ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Deep Reinforced Model for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Summarization with Bilingual Semantic Similarity Rewards (2020)

Cross-lingual text summarization aims at generating a document summary in one language given input in another language. It is a practically important but under-explored task, primarily due to the dearth of available data. Existing methods resort to machine translation to synthesize training data, but such pipeline approaches suffer from error propagation. In this work, we propose an end-to-end cross-lingual text summarization model. The model uses reinforcement learning to directly optimize a bilingual semantic similarity metric between the summaries generated in a target language and gold summaries in a source language. We also introduce techniques to pre-train the model leveraging monolingual summarization and machine translation objectives. Experimental results in both English{--}Chinese and English{--}German cross-lingual summarization settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. In addition, we find that reinforcement learning models with bilingual semantic similarity as rewards generate more fluent sentences than strong baselines.
A Question Type Driven and Copy Loss Enhanced Frameworkfor Answer-Agnostic Neural Question Generation (2020)

The answer-agnostic question generation is a significant and challenging task, which aims to automatically generate questions for a given sentence but without an answer. In this paper, we propose two new strategies to deal with this task: question type prediction and copy loss mechanism. The question type module is to predict the types of questions that should be asked, which allows our model to generate multiple types of questions for the same source sentence. The new copy loss enhances the original copy mechanism to make sure that every important word in the source sentence has been copied when generating questions. Our integrated model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in answer-agnostic question generation, achieving a BLEU-4 score of 13.9 on SQuAD. Human evaluation further validates the high quality of our generated questions. We will make our code public available for further research.
A Generative Approach to Titling and Clustering Wikipedia Sections (2020)

We evaluate the performance of transformer encoders with various decoders for information organization through a new task: generation of section headings for Wikipedia articles. Our analysis shows that decoders containing attention mechanisms over the encoder output achieve high-scoring results by generating extractive text. In contrast, a decoder without attention better facilitates semantic encoding and can be used to generate section embeddings. We additionally introduce a new loss function, which further encourages the decoder to generate high-quality embeddings.
The Unreasonable Volatility of Neural Machine Translation Models (2020)

Recent works have shown that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models achieve impressive performance, however, questions about understanding the behavior of these models remain unanswered. We investigate the unexpected volatility of NMT models where the input is semantically and syntactically correct. We discover that with trivial modifications of source sentences, we can identify cases where \textit{unexpected changes} happen in the translation and in the worst case lead to mistranslations. This volatile behavior of translating extremely similar sentences in surprisingly different ways highlights the underlying generalization problem of current NMT models. We find that both RNN and Transformer models display volatile behavior in 26{\%} and 19{\%} of sentence variations, respectively.
Leveraging Sentence Similarity in Natural Language Generation: Improving Beam Search using Range Voting (2020)

We propose a method for natural language generation, choosing the most representative output rather than the most likely output. By viewing the language generation process from the voting theory perspective, we define representativeness using range voting and a similarity measure. The proposed method can be applied when generating from any probabilistic language model, including n-gram models and neural network models. We evaluate different similarity measures on an image captioning task and a machine translation task, and show that our method generates longer and more diverse sentences, providing a solution to the common problem of short outputs being preferred over longer and more informative ones. The generated sentences obtain higher BLEU scores, particularly when the beam size is large. We also perform a human evaluation on both tasks and find that the outputs generated using our method are rated higher.
Distill, Adapt, Distill: Training Small, In-Domain Models for Neural Machine Translation (2020)

We explore best practices for training small, memory efficient machine translation models with sequence-level knowledge distillation in the domain adaptation setting. While both domain adaptation and knowledge distillation are widely-used, their interaction remains little understood. Our large-scale empirical results in machine translation (on three language pairs with three domains each) suggest distilling twice for best performance: once using general-domain data and again using in-domain data with an adapted teacher.
Training and Inference Methods for High-Coverage Neural Machine Translation (2020)

In this paper, we introduce a system built for the Duolingo Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE) shared task at the 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT 2020). We participated in the English-to-Japanese track with a Transformer model pretrained on the JParaCrawl corpus and fine-tuned in two steps on the JESC corpus and then the (smaller) Duolingo training corpus. First, during training, we find it is essential to deliberately expose the model to higher-quality translations more often during training for optimal translation performance. For inference, encouraging a small amount of diversity with Diverse Beam Search to improve translation coverage yielded marginal improvement over regular Beam Search. Finally, using an auxiliary filtering model to filter out unlikely candidates from Beam Search improves performance further. We achieve a weighted F1 score of 27.56{\%} on our own test set, outperforming the STAPLE AWS translations baseline score of 4.31{\%}.
Meeting the 2020 Duolingo Challenge on a Shoestring (2020)

