This paper describes the submission of LMU Munich to the WMT 2020 unsupervised shared task, in two language directions, German<->Upper Sorbian. Our core unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) system follows the strategy of Chronopoulou et al. (2020), using a monolingual pretrained language generation model (on German) and fine-tuning it on both German and Upper Sorbian, before initializing a UNMT model, which is trained with online backtranslation. Pseudo-parallel data obtained from an unsupervised statistical machine translation (USMT) system is used to fine-tune the UNMT model. We also apply BPE-Dropout to the low resource (Upper Sorbian) data to obtain a more robust system. We additionally experiment with residual adapters and find them useful in the Upper Sorbian->German direction. We explore sampling during backtranslation and curriculum learning to use SMT translations in a more principled way. Finally, we ensemble our best-performing systems and reach a BLEU score of 32.4 on German->Upper Sorbian and 35.2 on Upper Sorbian->German.
Using a language model (LM) pretrained on two languages with large monolingual data in order to initialize an unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) system yields state-of-the-art results. When limited data is available for one language, however, this method leads to poor translations. We present an effective approach that reuses an LM that is pretrained only on the high-resource language. The monolingual LM is fine-tuned on both languages and is then used to initialize a UNMT model. To reuse the pretrained LM, we have to modify its predefined vocabulary, to account for the new language. We therefore propose a novel vocabulary extension method. Our approach, RE-LM, outperforms a competitive cross-lingual pretraining model (XLM) in English-Macedonian (En-Mk) and English-Albanian (En-Sq), yielding more than +8.3 BLEU points for all four translation directions.
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), pretrained language models (LMs) that are transferred to downstream tasks have been recently shown to achieve state-of-the-art results. However, standard fine-tuning can degrade the general-domain representations captured during pretraining. To address this issue, we introduce a new regularization technique, AFTER; domain Adversarial Fine-Tuning as an Effective Regularizer. Specifically, we complement the task-specific loss used during fine-tuning with an adversarial objective. This additional loss term is related to an adversarial classifier, that aims to discriminate between in-domain and out-of-domain text representations. In-domain refers to the labeled dataset of the task at hand while out-of-domain refers to unlabeled data from a different domain. Intuitively, the adversarial classifier acts as a regularizer which prevents the model from overfitting to the task-specific domain. Empirical results on various natural language understanding tasks show that AFTER leads to improved performance compared to standard fine-tuning.
A growing number of state-of-the-art transfer learning methods employ language models pretrained on large generic corpora. In this paper we present a conceptually simple and effective transfer learning approach that addresses the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, we combine the task-specific optimization function with an auxiliary language model objective, which is adjusted during the training process. This preserves language regularities captured by language models, while enabling sufficient adaptation for solving the target task. Our method does not require pretraining or finetuning separate components of the network and we train our models end-to-end in a single step. We present results on a variety of challenging affective and text classification tasks, surpassing well established transfer learning methods with greater level of complexity.
In this paper we present our approach to tackle the Implicit Emotion Shared Task (IEST) organized as part of WASSA 2018 at EMNLP 2018. Given a tweet, from which a certain word has been removed, we are asked to predict the emotion of the missing word. In this work, we experiment with neural Transfer Learning (TL) methods. Our models are based on LSTM networks, augmented with a self-attention mechanism. We use the weights of various pretrained models, for initializing specific layers of our networks. We leverage a big collection of unlabeled Twitter messages, for pretraining word2vec word embeddings and a set of diverse language models. Moreover, we utilize a sentiment analysis dataset for pretraining a model, which encodes emotion related information. The submitted model consists of an ensemble of the aforementioned TL models. Our team ranked 3rd out of 30 participants, achieving an F1 score of 0.703.
In this paper we present deep-learning models that submitted to the SemEval-2018 Task~1 competition: "Affect in Tweets". We participated in all subtasks for English tweets. We propose a Bi-LSTM architecture equipped with a multi-layer self attention mechanism. The attention mechanism improves the model performance and allows us to identify salient words in tweets, as well as gain insight into the models making them more interpretable. Our model utilizes a set of word2vec word embeddings trained on a large collection of 550 million Twitter messages, augmented by a set of word affective features. Due to the limited amount of task-specific training data, we opted for a transfer learning approach by pretraining the Bi-LSTMs on the dataset of Semeval 2017, Task 4A. The proposed approach ranked 1st in Subtask E "Multi-Label Emotion Classification", 2nd in Subtask A "Emotion Intensity Regression" and achieved competitive results in other subtasks.