ASR system and BLEU score of the MT system are reported in the supplementary material  In addition to a simple combination of the ASR and MT systems, we also re-segment the ASR outputs before feeding to the MT system, denoted as cascaded+re-seg  Specifically, we train a seq2seq model BIBREF19 on the MT dataset, where the source side is a no punctuation sentence and the target side is a natural sentence  After that, we use the seq2seq model to add sentence boundaries and punctuation on ASR outputs  Experimental results are shown in Table TABREF41  Our end-to-end model outperforms the simple cascaded model over 2 BLEU scores, and it achieves a comparable performance with the cascaded model combining with a sentence re-segment model 
Related Work
Early works conduct speech translation in a pipeline manner BIBREF2, BIBREF20, where the ASR output lattices are fed into an MT system to generate target sentences  HMM BIBREF21, DenseNet BIBREF22, TDNN BIBREF23 are commonly used ASR systems, while RNN with attention BIBREF19 and Transformer BIBREF10 are top choices for MT  To enhance the robustness of the NMT model towards ASR errors, BIBREF24 DBLP:conf/eacl/TsvetkovMD14 and BIBREF25 DBLP:conf/asru/ChenHHL17 propose to simulate the noise in training and inference 
To avoid error propagation and high latency issues, recent works propose translating the acoustic speech into text in target language without yielding the source transcription BIBREF4  Since ST data is scarce, pre-training BIBREF7, multi-task learning BIBREF4, BIBREF6, curriculum learning BIBREF26, attention-passing BIBREF27, and knowledge distillation BIBREF28, BIBREF29 strategies have been explored to utilize ASR data and MT data  Specifically, BIBREF5 DBLP:conf/interspeech/WeissCJWC17 show improvements of performance by training the ST model jointly with the ASR and the MT model  BIBREF6 berard2018end observe faster convergence and better results due to pre-training and multi-task learning on a larger dataset  BIBREF7 DBLP:conf/naacl/BansalKLLG19 show that pre-training a speech encoder on one language can improve ST quality on a different source language  All of them follow the traditional multi-task training strategies  BIBREF26 DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1802-06003 propose to use curriculum learning to improve ST performance on syntactically distant language pairs  To effectively leverage transcriptions in ST data, BIBREF18 DBLP:conf/naacl/AnastasopoulosC18 augment the multi-task model where the target decoder receives information from the source decoder and they show improvements on low-resource speech translation  Their model just consumes ASR and ST data, in contrast, our work sufficiently utilizes the large-scale MT data to capture the rich semantic knowledge  BIBREF30 DBLP:conf/icassp/JiaJMWCCALW19 use pre-trained MT and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis models to convert weakly supervised data into ST pairs and demonstrate that an end-to-end MT model can be trained using only synthesised data 
Conclusion
This paper has investigated the end-to-end method for ST  It has discussed why there is a huge gap between pre-training and fine-tuning in previous methods  To alleviate these issues, we have proposed a method, which is capable of reusing every sub-net and keeping the role of sub-net consistent between pre-training and fine-tuning  Empirical studies have demonstrated that our model significantly outperforms baselines 
Context 3: e , the other children $\tilde{c} \ne c$ of the parent node $c^{\prime }$ of $c$  For $\ell > 1$, the $\ell $-deep sister family also includes all descendants of each $\tilde{c}$ up to $\ell -1$ levels deep, denoted $\textsc {hops}_{\ell -1}(\tilde{c},\downarrow )$  Formally:
For definitions and synonyms we build distractors from all of these sets (with a similar restriction on the depth of sister distractors as noted above)  In doing this, we can systematically investigate model performance on a wide range of distractor sets 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: WordNetQA ::: Perturbations and Semantic Clusters
Based on how we generate data, for each concept $c$ (i e , atomic WordNet synset) and probe type (i e , definitions, hypernymy, etc ), we have a wide variety of questions related to $c$ that manipulate 1) the complexity of reasoning that is involved (e g , the number of inferential hops) and; 2) the types of distractors (or distractor perturbations) that are employed  We call such sets semantic clusters  As we describe in the next section, semantic clusters allow us to devise new types of evaluation that reveal whether models have comprehensive and consistent knowledge of target concepts (e g , evaluating whether a model can correctly answer several questions associated with a concept, as opposed to a few disjoint instances) 
