ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Constraining word alignments with posterior regularization for label transfer (2022)

Unsupervised word alignments offer a lightweight and interpretable method to transfer labels from high- to low-resource languages, as long as semantically related words have the same label across languages. But such an assumption is often not true in industrial NLP pipelines, where multilingual annotation guidelines are complex and deviate from semantic consistency due to various factors (such as annotation difficulty, conflicting ontology, upcoming feature launches etc.);We address this difficulty by constraining the alignments models to remain consistent with both source and target annotation guidelines , leveraging posterior regularization and labeled examples. We illustrate the overall approach using IBM 2 (fast{\_}align) as a base model, and report results on both internal and external annotated datasets. We measure consistent accuracy improvements on the MultiATIS++ dataset over AWESoME, a popular transformer-based alignment model, in the label projection task ($+2.7\%$ at word-level and $+15\%$ at sentence-level), and show how even a small amount of target language annotations help substantially.
Explaining the Effectiveness of Multi-Task Learning for Efficient Knowledge Extraction from Spine MRI Reports (2022)

Pretrained Transformer based models finetuned on domain specific corpora have changed the landscape of NLP. However, training or fine-tuning these models for individual tasks can be time consuming and resource intensive. Thus, a lot of current research is focused on using transformers for multi-task learning (Raffel et al., 2020) and how to group the tasks to help a multi-task model to learn effective representations that can be shared across tasks (Standley et al., 2020; Fifty et al., 2021) . In this work, we show that a single multi-tasking model can match the performance of task specific model when the task specific models show similar representations across all of their hidden layers and their gradients are aligned, i.e. their gradients follow the same direction. We hypothesize that the above observations explain the effectiveness of multi-task learning. We validate our observations on our internal radiologist-annotated datasets on the cervical and lumbar spine. Our method is simple and intuitive, and can be used in a wide range of NLP problems.
FPI: Failure Point Isolation in Large-scale Conversational Assistants (2022)

Large-scale conversational assistants such as Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri process requests through a series of modules for wake word detection, speech recognition, language understanding and response generation. An error in one of these modules can cascade through the system. Given the large traffic volumes in these assistants, it is infeasible to manually analyze the data, identify requests with processing errors and isolate the source of error. We present a machine learning system to address this challenge. First, we embed the incoming request and context, such as system response and subsequent turns, using pre-trained transformer models. Then, we combine these embeddings with encodings of additional metadata features (such as confidence scores from different modules in the online system) using a {\textquotedblleft}mixing-encoder{\textquotedblright} to output the failure point predictions. Our system obtains 92.2{\%} of human performance on this task while scaling to analyze the entire traffic in 8 different languages of a large-scale conversational assistant. We present detailed ablation studies analyzing the impact of different modeling choices.
Asynchronous Convergence in Multi-Task Learning via Knowledge Distillation from Converged Tasks (2022)

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to solve multiple tasks jointly by sharing a base representation among them. This can lead to more efficient learning and better generalization, as compared to learning each task individually. However, one issue that often arises in MTL is the convergence speed between tasks varies due to differences in task difficulty, so it can be a challenge to simultaneously achieve the best performance on all tasks with a single model checkpoint. Various techniques have been proposed to address discrepancies in task convergence rate, including weighting the per-task losses and modifying task gradients. In this work, we propose a novel approach that avoids the problem of requiring all tasks to converge at the same rate, but rather allows for {\textquotedblleft}asynchronous{\textquotedblright} convergence among the tasks where each task can converge on its own schedule. As our main contribution, we monitor per-task validation metrics and switch to a knowledge distillation loss once a task has converged instead of continuing to train on the true labels. This prevents the model from overfitting on converged tasks while it learns the remaining tasks. We evaluate the proposed method in two 5-task MTL setups consisting of internal e-commerce datasets. The results show that our method consistently outperforms existing loss weighting and gradient balancing approaches, achieving average improvements of 0.9{\%} and 1.5{\%} over the best performing baseline model in the two setups, respectively.
Augmenting Training Data for Massive Semantic Matching Models in Low-Traffic E-commerce Stores (2022)

Extreme multi-label classification (XMC) systems have been successfully applied in e-commerce (Shen et al., 2020; Dahiya et al., 2021) for retrieving products based on customer behavior. Such systems require large amounts of customer behavior data (e.g. queries, clicks, purchases) for training. However, behavioral data is limited in low-traffic e-commerce stores, impacting performance of these systems. In this paper, we present a technique that augments behavioral training data via query reformulation. We use the Aggregated Label eXtreme Multi-label Classification (AL-XMC) system (Shen et al., 2020) as an example semantic matching model and show via crowd-sourced human judgments that, when the training data is augmented through query reformulations, the quality of AL-XMC improves over a baseline that does not use query reformulation. We also show in online A/B tests that our method significantly improves business metrics for the AL-XMC model.
Retrieval Based Response Letter Generation For a Customer Care Setting (2022)