What is given below is a brief description of the two systems, called gFCONV and c-VAE, which we built in a response to the 2020 Duolingo Challenge. Both are neural models that aim at disrupting a sentence representation the encoder generates with an eye on increasing the diversity of sentences that emerge out of the process. Importantly, we decided not to turn to external sources for extra ammunition, curious to know how far we can go while confining ourselves to the data released by Duolingo. gFCONV works by taking over a pre-trained sequence model, and intercepting the output its encoder produces on its way to the decoder. c-VAE is a conditional variational auto-encoder, seeking the diversity by blurring the representation that the encoder derives. Experiments on a corpus constructed out of the public dataset from Duolingo, containing some 4 million pairs of sentences, found that gFCONV is a consistent winner over c-VAE though both suffered heavily from a low recall.
English-to-Japanese Diverse Translation by Combining Forward and Backward Outputs (2020)

We introduce our TMU system that is submitted to The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT2020) to English-to-Japanese (En{\textrightarrow}Ja) track on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE) shared task. In most cases machine translation systems generate a single output from the input sentence, however, in order to assist language learners in their journey with better and more diverse feedback, it is helpful to create a machine translation system that is able to produce diverse translations of each input sentence. However, creating such systems would require complex modifications in a model to ensure the diversity of outputs. In this paper, we investigated if it is possible to create such systems in a simple way and whether it can produce desired diverse outputs. In particular, we combined the outputs from forward and backward neural translation models (NMT). Our system achieved third place in En{\textrightarrow}Ja track, despite adopting only a simple approach.
POSTECH Submission on Duolingo Shared Task (2020)

In this paper, we propose a transfer learning based simultaneous translation model by extending BART. We pre-trained BART with Korean Wikipedia and a Korean news dataset, and fine-tuned with an additional web-crawled parallel corpus and the 2020 Duolingo official training dataset. In our experiments on the 2020 Duolingo test dataset, our submission achieves 0.312 in weighted macro F1 score, and ranks second among the submitted En-Ko systems.
The ADAPT System Description for the STAPLE 2020 English-to-Portuguese Translation Task (2020)

This paper describes the ADAPT Centre`s submission to STAPLE (Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrase for Language Education) 2020, a shared task of the 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT), for the English-to-Portuguese translation task. In this shared task, the participants were asked to produce high-coverage sets of plausible translations given English prompts (input source sentences). We present our English-to-Portuguese machine translation (MT) models that were built applying various strategies, e.g. data and sentence selection, monolingual MT for generating alternative translations, and combining multiple n-best translations. Our experiments show that adding the aforementioned techniques to the baseline yields an excellent performance in the English-to-Portuguese translation task.
Expand and Filter: CUNI and LMU Systems for the WNGT 2020 Duolingo Shared Task (2020)

We present our submission to the Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE) challenge. We used a standard Transformer model for translation, with a crosslingual classifier predicting correct translations on the output n-best list. To increase the diversity of the outputs, we used additional data to train the translation model, and we trained a paraphrasing model based on the Levenshtein Transformer architecture to generate further synonymous translations. The paraphrasing results were again filtered using our classifier. While the use of additional data and our classifier filter were able to improve results, the paraphrasing model produced too many invalid outputs to further improve the output quality. Our model without the paraphrasing component finished in the middle of the field for the shared task, improving over the best baseline by a margin of 10-22 {\%} weighted F1 absolute.
Exploring Model Consensus to Generate Translation Paraphrases (2020)

This paper describes our submission to the 2020 Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE). This task focuses on improving the ability of neural MT systems to generate diverse translations. Our submission explores various methods, including N-best translation, Monte Carlo dropout, Diverse Beam Search, Mixture of Experts, Ensembling, and Lexical Substitution. Our main submission is based on the integration of multiple translations from multiple methods using Consensus Voting. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves a considerable degree of diversity without introducing noisy translations. Our final submission achieves a 0.5510 weighted F1 score on the blind test set for the English-Portuguese track.
Growing Together: Modeling Human Language Learning With n-Best Multi-Checkpoint Machine Translation (2020)