Details of the individual datasets are shown in Table TABREF12  From these sets, we follow BIBREF22 in allocating a maximum of 3k examples for training and reserve the rest for development and testing  Since we are interested in probing, having large held-out sets allows us to do detailed analysis and cluster-based evaluation 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: DictionaryQA
The DictionaryQA dataset is created from the GCIDE dictionary, which is a comprehensive open-source English dictionary built largely from the Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary BIBREF38  Each entry consists of a word, its part-of-speech, its definition, and an optional example sentence (see Table TABREF14)  Overall, 33k entries (out of a total of 155k) contain example sentences/usages  As with the WordNet probes, we focus on this subset so as to contextualize each word being probed  In contrast to WordNet, GCIDE does not have ISA relations or explicit synsets, so we take each unique entry to be a distinct sense  We then use the dictionary entries to create a probe that centers around word-sense disambiguation, as described below 
Dataset Probes and Construction ::: DictionaryQA ::: Example and Distractor Generation 
To generate gold questions and answers, we use the same generation templates for definitions exemplified in Figure TABREF8 for WordNetQA  To generate distractors, we simply take alternative definitions for the target words that represent a different word sense (e g , the alternative definitions of gift shown in Table TABREF14), as well as randomly chosen definitions if needed to create a 5-way multiple choice question  As above, we reserve a maximum of 3k examples for training  Since we have only 9k examples in total in this dataset (see WordSense in Table TABREF12), we also reserve 3k each for development and testing 
We note that initial attempts to build this dataset through standard random splitting gave rise to certain systematic biases that were exploited by the choice-only baseline models described in the next section, and hence inflated overall model scores  After several efforts at filtering we found that, among other factors, using definitions from entries without example sentences as distractors (e g , the first two entries in Table TABREF14) had a surprising correlation with such biases  This suggests that possible biases involving differences between dictionary entries with and without examples can taint the resulting automatically generated MCQA dataset (for more discussion on the pitfalls involved with automatic dataset construction, see Section SECREF5) 
Probing Methodology and Modeling
Given the probes above, we now can start to answer the empirical questions posed at the beginning  Our main focus is on looking at transformer-based MCQA models trained in the science domain (using the benchmarks shown in Table TABREF21)  In this section, we provide details of MCQA and the target models, as well as several baselines that we use to sanity check our new datasets  To evaluate model competence, we look at a combination of model performance after science pre-training and after additional model fine-tuning using the lossless inoculation strategy of BIBREF22 (Section SECREF22)  In Section SECREF24, we also discuss a cluster-level accuracy metric for measuring performance over semantic clusters 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Task Definition and Modeling
Given a dataset $D =\lbrace (\textbf {q}^{(d)}, \lbrace a_{1}^{(d)},   , a_{N}^{(d)}\rbrace ) \rbrace _{d}^{\mid D \mid }$ consisting of pairs of questions stems $\textbf {q}$ and answer choices $a_{i}$, the goal is to find the correct answer $a_{i^{*}}$ that correctly answers each $\textbf {q}$  Throughout this paper, we look at 5-way multiple-choice problems (i e , where each $N=5$) 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Task Definition and Modeling ::: Question+Answer Encoder 
To model this, our investigation centers around the use of the transformer-based BIBREF25 BERT encoder and fine-tuning approach of BIBREF7 (see also BIBREF6)  For each question and individual answer pair $q^{(j)}_{a_{i}}$, we assume the following rendering of this input:
