huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: We present the first challenge set and evaluation protocol for the analysis of gender bias in machine translation (MT). Our approach uses two recent coreference resolution datasets composed of English sentences which cast participants into non-stereotypical gender roles (e.g., {``}The doctor asked the nurse to help her in the operation{''}). We devise an automatic gender bias evaluation method for eight target languages with grammatical gender, based on morphological analysis (e.g., the use of female inflection for the word {``}doctor{''}). Our analyses show that four popular industrial MT systems and two recent state-of-the-art academic MT models are significantly prone to gender-biased translation errors for all tested target languages. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/gabrielStanovsky/mt{\_}gender.
LSTMEmbed: Learning Word and Sense Representations from a Large Semantically Annotated Corpus with Long Short-Term Memories
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: While word embeddings are now a de facto standard representation of words in most NLP tasks, recently the attention has been shifting towards vector representations which capture the different meanings, i.e., senses, of words. In this paper we explore the capabilities of a bidirectional LSTM model to learn representations of word senses from semantically annotated corpora. We show that the utilization of an architecture that is aware of word order, like an LSTM, enables us to create better representations. We assess our proposed model on various standard benchmarks for evaluating semantic representations, reaching state-of-the-art performance on the SemEval-2014 word-to-sense similarity task. We release the code and the resulting word and sense embeddings at http://lcl.uniroma1.it/LSTMEmbed.
Understanding Undesirable Word Embedding Associations
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Word embeddings are often criticized for capturing undesirable word associations such as gender stereotypes. However, methods for measuring and removing such biases remain poorly understood. We show that for any embedding model that implicitly does matrix factorization, debiasing vectors post hoc using subspace projection (Bolukbasi et al., 2016) is, under certain conditions, equivalent to training on an unbiased corpus. We also prove that WEAT, the most common association test for word embeddings, systematically overestimates bias. Given that the subspace projection method is provably effective, we use it to derive a new measure of association called the relational inner product association (RIPA). Experiments with RIPA reveal that, on average, skipgram with negative sampling (SGNS) does not make most words any more gendered than they are in the training corpus. However, for gender-stereotyped words, SGNS actually amplifies the gender association in the corpus.
Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female politicians. In this paper, we aim not to merely study this phenomenon qualitatively, but instead to quantify the degree to which the language used to describe men and women is different and, moreover, different in a positive or negative way. To that end, we introduce a generative latent-variable model that jointly represents adjective (or verb) choice, with its sentiment, given the natural gender of a head (or dependent) noun. We find that there are significant differences between descriptions of male and female nouns and that these differences align with common gender stereotypes: Positive adjectives used to describe women are more often related to their bodies than adjectives used to describe men.
Topic Sensitive Attention on Generic Corpora Corrects Sense Bias in Pretrained Embeddings
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Given a small corpus D{\_}T pertaining to a limited set of focused topics, our goal is to train embeddings that accurately capture the sense of words in the topic in spite of the limited size of D{\_}T. These embeddings may be used in various tasks involving D{\_}T. A popular strategy in limited data settings is to adapt pretrained embeddings E trained on a large corpus. To correct for sense drift, fine-tuning, regularization, projection, and pivoting have been proposed recently. Among these, regularization informed by a word{'}s corpus frequency performed well, but we improve upon it using a new regularizer based on the stability of its cooccurrence with other words. However, a thorough comparison across ten topics, spanning three tasks, with standardized settings of hyper-parameters, reveals that even the best embedding adaptation strategies provide small gains beyond well-tuned baselines, which many earlier comparisons ignored. In a bold departure from adapting pretrained embeddings, we propose using D{\_}T to probe, attend to, and borrow fragments from any large, topic-rich source corpus (such as Wikipedia), which need not be the corpus used to pretrain embeddings. This step is made scalable and practical by suitable indexing. We reach the surprising conclusion that even limited corpus augmentation is more useful than adapting embeddings, which suggests that non-dominant sense information may be irrevocably obliterated from pretrained embeddings and cannot be salvaged by adaptation.
SphereRE: Distinguishing Lexical Relations with Hyperspherical Relation Embeddings
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Lexical relations describe how meanings of terms relate to each other. Typical examples include hypernymy, synonymy, meronymy, etc. Automatic distinction of lexical relations is vital for NLP applications, and also challenging due to the lack of contextual signals to discriminate between such relations. In this work, we present a neural representation learning model to distinguish lexical relations among term pairs based on Hyperspherical Relation Embeddings (SphereRE). Rather than learning embeddings for individual terms, the model learns representations of relation triples by mapping them to the hyperspherical embedding space, where relation triples of different lexical relations are well separated. Experiments over several benchmarks confirm SphereRE outperforms state-of-the-arts.