We describe our submission to the 2020 Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE). We view MT models at various training stages (i.e., checkpoints) as human learners at different levels. Hence, we employ an ensemble of multi-checkpoints from the same model to generate translation sequences with various levels of fluency. From each checkpoint, for our best model, we sample n-Best sequences (n=10) with a beam width =100. We achieve an 37.57 macro F1 with a 6 checkpoint model ensemble on the official shared task test data, outperforming a baseline Amazon translation system of 21.30 macro F1 and ultimately demonstrating the utility of our intuitive method.
Generating Diverse Translations via Weighted Fine-tuning and Hypotheses Filtering for the Duolingo STAPLE Task (2020)

This paper describes the University of Maryland`s submission to the Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation And Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE). Unlike the standard machine translation task, STAPLE requires generating a set of outputs for a given input sequence, aiming to cover the space of translations produced by language learners. We adapt neural machine translation models to this requirement by (a) generating n-best translation hypotheses from a model fine-tuned on learner translations, oversampled to reflect the distribution of learner responses, and (b) filtering hypotheses using a feature-rich binary classifier that directly optimizes a close approximation of the official evaluation metric. Combination of systems that use these two strategies achieves F1 scores of 53.9{\%} and 52.5{\%} on Vietnamese and Portuguese, respectively ranking 2nd and 4th on the leaderboard.
The JHU Submission to the 2020 Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrase for Language Education (2020)

This paper presents the Johns Hopkins University submission to the 2020 Duolingo Shared Task on Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrase for Language Education (STAPLE). We participated in all five language tasks, placing first in each. Our approach involved a language-agnostic pipeline of three components: (1) building strong machine translation systems on general-domain data, (2) fine-tuning on Duolingo-provided data, and (3) generating n-best lists which are then filtered with various score-based techniques. In addi- tion to the language-agnostic pipeline, we attempted a number of linguistically-motivated approaches, with, unfortunately, little success. We also find that improving BLEU performance of the beam-search generated translation does not necessarily improve on the task metric{---}weighted macro F1 of an n-best list.
Simultaneous paraphrasing and translation by fine-tuning Transformer models (2020)

This paper describes the third place submission to the shared task on simultaneous translation and paraphrasing for language education at the 4th workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT) for ACL 2020. The final system leverages pre-trained translation models and uses a Transformer architecture combined with an oversampling strategy to achieve a competitive performance. This system significantly outperforms the baseline on Hungarian (27{\%} absolute improvement in Weighted Macro F1 score) and Portuguese (33{\%} absolute improvement) languages.
The NiuTrans System for WNGT 2020 Efficiency Task (2020)

This paper describes the submissions of the NiuTrans Team to the WNGT 2020 Efficiency Shared Task. We focus on the efficient implementation of deep Transformer models (Wang et al., 2019; Li et al., 2019) using NiuTensor, a flexible toolkit for NLP tasks. We explored the combination of deep encoder and shallow decoder in Transformer models via model compression and knowledge distillation. The neural machine translation decoding also benefits from FP16 inference, attention caching, dynamic batching, and batch pruning. Our systems achieve promising results in both translation quality and efficiency, e.g., our fastest system can translate more than 40,000 tokens per second with an RTX 2080 Ti while maintaining 42.9 BLEU on newstest2018.
Efficient and High-Quality Neural Machine Translation with OpenNMT (2020)

This paper describes the OpenNMT submissions to the WNGT 2020 efficiency shared task. We explore training and acceleration of Transformer models with various sizes that are trained in a teacher-student setup. We also present a custom and optimized C++ inference engine that enables fast CPU and GPU decoding with few dependencies. By combining additional optimizations and parallelization techniques, we create small, efficient, and high-quality neural machine translation models.
Edinburgh`s Submissions to the 2020 Machine Translation Efficiency Task (2020)

We participated in all tracks of the Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation 2020 Efficiency Shared Task: single-core CPU, multi-core CPU, and GPU. At the model level, we use teacher-student training with a variety of student sizes, tie embeddings and sometimes layers, use the Simpler Simple Recurrent Unit, and introduce head pruning. On GPUs, we used 16-bit floating-point tensor cores. On CPUs, we customized 8-bit quantization and multiple processes with affinity for the multi-core setting. To reduce model size, we experimented with 4-bit log quantization but use floats at runtime. In the shared task, most of our submissions were Pareto optimal with respect the trade-off between time and quality.
Improving Document-Level Neural Machine Translation with Domain Adaptation (2020)