which is run through the pre-trained BERT encoder to generate a representation for $ q^{(j)}_{a_{i}}$ using the hidden state representation for CLS (i e , the classifier token) $\textbf {c}_{i}$:
The probability of a given answer $p^{(j)}_{i}$ is then computed as $p^{(j)}_{i} \propto e^{\textbf {v}\cdot \textbf {c}^{(j)}_{i}}$, which uses an additional set of classification parameters $\textbf {v} \in \mathbb {R}^{H}$ that are optimized (along with the full transformer network) by taking the final loss of the probability of each correct answer $p_{i^{*}}$ over all answer choices:
We specifically use BERT-large uncased with whole-word masking, as well as the RoBERTa-large model from BIBREF9, which is a more robustly trained version of the original BERT model  Our system uses the implementations provided in AllenNLP BIBREF39 and Huggingface BIBREF40 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Task Definition and Modeling ::: Baselines and Sanity Checks 
When creating synthetic datasets, it is important to ensure that systematic biases, or annotation artifacts BIBREF41, are not introduced into the resulting probes and that the target datasets are sufficiently challenging (or good, in the sense of BIBREF42)  To test for this, we use several of the MCQA baseline models first introduced in BIBREF0, which take inspiration from the LSTM-based models used in BIBREF43 for NLI and various partial-input baselines based on these models 
Following the notation from BIBREF0, for any given sequence $s$ of tokens in $\lbrace q^{(j)}, a_{1}^{(j)},   ,a_{N}^{(j)}\rbrace $ in $D$, an encoding of $s$ is given as $h_{s}^{(j)} = \textbf {BiLSTM}(\textsc {embed}(s)) \in \mathbb {R}^{|s| \times 2h}$ (where $h$ is the dimension of the hidden state in each directional network, and embed$(\cdot )$ is an embedding function that assigns token-level embeddings to each token in $s$)  A contextual representation for each $s$ is then built by applying an element-wise max operation over $h_{s}$ as follows:
With these contextual representations, different baseline models can be constructed  For example, a Choice-Only model, which is a variant of the well-known hypothesis-only baseline used in NLI BIBREF46, scores each choice $c_{i}$ in the following way:
for $\textbf {W}^{T} \in \mathbb {R}^{2h}$ independently of the question and assigns a probability to each answer $p_{i}^{(j)} \propto e^{\alpha _{i}^{(j)}}$ 
A slight variant of this model, the Choice-to-choice model, tries to single out a given answer choice relative to other choices by scoring all choice pairs $\alpha _{i,i^{\prime }}^{(j)} = \textsc {Att}(r^{(j)}_{c_{i}},r^{(j)}_{c_{i^{\prime }}}) \in \mathbb {R}$ using a learned attention mechanism Att and finding the choice with the minimal similarity to other options (for full details, see their original paper)  In using these partial-input baselines, which we train directly on each target probe, we can check whether systematic biases related to answer choices were introduced into the data creation process 
A Question-to-choice model, in contrast, uses the contextual representations for each question and individual choice and an attention model Att model to get a score $\alpha ^{(j)}_{q,i} = \textsc {Att}(r^{(j)}_{q},r^{(j)}_{c_{i}}) \in \mathbb {R}$ as above  Here we also experiment with using ESIM BIBREF47 to generate the contextual representations $r$, as well as a simpler VecSimilarity model that measures the average vector similarity between question and answer tokens: $\alpha ^{(j)}_{q,i} = \textsc {Sim}(\textsc {embed}(q^{(j)}),\textsc {embed}(c^{(j)}_{i}))$  In contrast to the models above, these sets of baselines are used to check for artifacts between questions and answers that are not captured in the partial-input baselines (see discussion in BIBREF49) and ensure that the overall MCQA tasks are sufficiently difficult for our transformer models 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Inoculation and Pre-training
Using the various models introduced above, we train these models on benchmark tasks in the science domain and look at model performance on our probes with and without additional training on samples of probe data, building on the idea of inoculation from BIBREF23  Model inoculation is the idea of continuing to train models on new challenge tasks (in our cases, separately for each probe) using only a small amount of examples  Unlike in ordinary fine-tuning, the goal is not to learn an entirely re-purposed model, but to improve on (or vaccinate against) particular phenomena (e g , our synthetic probes) that potentially deviate from a model's original training distribution (but that nonetheless might involve knowledge already contained in the model) 