Letter-like communications (such as email) are a major means of customer relationship management within customer-facing organizations. These communications are initiated on a channel by requests from customers and then responded to by the organization on the same channel. For decades, the job has almost entirely been conducted by human agents who attempt to provide the most appropriate reaction to the request. Rules have been made to standardize the overall customer service process and make sure the customers receive professional responses. Recent progress in natural language processing has made it possible to automate response generation. However, the diversity and open nature of customer queries and the lack of structured knowledge bases make this task even more challenging than typical task-oriented language generation tasks. Keeping those obstacles in mind, we propose a deep-learning based response letter generation framework that attempts to retrieve knowledge from historical responses and utilize it to generate an appropriate reply. Our model uses data augmentation to address the insufficiency of query-response pairs and employs a ranking mechanism to choose the best response from multiple potential options. We show that our technique outperforms the baselines by significant margins while producing consistent and informative responses.
Medical Coding with Biomedical Transformer Ensembles and Zero/Few-shot Learning (2022)

Medical coding (MC) is an essential pre-requisite for reliable data retrieval and reporting. Given a free-text \textit{reported term} (RT) such as {\textquotedblleft}pain of right thigh to the knee{\textquotedblright}, the task is to identify the matching \textit{lowest-level term} (LLT) {--}in this case {\textquotedblleft}unilateral leg pain{\textquotedblright}{--} from a very large and continuously growing repository of standardized medical terms. However, automating this task is challenging due to a large number of LLT codes (as of writing over $80\,000$), limited availability of training data for long tail/emerging classes, and the general high accuracy demands of the medical domain.With this paper, we introduce the MC task, discuss its challenges, and present a novel approach called xTARS that combines traditional BERT-based classification with a recent zero/few-shot learning approach (TARS). We present extensive experiments that show that our combined approach outperforms strong baselines, especially in the few-shot regime. The approach is developed and deployed at Bayer, live since November 2021. As we believe our approach potentially promising beyond MC, and to ensure reproducibility, we release the code to the research community.
Knowledge extraction from aeronautical messages (NOTAMs) with self-supervised language models for aircraft pilots (2022)

During their pre-flight briefings, aircraft pilots must analyse a long list of NoTAMs (NOtice To AirMen) indicating potential hazards along the flight route, sometimes up to pages for long-haul flights. NOTAM free-text fields typically have a very special phrasing, with lots of acronyms and domain-specific vocabulary, which makes it differ significantly from standard English. In this paper, we pretrain language models derived from BERT on circa 1 million unlabeled NOTAMs and reuse the learnt representations on three downstream tasks valuable for pilots: criticality prediction, named entity recognition and translation into a structured language called Airlang. This self-supervised approach, where smaller amounts of labeled data are enough for task-specific fine-tuning, is well suited in the aeronautical context since expert annotations are expensive and time-consuming. We present evaluation scores across the tasks showing a high potential for an operational usability of such models (by pilots, airlines or service providers), which is a first to the best of our knowledge.
Intent Discovery for Enterprise Virtual Assistants: Applications of Utterance Embedding and Clustering to Intent Mining (2022)

A key challenge in the creation and refinement of virtual assistants is the ability to mine unlabeled utterance data to discover common intents. We develop an approach to this problem that combines large-scale pre-training and multi-task learning to derive a semantic embedding that can be leveraged to identify clusters of utterances that correspond to unhandled intents. An utterance encoder is first trained with a language modeling objective and subsequently adapted to predict intent labels from a large collection of cross-domain enterprise virtual assistant data using a multi-task cosine softmax loss. Experimental evaluation shows significant advantages for this multi-step pre-training approach, with large gains in downstream clustering accuracy on new applications compared to standard sentence embedding approaches. The approach has been incorporated into an interactive discovery tool that enables visualization and exploration of intents by system analysts and builders.
ReFinED: An Efficient Zero-shot-capable Approach to End-to-End Entity Linking (2022)