Recent studies have shown that translation quality of NMT systems can be improved by providing document-level contextual information. In general sentence-based NMT models are extended to capture contextual information from large-scale document-level corpora which are difficult to acquire. Domain adaptation on the other hand promises adapting components of already developed systems by exploiting limited in-domain data. This paper presents FJWU`s system submission at WNGT, we specifically participated in Document level MT task for German-English translation. Our system is based on context-aware Transformer model developed on top of original NMT architecture by integrating contextual information using attention networks. Our experimental results show providing previous sentences as context significantly improves the BLEU score as compared to a strong NMT baseline. We also studied the impact of domain adaptation on document level translationand were able to improve results by adaptingthe systems according to the testing domain.
Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrase for Language Education (2020)

We present the task of Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrasing for Language Education (STAPLE). Given a prompt in one language, the goal is to generate a diverse set of correct translations that language learners are likely to produce. This is motivated by the need to create and maintain large, high-quality sets of acceptable translations for exercises in a language-learning application, and synthesizes work spanning machine translation, MT evaluation, automatic paraphrasing, and language education technology. We developed a novel corpus with unique properties for five languages (Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Vietnamese), and report on the results of a shared task challenge which attracted 20 teams to solve the task. In our meta-analysis, we focus on three aspects of the resulting systems: external training corpus selection, model architecture and training decisions, and decoding and filtering strategies. We find that strong systems start with a large amount of generic training data, and then fine-tune with in-domain data, sampled according to our provided learner response frequencies.
CollFrEn: Rich Bilingual English--French Collocation Resource (2020)

Collocations in the sense of idiosyncratic lexical co-occurrences of two syntactically bound words traditionally pose a challenge to language learners and many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications alike. Reliable ground truth (i.e., ideally manually compiled) resources are thus of high value. We present a manually compiled bilingual English{--}French collocation resource with 7,480 collocations in English and 6,733 in French. Each collocation is enriched with information that facilitates its downstream exploitation in NLP tasks such as machine translation, word sense disambiguation, natural language generation, relation classification, and so forth. Our proposed enrichment covers: the semantic category of the collocation (its lexical function), its vector space representation (for each individual word as well as their joint collocation embedding), a subcategorization pattern of both its elements, as well as their corresponding BabelNet id, and finally, indices of their occurrences in large scale reference corpora.
Filling the \_\_\_-s in Finnish MWE lexicons (2020)

This paper describes the automatic construction of FinnMWE: a lexicon of Finnish Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs). In focus here are syntactic frames: verbal constructions with arguments in a particular morphological form. The verbal frames are automatically extracted from FinnWordNet and English Wiktionary. The resulting lexicon interoperates with dependency tree searching software so that instances can be quickly found within dependency treebanks. The extraction and enrichment process is explained in detail. The resulting resource is evaluated in terms of its coverage of different types of MWEs. It is also compared with and evaluated against Finnish PropBank.
Hierarchy-aware Learning of Sequential Tool Usage via Semi-automatically Constructed Taxonomies (2020)

When repairing a device, humans employ a series of tools that corresponds to the arrangement of the device components. Such sequences of tool usage can be learned from repair manuals, so that at each step, having observed the previously applied tools, a sequential model can predict the next required tool. In this paper, we improve the tool prediction performance of such methods by additionally taking the hierarchical relationships among the tools into account. To this aim, we build a taxonomy of tools with hyponymy and hypernymy relations from the data by decomposing all multi-word expressions of tool names. We then develop a sequential model that performs a binary prediction for each node in the taxonomy. The evaluation of the method on a dataset of repair manuals shows that encoding the tools with the constructed taxonomy and using a top-down beam search for decoding increases the prediction accuracy and yields an interpretable taxonomy as a potentially valuable byproduct.
Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials (2020)

The multiword adverbials N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM (as English {\textquotedblleft}brick by brick{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}one by one{\textquotedblright}, respectively) are event modifiers which require temporal sequencing of the event they modify into a linearly ordered series of sub-events. Previous studies unified these two constructions under a single semantic analysis and adopted either a mereological or a scalar approach. However, based on a corpus study examining new Slavic language material and a binomial logistic regression modelling of the manually annotated data, we argue that two separate analyses are needed to account for these constructions, namely a scalar analysis for the N-BY-N construction and a mereological one for the NUM-BY-NUM construction.
Polish corpus of verbal multiword expressions (2020)

This paper describes a manually annotated corpus of verbal multi-word expressions in Polish. It is among the 4 biggest datasets in release 1.2 of the PARSEME multiligual corpus. We describe the data sources, as well as the annotation process and its outcomes. We also present interesting phenomena encountered during the annotation task and put forward enhancements for the PARSEME annotation guidelines.