In the variant proposed in BIBREF22, for each pre-trained (science) model and architecture $M_{a}$ we continue training the model on $k$ new probe examples (with a maximum of $k=$ 3k) under a set of different hyper-parameter configurations $j \in \lbrace 1,    , J\rbrace $ and identify, for each $k$, the model $M_{*}^{a,k}$ with the best aggregate performance $S$ on the original (orig) and new task:
As in BIBREF22, we found all models to be especially sensitive to different learning rates, and performed comprehensive hyper-parameters searches that also manipulate the number of iterations and random seeds used 
Using this methodology, we can see how much exposure to new data it takes for a given model to master a new task, and whether there are phenomena that stress particular models (e g , lead to catastrophic forgetting of the original task)  Given the restrictions on the number of fine-tuning examples, our assumption is that when models are able to maintain good performance on their original task during inoculation, the quickness with which they are able to learn the inoculated task provides evidence of prior competence, which is precisely what we aim to probe  To measure past performance, we define a model's inoculation cost as the difference in the performance of this model on its original task before and after inoculation 
We pre-train on an aggregated training set of the benchmark science exams detailed in Table TABREF21, and created an aggregate development set of around 4k science questions for evaluating overall science performance and inoculation costs  To handle the mismatch between number of answer choices in these sets, we made all sets 5-way by adding empty answers as needed  We also experimented with a slight variant of inoculation, called add-some inoculation, which involves balancing the inoculation training sets with naturalistic science questions  We reserve the MCQL dataset in Table TABREF21 for this purpose, and experiment with balancing each probe example with a science example (x1 matching) and adding twice as many science questions (x2 matching, up to 3k) for each new example 
Probing Methodology and Modeling ::: Evaluating Model Competence
The standard way to evaluate our MCQA models is by looking at the overall accuracy of the correct answer prediction, or what we call instance-level accuracy (as in Table TABREF25)  Given the nature of our data and the existence of semantic clusters as detailed in Section SECREF11 (i e , sets of questions and answers under different distractor choices and inference complexity), we also measure a model's cluster-level (or strict cluster) accuracy, which requires correctly answering all questions in a cluster  Example semantic clusters are shown in Table TABREF30; in the first case, there are 6 ISA$^\uparrow $ questions (including perturbations) about the concept trouser n 01 (e g

ground_truth: Vanilla ST baseline, encoder pre-training, in which the ST encoder is initialized from an ASR model, decoder pre-training, in which the ST decoder is initialized from an MT model, encoder-decoder pre-training, where both the encoder and decoder are pre-trained, many-to-many multi-task model where the encoders and decoders are derived from pre-trained ASR and MT models, Triangle+pre-train: BIBREF18 DBLP:conf/naacl/AnastasopoulosC18 proposed a triangle multi-task strategy for speech translation

Vanilla ST baseline, Pre-training baselines, Multi-task baselines, Many-to-many+pre-training, Triangle+pre-train

Vanilla ST baseline: The vanilla ST BIBREF9 has only a speech encoder and a decoder. It is trained from scratch on the ST-TED corpus.

Pre-training baselines: We conduct three pre-training baseline experiments: 1) encoder pre-training, in which the ST encoder is initialized from an ASR model; 2) decoder pre-training, in which the ST decoder is initialized from an MT model; and 3) encoder-decoder pre-training, where both the encoder and decoder are pre-trained. The ASR model has the same architecture with vanilla ST model, trained on the mixture of ST-TED and TED-LIUM2 corpus. The MT model has a text encoder and decoder with the same architecture of which in TCEN. It is first trained on WMT data (out-of-domain) and then fine-tuned on in-domain data.