We introduce ReFinED, an efficient end-to-end entity linking model which uses fine-grained entity types and entity descriptions to perform linking. The model performs mention detection, fine-grained entity typing, and entity disambiguation for all mentions within a document in a single forward pass, making it more than 60 times faster than competitive existing approaches. ReFinED also surpasses state-of-the-art performance on standard entity linking datasets by an average of 3.7 F1. The model is capable of generalising to large-scale knowledge bases such as Wikidata (which has 15 times more entities than Wikipedia) and of zero-shot entity linking. The combination of speed, accuracy and scale makes ReFinED an effective and cost-efficient system for extracting entities from web-scale datasets, for which the model has been successfully deployed.
Lightweight Transformers for Conversational AI (2022)

To understand how training on conversational language impacts performance of pre-trained models on downstream dialogue tasks, we build compact Transformer-based Language Models from scratch on several large corpora of conversational data. We compare the performance and characteristics of these models against BERT and other strong baselines on dialogue probing tasks. Commercial dialogue systems typically require a small footprint and fast execution time, but recent trends are in the other direction, with an ever-increasing number of parameters, resulting in difficulties in model deployment. We focus instead on training fast, lightweight models that excel at natural language understanding (NLU) and can replace existing lower-capacity conversational AI models with similar size and speed. In the process, we develop a simple but unique curriculum-based approach that moves from general-purpose to dialogue-targeted both in terms of data and objective. Our resultant models have around 1/3 the number of parameters of BERT-base and produce better representations for a wide array of intent detection datasets using linear and Mutual-Information probing techniques. Additionally, the models can be easily fine-tuned on a single consumer GPU card and deployed in near real-time production environments.
NER-MQMRC: Formulating Named Entity Recognition as Multi Question Machine Reading Comprehension (2022)

NER has been traditionally formulated as a sequence labeling task. However, there has been recent trend in posing NER as a machine reading comprehension task (Wang et al., 2020; Mengge et al., 2020), where entity name (or other information) is considered as a question, text as the context and entity value in text as answer snippet. These works consider MRC based on a single question (entity) at a time. We propose posing NER as a multi-question MRC task, where multiple questions (one question per entity) are considered at the same time for a single text. We propose a novel BERT-based multi-question MRC (NER-MQMRC) architecture for this formulation. NER-MQMRC architecture considers all entities as input to BERT for learning token embeddings with self-attention and leverages BERT-based entity representation for further improving these token embeddings for NER task. Evaluation on three NER datasets show that our proposed architecture leads to average 2.5 times faster training and 2.3 times faster inference as compared to NER-SQMRC framework based models by considering all entities together in a single pass. Further, we show that our model performance does not degrade compared to single-question based MRC (NER-SQMRC) (Devlin et al., 2019) leading to F1 gain of +0.41{\%}, +0.32{\%} and +0.27{\%} for AE-Pub, Ecommerce5PT and Twitter datasets respectively. We propose this architecture primarily to solve large scale e-commerce attribute (or entity) extraction from unstructured text of a magnitude of 50k+ attributes to be extracted on a scalable production environment with high performance and optimised training and inference runtimes.
What Do Users Care About? Detecting Actionable Insights from User Feedback (2022)

Users often leave feedback on a myriad of aspects of a product which, if leveraged successfully, can help yield useful insights that can lead to further improvements down the line. Detecting actionable insights can be challenging owing to large amounts of data as well as the absence of labels in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present an aggregation and graph-based ranking strategy for unsupervised detection of these insights from real-world, noisy, user-generated feedback. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two real-world user feedback datasets and one academic dataset.
CTM - A Model for Large-Scale Multi-View Tweet Topic Classification (2022)

Automatically associating social media posts with topics is an important prerequisite for effective search and recommendation on many social media platforms. However, topic classification of such posts is quite challenging because of (a) a large topic space (b) short text with weak topical cues, and (c) multiple topic associations per post. In contrast to most prior work which only focuses on post-classification into a small number of topics ($10-20$), we consider the task of large-scale topic classification in the context of Twitter where the topic space is 10 times larger with potentially multiple topic associations per Tweet. We address the challenges above and propose a novel neural model, that (a) supports a large topic space of 300 topics (b) takes a holistic approach to tweet content modeling {--} leveraging multi-modal content, author context, and deeper semantic cues in the Tweet. Our method offers an effective way to classify Tweets into topics at scale by yielding superior performance to other approaches (a relative lift of $\mathbf{20}\%$ in median average precision score) and has been successfully deployed in production at Twitter.
Developing a Production System for Purpose of Call Detection in Business Phone Conversations (2022)