Multilingual Factor Analysis
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: In this work we approach the task of learning multilingual word representations in an offline manner by fitting a generative latent variable model to a multilingual dictionary. We model equivalent words in different languages as different views of the same word generated by a common latent variable representing their latent lexical meaning. We explore the task of alignment by querying the fitted model for multilingual embeddings achieving competitive results across a variety of tasks. The proposed model is robust to noise in the embedding space making it a suitable method for distributed representations learned from noisy corpora.
Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade? For instance, does the character bigram {`}gl{'} have any systematic relationship to the meaning of words like {`}glisten{'}, {`}gleam{'} and {`}glow{'}? In this work, we offer a holistic quantification of the systematicity of the sign using mutual information and recurrent neural networks. We employ these in a data-driven and massively multilingual approach to the question, examining 106 languages. We find a statistically significant reduction in entropy when modeling a word form conditioned on its semantic representation. Encouragingly, we also recover well-attested English examples of systematic affixes. We conclude with the meta-point: Our approximate effect size (measured in bits) is quite small{---}despite some amount of systematicity between form and meaning, an arbitrary relationship and its resulting benefits dominate human language.
Learning Morphosyntactic Analyzers from the Bible via Iterative Annotation Projection across 26 Languages
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: A large percentage of computational tools are concentrated in a very small subset of the planet{'}s languages. Compounding the issue, many languages lack the high-quality linguistic annotation necessary for the construction of such tools with current machine learning methods. In this paper, we address both issues simultaneously: leveraging the high accuracy of English taggers and parsers, we project morphological information onto translations of the Bible in 26 varied test languages. Using an iterative discovery, constraint, and training process, we build inflectional lexica in the target languages. Through a combination of iteration, ensembling, and reranking, we see double-digit relative error reductions in lemmatization and morphological analysis over a strong initial system.
Adversarial Multitask Learning for Joint Multi-Feature and Multi-Dialect Morphological Modeling
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Morphological tagging is challenging for morphologically rich languages due to the large target space and the need for more training data to minimize model sparsity. Dialectal variants of morphologically rich languages suffer more as they tend to be more noisy and have less resources. In this paper we explore the use of multitask learning and adversarial training to address morphological richness and dialectal variations in the context of full morphological tagging. We use multitask learning for joint morphological modeling for the features within two dialects, and as a knowledge-transfer scheme for cross-dialectal modeling. We use adversarial training to learn dialect invariant features that can help the knowledge-transfer scheme from the high to low-resource variants. We work with two dialectal variants: Modern Standard Arabic (high-resource {``}dialect{'}{''}) and Egyptian Arabic (low-resource dialect) as a case study. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results for both. Furthermore, adversarial training provides more significant improvement when using smaller training datasets in particular.
Neural Machine Translation with Reordering Embeddings
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: The reordering model plays an important role in phrase-based statistical machine translation. However, there are few works that exploit the reordering information in neural machine translation. In this paper, we propose a reordering mechanism to learn the reordering embedding of a word based on its contextual information. These learned reordering embeddings are stacked together with self-attention networks to learn sentence representation for machine translation. The reordering mechanism can be easily integrated into both the encoder and the decoder in the Transformer translation system. Experimental results on WMT{'}14 English-to-German, NIST Chinese-to-English, and WAT Japanese-to-English translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly improve the performance of the Transformer.
Neural Fuzzy Repair: Integrating Fuzzy Matches into Neural Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: We present a simple yet powerful data augmentation method for boosting Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance by leveraging information retrieved from a Translation Memory (TM). We propose and test two methods for augmenting NMT training data with fuzzy TM matches. Tests on the DGT-TM data set for two language pairs show consistent and substantial improvements over a range of baseline systems. The results suggest that this method is promising for any translation environment in which a sizeable TM is available and a certain amount of repetition across translations is to be expected, especially considering its ease of implementation.
Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Transformer is the state-of-the-art model in recent machine translation evaluations. Two strands of research are promising to improve models of this kind: the first uses wide networks (a.k.a. Transformer-Big) and has been the de facto standard for development of the Transformer system, and the other uses deeper language representation but faces the difficulty arising from learning deep networks. Here, we continue the line of research on the latter. We claim that a truly deep Transformer model can surpass the Transformer-Big counterpart by 1) proper use of layer normalization and 2) a novel way of passing the combination of previous layers to the next. On WMT{'}16 English-German and NIST OpenMT{'}12 Chinese-English tasks, our deep system (30/25-layer encoder) outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline (6-layer encoder) by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. As another bonus, the deep model is 1.6X smaller in size and 3X faster in training than Transformer-Big.
Generating Diverse Translations with Sentence Codes
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Users of machine translation systems may desire to obtain multiple candidates translated in different ways. In this work, we attempt to obtain diverse translations by using sentence codes to condition the sentence generation. We describe two methods to extract the codes, either with or without the help of syntax information. For diverse generation, we sample multiple candidates, each of which conditioned on a unique code. Experiments show that the sampled translations have much higher diversity scores when using reasonable sentence codes, where the translation quality is still on par with the baselines even under strong constraint imposed by the codes. In qualitative analysis, we show that our method is able to generate paraphrase translations with drastically different structures. The proposed approach can be easily adopted to existing translation systems as no modification to the model is required.