Multi-task baselines: We also conduct three multi-task baseline experiments including one-to-many setting, many-to-one setting, and many-to-many setting. In the first two settings, we train the model with $\alpha _{st}=0.75$ while $\alpha _{asr}=0.25$ or $\alpha _{mt}=0.25$. For many-to-many setting, we use $\alpha _{st}=0.6, \alpha _{asr}=0.2$ and $\alpha _{mt}=0.2$.. For MT task, we use only in-domain data.

Many-to-many+pre-training: We train a many-to-many multi-task model where the encoders and decoders are derived from pre-trained ASR and MT models. 

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. Are the automatically constructed datasets subject to quality control?
Context 3: , involving knowing that trousers are a type of consumer good and garment/clothing), which a model must answer in order to receive full credit 
Our cluster-based analysis is motivated by the idea that if a model truly knows the meaning of a given concept, such as the concept of trousers, then it should be able to answer arbitrary questions about this concept without sensitivity to varied distractors  While our strict cluster metric is simplistic, it takes inspiration from work on visual QA BIBREF53, and allows us to evaluate how consistent and robust models are across our different probes, and to get insight into whether errors are concentrated on a small set of concepts or widespread across clusters 
Results and Findings
In this section, we provide the results of the empirical questions first introduced in Figure FIGREF1, starting with the results of our baseline models 
Results and Findings ::: Are our Probes Sufficiently Challenging?
As shown in Table TABREF25, most of our partial-input baselines (i e , Choice-Only and Choice-to-Choice models) failed to perform well on our dataset probes across a wide range of models, showing that such probes are generally immune from biases relating to how distractors were generated  As already discussed in Section SECREF13, however, initial versions of the DictionaryQA dataset had unforeseen biases partly related to whether distractors were sampled from entries without example sentences, which resulted in high Choice-Only-GloVe scores ranging around 56% accuracy before a filtering step was applied to remove these distractors 
We had similar issues with the hypernymy probe which, even after a filtering step that used our Choice-to-Choice-GloVe model, still leads to high results on the BERT and RoBERTa choice-only models  Given that several attempts were made to entirely de-duplicate the different splits (both in terms of gold answers and distractor types), the source of these biases is not at all obvious, which shows how easy it is for unintended biases in expert knowledge to appear in the resulting datasets and the importance of having rigorous baselines  We also note the large gap in some cases between the BERT and RoBERTa versus GloVe choice-only models, which highlights the need for having partial-input baselines that use the best available models 
Using a more conventional set of Task-Specific QA models (i e , the LSTM-based Question-to-Choice models trained directly on the probes), we can see that results are not particularly strong on any of the datasets, suggesting that our probes are indeed sufficiently challenging and largely immune from overt artifacts  The poor performance of the VecSimilarity (which uses pre-trained Word2Vec embeddings without additional training) provides additional evidence that elementary lexical matching strategies are insufficient for solving any of the probing tasks 
Results and Findings ::: How well do pre-trained MCQA models do?
