Dominican Republic

For many use cases, it is required that MT does not just translate raw text, but complex formatted documents (e.g. websites, slides, spreadsheets) and the result of the translation should reflect the formatting. This is challenging, as markup can be nested, apply to spans contiguous in source but non-contiguous in target etc. Here we present TransIns, a system for non-plain text document translation that builds on the Okapi framework and MT models trained with Marian NMT. We develop, implement and examine different strategies for reinserting markup into translated sentences using token alignments between source and target sentences. We propose a simple and effective strategy that compiles down all markup to single source tokens and transfers them to aligned target tokens. Our evaluation shows that this strategy yields highly accurate markup in the translated documents that outperforms the markup quality found in documents translated with popular translation services.

EMNLP 2021

TransIns: Document Translation with Markup Reinsertion

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

demo

We explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to focus on the macro level and not on the level of individual edges---a gap we aim to address. As a test case, we take the transfer of Universal Dependencies (UD) parsing from English to a diverse set of languages and conduct two sets of experiments. In one, we analyze zero-shot performance based on the extent to which English source edges are preserved in translation. In another, we apply three linguistically motivated transformations to UD, creating more cross-lingually stable versions of it, and assess their zero-shot parsability. In order to compare parsing performance across different schemes, we perform extrinsic evaluation on the downstream task of cross-lingual relation extraction (RE) using a subset of a popular English RE benchmark translated to Russian and Korean. In both sets of experiments, our results suggest a strong relation between cross-lingual stability and zero-shot parsing performance.

On the Relation between Syntactic Divergence and Zero-Shot Performance

We compare two orthogonal semi-supervised learning techniques, namely tri-training and pretrained word embeddings, in the task of dependency parsing. We explore language-specific FastText and ELMo embeddings and multilingual BERT embeddings. We focus on a low resource scenario as semi-supervised learning can be expected to have the most impact here. Based on treebank size and available ELMo models, we select Hungarian, Uyghur (a zero-shot language for mBERT) and Vietnamese. Furthermore, we include English in a simulated low-resource setting. We find that pretrained word embeddings make more effective use of unlabelled data than tri-training but that the two approaches can be successfully combined.

Revisiting Tri-training of Dependency Parsers

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling alleviates the data dependence in the case of data scarcity in the target domain, which has aroused extensive research. However, as most of the existing methods do not achieve effective knowledge transfer to the target domain, they just fit the distribution of the seen slot and show poor performance on unseen slot in the target domain. To solve this, we propose a novel approach based on prototypical contrastive learning with a dynamic label confusion strategy for zero-shot slot filling. The prototypical contrastive learning aims to reconstruct the semantic constraints of labels, and we introduce the label confusion strategy to establish the label dependence between the source domains and the target domain on-the-fly. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvement on the unseen slots, while also set new state-of-the-arts on slot filling task.

Bridge to Target Domain by Prototypical Contrastive Learning and Label Confusion: Re-explore Zero-Shot Learning for Slot Filling

Abstractive text summarization is one of the areas influenced by the emergence of pre-trained language models. Current pre-training works in abstractive summarization give more points to the summaries with more words in common with the main text and pay less attention to the semantic similarity between generated sentences and the original document. We propose ARMAN, a Transformer-based encoder-decoder model pre-trained with three novel objectives to address this issue. In ARMAN, salient sentences from a document are selected according to a modified semantic score to be masked and form a pseudo summary. To summarize more accurately and similar to human writing patterns, we applied modified sentence reordering. We evaluated our proposed models on six downstream Persian summarization tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all six summarization tasks measured by ROUGE and BERTScore. Our models also outperform prior works in textual entailment, question paraphrasing, and multiple-choice question answering. Finally, we established a human evaluation and show that using the semantic score significantly improves summarization results.

ARMAN: Pre-training with Semantically Selecting and Reordering of Sentences for Persian Abstractive Summarization

We present a cross-lingual summarisation corpus with long documents in a source language associated with multi-sentence summaries in a target language. The corpus covers twelve language pairs and directions for four European languages, namely Czech, English, French and German, and the methodology for its creation can be applied to several other languages. We derive cross-lingual document-summary instances from Wikipedia by combining lead paragraphs and articles’ bodies from language aligned Wikipedia titles. We analyse the proposed cross-lingual summarisation task with automatic metrics and validate it with a human study. To illustrate the utility of our dataset we report experiments with multi-lingual pretrained models in supervised, zero- and few-shot, and out-of-domain scenarios.