Self-Supervised Neural Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: We present a simple new method where an emergent NMT system is used for simultaneously selecting training data and learning internal NMT representations. This is done in a self-supervised way without parallel data, in such a way that both tasks enhance each other during training. The method is language independent, introduces no additional hyper-parameters, and achieves BLEU scores of 29.21 (en2fr) and 27.36 (fr2en) on newstest2014 using English and French Wikipedia data for training.
Exploring Phoneme-Level Speech Representations for End-to-End Speech Translation
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Previous work on end-to-end translation from speech has primarily used frame-level features as speech representations, which creates longer, sparser sequences than text. We show that a naive method to create compressed phoneme-like speech representations is far more effective and efficient for translation than traditional frame-level speech features. Specifically, we generate phoneme labels for speech frames and average consecutive frames with the same label to create shorter, higher-level source sequences for translation. We see improvements of up to 5 BLEU on both our high and low resource language pairs, with a reduction in training time of 60{\%}. Our improvements hold across multiple data sizes and two language pairs.
Visually Grounded Neural Syntax Acquisition
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: We present the Visually Grounded Neural Syntax Learner (VG-NSL), an approach for learning syntactic representations and structures without any explicit supervision. The model learns by looking at natural images and reading paired captions. VG-NSL generates constituency parse trees of texts, recursively composes representations for constituents, and matches them with images. We define concreteness of constituents by their matching scores with images, and use it to guide the parsing of text. Experiments on the MSCOCO data set show that VG-NSL outperforms various unsupervised parsing approaches that do not use visual grounding, in terms of F1 scores against gold parse trees. We find that VGNSL is much more stable with respect to the choice of random initialization and the amount of training data. We also find that the concreteness acquired by VG-NSL correlates well with a similar measure defined by linguists. Finally, we also apply VG-NSL to multiple languages in the Multi30K data set, showing that our model consistently outperforms prior unsupervised approaches.
Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Advances in learning and representations have reinvigorated work that connects language to other modalities. A particularly exciting direction is Vision-and-Language Navigation(VLN), in which agents interpret natural language instructions and visual scenes to move through environments and reach goals. Despite recent progress, current research leaves unclear how much of a role language under-standing plays in this task, especially because dominant evaluation metrics have focused on goal completion rather than the sequence of actions corresponding to the instructions. Here, we highlight shortcomings of current metrics for the Room-to-Room dataset (Anderson et al.,2018b) and propose a new metric, Coverage weighted by Length Score (CLS). We also show that the existing paths in the dataset are not ideal for evaluating instruction following because they are direct-to-goal shortest paths. We join existing short paths to form more challenging extended paths to create a new data set, Room-for-Room (R4R). Using R4R and CLS, we show that agents that receive rewards for instruction fidelity outperform agents that focus on goal completion.
Expressing Visual Relationships via Language
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: Describing images with text is a fundamental problem in vision-language research. Current studies in this domain mostly focus on single image captioning. However, in various real applications (e.g., image editing, difference interpretation, and retrieval), generating relational captions for two images, can also be very useful. This important problem has not been explored mostly due to lack of datasets and effective models. To push forward the research in this direction, we first introduce a new language-guided image editing dataset that contains a large number of real image pairs with corresponding editing instructions. We then propose a new relational speaker model based on an encoder-decoder architecture with static relational attention and sequential multi-head attention. We also extend the model with dynamic relational attention, which calculates visual alignment while decoding. Our models are evaluated on our newly collected and two public datasets consisting of image pairs annotated with relationship sentences. Experimental results, based on both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate that our model outperforms all baselines and existing methods on all the datasets.
Weakly-Supervised Spatio-Temporally Grounding Natural Sentence in Video
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, July 2019)

Abstract: In this paper, we address a novel task, namely weakly-supervised spatio-temporally grounding natural sentence in video. Specifically, given a natural sentence and a video, we localize a spatio-temporal tube in the video that semantically corresponds to the given sentence, with no reliance on any spatio-temporal annotations during training. First, a set of spatio-temporal tubes, referred to as instances, are extracted from the video. We then encode these instances and the sentence using our newly proposed attentive interactor which can exploit their fine-grained relationships to characterize their matching behaviors. Besides a ranking loss, a novel diversity loss is introduced to train our attentive interactor to strengthen the matching behaviors of reliable instance-sentence pairs and penalize the unreliable ones. We also contribute a dataset, called VID-sentence, based on the ImageNet video object detection dataset, to serve as a benchmark for our task. Results from extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model over the baseline approaches.