Science models that use non-transformer based encoders, such as the ESIM model with GloVe and ELMO, perform poorly across all probes, in many cases scoring near random chance, showing limits to how well they generalize from science to other tasks even with pre-trained GloVe and ELMO embeddings  In sharp contrast, the transformer models have mixed results, the most striking result being the RoBERTa models on the definitions and synonymy probes (achieving a test accuracy of 77% and 61%, respectively), which outperform several of the task-specific LSTM models trained directly on the probes  At first glance, this suggests that RoBERTa, which generally far outpaces even BERT across most probes, has high competence of definitions and synonyms even without explicit training on our new tasks 
Given the controlled nature of our probes, we can get a more detailed view of how well the science models are performing across different reasoning and distractor types, as shown in the first column of Figure FIGREF28 for ESIM and RoBERTa  The ESIM science model without training has uniformly poor performance across all categories, whereas the performance of RoBERTa is more varied  Across all datasets and number of hops (i e , the rows in the heat maps), model performance for RoBERTa is consistently highest among examples with random distractors (i e , the first column), and lowest in cases involving distractors that are closest in WordNet space (e g , sister and ISA, or up/down, distractors of distance $k^{\prime }=1$)  This is not surprising, given that, in the first case, random distractors are likely to be the easiest category (and the opposite for distractors close in space), but suggests that RoBERTa might only be getting the easiest cases correct 
Model performance also clearly degrades for hypernymy and hyponymy across all models as the number of hops $k$ increases (see red dashed boxes)  For example, problems that involve hyponym reasoning with sister distractors of distance $k^{\prime }=1$ (i e , the second column) degrades from 47% to 15% when the number of hops $k$ increases from 1 to 4  This general tendency persists even after additional fine-tuning, as we discuss next, and gives evidence that models are limited in their capacity for certain types of multi-hop inferences 
As discussed by BIBREF26, the choice of generation templates can have a significant effect on model performance  The results so far should therefore be regarded as a lower bound on model competence  It is possible that model performance is high for definitions, for example, because the associated templates best align with the science training distribution (which we know little about)  For this reason, the subsequent inoculation step is important—it gives the model an opportunity to learn about our target templates and couple this learned knowledge with its general knowledge acquired during pre-training and science training (which is, again, what we aim to probe) 
Results and Findings ::: Can Models Be Effectively Inoculated?
Model performance after additional fine-tuning, or inoculation, is shown in the last 3 rows of Table TABREF25, along with learning curves shown in Figure FIGREF29 for a selection of probes and models  In the former case, the performance represents the model (and inoculation amount) with the highest aggregate performance over the old task and new probe  Here we again see the transformer-based models outperform non-transformer models, and that better models correlate with lower inoculation costs  For example, when inoculating on synonymy, the cost for ESIM is around 7% reduced accuracy on its original task, as opposed to $< 1$% and around 1% for BERT and RoBERTa, respectively  This shows the high capacity for transformer models to absorb new tasks with minimal costs, as also observed in BIBREF22 for NLI 
As shown in Figure FIGREF29, transformer models tend to learn most tasks fairly quickly while keeping constant scores on their original tasks (i e , the flat dashed lines observed in plots 1-4), which gives evidence of high competence  In both cases, add-some inoculation proves to be a cheap and easy way to 1) improve scores on the probing tasks (i e , the solid black and blue lines in plot 1) and; 2) minimize loss on science (e g , the blue and black dashed lines in plots 2-4)  The opposite is the case for ESIM (plots 5-6); models are generally unable to simultaneously learn individual probes without degrading on their original task, and adding more science data during inoculation confuses models on both tasks 
As shown in Figure FIGREF28, RoBERTa is able to significantly improve performance across most categories even after inoculation with a mere 100 examples (the middle plot), which again provides strong evidence of prior competence  As an example, RoBERTa improves on 2-hop hyponymy inference with random distractors by 18% (from 59% to 77%)  After 3k examples, the model has high performance on virtually all categories (the same score increases from 59% to 87%), however results still tends to degrade as a function of hop and distractor complexity, as discussed above 
Despite the high performance of our transformer models after inoculation, model performance on most probes (with the exception of Definitions) averages around 80% for our best models  This suggests that there is still considerable room for improvement, especially for synonymy and word sense, which is a topic that we discuss more in Section SECREF6 
Results and Findings ::: Are Models Consistent across Clusters?