For agents at a contact centre receiving calls, the most important piece of information is the reason for a given call. An agent cannot provide support on a call if they do not know why a customer is calling. In this paper we describe our implementation of a commercial system to detect Purpose of Call statements in English business call transcripts in real time. We present a detailed analysis of types of Purpose of Call statements and language patterns related to them, discuss an approach to collect rich training data by bootstrapping from a set of rules to a neural model, and describe a hybrid model which consists of a transformer-based classifier and a set of rules by leveraging insights from the analysis of call transcripts. The model achieved 88.6 F1 on average in various types of business calls when tested on real life data and has low inference time. We reflect on the challenges and design decisions when developing and deploying the system.
Adversarial Text Normalization (2022)

Text-based adversarial attacks are becoming more commonplace and accessible to general internet users. As these attacks proliferate, the need to address the gap in model robustness becomes imminent. While retraining on adversarial data may increase performance, there remains an additional class of character-level attacks on which these models falter. Additionally, the process to retrain a model is time and resource intensive, creating a need for a lightweight, reusable defense. In this work, we propose the Adversarial Text Normalizer, a novel method that restores baseline performance on attacked content with low computational overhead. We evaluate the efficacy of the normalizer on two problem areas prone to adversarial attacks, i.e. Hate Speech and Natural Language Inference. We find that text normalization provides a task-agnostic defense against character-level attacks that can be implemented supplementary to adversarial retraining solutions, which are more suited for semantic alterations.
Constraint-based Multi-hop Question Answering with Knowledge Graph (2022)

The objective of a Question-Answering system over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) is to respond to natural language queries presented over the KG. A complex question answering system typically addresses one of the two categories of complexity: questions with constraints and questions involving multiple hops of relations. Most of the previous works have addressed these complexities separately. Multi-hop KGQA necessitates reasoning across numerous edges of the KG in order to arrive at the correct answer. Because KGs are frequently sparse, multi-hop KGQA presents extra complications. Recent works have developed KG embedding approaches to reduce KG sparsity by performing missing link prediction. In this paper, we tried to address multi-hop constrained-based queries using KG embeddings to generate more flexible query graphs. Empirical results indicate that the proposed methodology produces state-of-the-art outcomes on three KGQA datasets.
Fast Bilingual Grapheme-To-Phoneme Conversion (2022)

Autoregressive transformer (ART)-based grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models have been proposed for bi/multilingual text-to-speech systems. Although they have achieved great success, they suffer from high inference latency in real-time industrial applications, especially processing long sentence. In this paper, we propose a fast and high-performance bilingual G2P model. For fast and exact decoding, we used a non-autoregressive structured transformer-based architecture and data augmentation for predicting output length. Our model achieved better performance than that of the previous autoregressive model and about 2700{\%} faster inference speed.
Knowledge Extraction From Texts Based on Wikidata (2022)

This paper presents an effort within our company of developing knowledge extraction pipeline for English, which can be further used for constructing an entreprise-specific knowledge base. We present a system consisting of entity detection and linking, coreference resolution, and relation extraction based on the Wikidata schema. We highlight existing challenges of knowledge extraction by evaluating the deployed pipeline on real-world data. We also make available a database, which can serve as a new resource for sentential relation extraction, and we underline the importance of having balanced data for training classification models.
AIT-QA: Question Answering Dataset over Complex Tables in the Airline Industry (2022)

Table Question Answering (Table QA) systems have been shown to be highly accurate when trained and tested on open-domain datasets built on top of Wikipedia tables. However, it is not clear whether their performance remains the same when applied to domain-specific scientific and business documents, encountered in industrial settings, which exhibit some unique characteristics: (a) they contain tables with a much more complex layout than Wikipedia tables (including hierarchical row and column headers), (b) they contain domain-specific terms, and (c) they are typically not accompanied by domain-specific labeled data that can be used to train Table QA models. To understand the performance of Table QA approaches in this setting, we introduce AIT-QA; a domain-specific Table QA test dataset. While focusing on the airline industry, AIT-QA reflects the challenges that domain-specific documents pose to Table QA, outlined above. In this work, we describe the creation of the dataset and report zero-shot experimental results of three SOTA Table QA methods. The results clearly expose the limitations of current methods with a best accuracy of just 51.8{\%}. We also present pragmatic table pre-processing steps to pivot and project complex tables into a layout suitable for the SOTA Table QA models. Finally, we provide data-driven insights on how different aspects of this setting (including hierarchical headers, domain-specific terminology, and paraphrasing) affect Table QA methods, in order to help the community develop improved methods for domain-specific Table QA.