Models and Datasets for Cross-Lingual Summarisation

Recently, Transformer-based models have been proven effective in the abstractive summarization task by creating fluent and informative summaries. Nevertheless, these models still suffer from the short-range dependency problem, causing them to produce summaries that miss the key points of document. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by introducing a neural topic model empowered with normalizing flow to capture the global semantics of the document, which are then integrated into the summarization model. In addition, to avoid the overwhelming effect of global semantics on contextualized representation, we introduce a mechanism to control the amount of global semantics supplied to the text generation module. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art summarization models on five common text summarization datasets, namely CNN/DailyMail, XSum, Reddit TIFU, arXiv, and PubMed.

Enriching and Controlling Global Semantics for Text Summarization

Task-agnostic pretraining objectives like masked language models or corrupted span prediction are applicable to a wide range of NLP downstream tasks (Raffel et al., 2019), but are outperformed by task-specific pretraining objectives like predicting extracted gap sentences on summarization (Zhang et al., 2020). We compare three summarization specific pretraining objectives with the task agnostic corrupted span prediction pretraining in a controlled study. We also extend our study to a low resource and zero shot setup, to understand how many training examples are needed in order to ablate the task-specific pretraining without quality loss. Our results show that task-agnostic pretraining is sufficient for most cases which hopefully reduces the need for costly task-specific pretraining. We also report new state-of-the-art number for two summarization tasks using a T5 model with 11 billion parameters and an optimal beam search length penalty.

A Thorough Evaluation of Task-Specific Pretraining for Summarization

Discontinuous constituent parsers have always lagged behind continuous approaches in terms of accuracy and speed, as the presence of constituents with discontinuous yield introduces extra complexity to the task. However, a discontinuous tree can be converted into a continuous variant by reordering tokens. Based on that, we propose to reduce discontinuous parsing to a continuous problem, which can then be directly solved by any off-the-shelf continuous parser. To that end, we develop a Pointer Network capable of accurately generating the continuous token arrangement for a given input sentence and define a bijective function to recover the original order. Experiments on the main benchmarks with two continuous parsers prove that our approach is on par in accuracy with purely discontinuous state-of-the-art algorithms, but considerably faster.

Reducing Discontinuous to Continuous Parsing with Pointer Network Reordering

We describe two approaches to single-root dependency parsing that yield significant speed ups in such parsing. One approach has been previously used in dependency parsers in practice, but remains undocumented in the parsing literature, and is considered a heuristic. We show that this approach actually finds the optimal dependency tree. The second approach relies on simple reweighting of the inference graph being input to the dependency parser and has an optimal running time. Here, we again show that this approach is fully correct and identifies the highest-scoring parse tree. Our experiments demonstrate a manyfold speed up compared to a previous graph-based state-of-the-art parser without any loss in accuracy or optimality.

A Root of a Problem: Optimizing Single-Root Dependency Parsing

Probabilistic distributions over spanning trees in directed graphs are a fundamental model of dependency structure in natural language processing, syntactic dependency trees. In NLP, dependency trees often have an additional root constraint: only one edge may emanate from the root. However, no sampling algorithm has been presented in the literature to account for this additional constraint. In this paper, we adapt two spanning tree sampling algorithms to faithfully sample dependency trees from a graph subject to the root constraint. Wilson (1996)'s sampling algorithm has a running time of O(H) where H is the mean hitting time of the graph. Colbourn (1996)'s sampling algorithm has a running time of O(N^3), which is often greater than the mean hitting time of a directed graph. Additionally, we build upon Colbourn's algorithm and present a novel extension that can sample K trees without replacement in O(K N^3+K^2 N) time. To the best of our knowledge, no algorithm has been given for sampling spanning trees without replacement from a directed graph.

TransIns: Document Translation with Markup Reinsertion

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