Table TABREF32 shows cluster-level accuracies for the different WordNetQA probes  As with performance across the different inference/distractor categories, these results are mixed  For some probes, such as definitions, our best models appear to be rather robust; e g , our RoBERTa model has a cluster accuracy of $75\%$, meaning that it can answer all questions perfectly for 75% of the target concepts and that errors are concentrated on a small minority (25%) of concepts  On synonymy and hypernymy, both BERT and RoBERTa appear robust on the majority of concepts, showing that errors are similarly concentrated  In contrast, our best model on hyponymy has an accuracy of 36%, meaning that its errors are spread across many concepts, thus suggesting less robustness 
Table TABREF30 shows a selection of semantic clusters involving ISA reasoning, as well as the model performance over different answers (shown symbolically) and perturbations  For example, in the the second case, the cluster is based around the concept/synset oppose v 06 and involves 4 inferences and a total 24 questions (i e , inferences with perturbations)  Our weakest model, ESIM, answers only 5 out of 24 questions correctly, whereas RoBERTa gets 21/24  In the other cases, RoBERTa gets all clusters correct, whereas BERT and ESIM get none of them correct 
We emphasize that these results only provide a crude look into model consistency and robustness  Recalling again the details in Table TABREF12, probes differ in terms of average size of clusters  Hyponymy, in virtue of having many more questions per cluster, might simply be a much more difficult dataset  In addition, such a strict evaluation does not take into account potential errors inside of clusters, which is an important issue that we discuss in the next section  We leave addressing such issues and coming up with more insightful cluster-based metrics for future work 
Discussion and Conclusion
We presented several new challenge datasets and a novel methodology for automatically building such datasets from knowledge graphs and taxonomies  We used these to probe state-of-the-art open-domain QA models (centering around models based on variants of BERT)  While our general methodology is amendable to any target knowledge resource or QA model/domain, we focus on probing definitions and ISA knowledge using open-source dictionaries and MCQA models trained in the science domain 
We find, consistent with recent probing studies BIBREF26, that transformer-based models have a remarkable ability to answer questions that involve complex forms of relational knowledge, both with and without explicit exposure to our new target tasks  In the latter case, a newer RoBERTa model trained only on benchmark science tasks is able to outperform several task-specific LSTM-based models trained directly on our probing data  When re-trained on small samples (e g , 100 examples) of probing data using variations of the lossless inoculation strategy from BIBREF22, RoBERTa is able to master many aspects of our probes with virtually no performance loss on its original QA task 
These positive results suggest that transformer-based models, especially models additionally fine-tuned on small samples of synthetic data, can be used in place of task-specific models used for querying relational knowledge, as has already been done for targeted tasks such as word sense disambiguation BIBREF54  Since models seem to already contain considerable amounts of relational knowledge, our simple inoculation strategy, which tries to nudge models to bring out this knowledge explicitly, could serve as a cheaper alternative to recent attempts to build architectures that explicitly incorporate structured knowledge BIBREF55; we see many areas where our inoculation strategy could be improved for such purposes, including having more complex loss functions that manage old and new information, as well as using techniques that take into account network plasticity BIBREF56 
The main appeal of using automatically generate datasets is the ability to systematically manipulate and control the complexity of target questions, which allows for more controlled experimentation and new forms of evaluation  Despite the positive results described above, results that look directly at the effect of different types of distractors and the complexity of reasoning show that our best models, even after additional fine-tuning, struggle with certain categories of hard distractors and multi-hop inferences  For some probes, our cluster-based analysis also reveals that errors are widespread across concept clusters, suggesting that models are not always consistent and robust  These results, taken together with our findings about the vulnerability of synthetic datasets to systematic biases, suggest that there is much room for improvement and that the positive results should be taken with a grain of salt  Developing better ways to evaluate semantic clusters and model robustness would be a step in this direction 
We emphasize that using synthetic versus naturalistic QA data comes with important trade-offs  While we are able to generate large amounts of systematically controlled data at virtually no cost or need for manual annotation, it is much harder to validate the quality of such data at such a scale and such varying levels of complexity  Conversely, with benchmark QA datasets, it is much harder to perform the type of careful manipulations and cluster-based analyses we report here  While we assume that the expert knowledge we employ, in virtue of being hand-curated by human experts, is generally correct, we know that such resources are fallible and error-prone  Initial crowd-sourcing experiments that look at validating samples of our data show high agreement across probes and that human scores correlate with the model trends across the probe categories  More details of these studies are left for future work 

ground_truth: No

No