Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension

In this work, we focus on dialogue reading comprehension (DRC), a task extracting answer spans for questions from dialogues. Dialogue context modeling in DRC is tricky due to complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. To solve the two problems, previous research proposes two self-supervised tasks respectively: guessing who a randomly masked speaker is according to the dialogue and predicting which utterance in the dialogue contains the answer. Although these tasks are effective, there are still urging problems: (1) randomly masking speakers regardless of the question cannot map the speaker mentioned in the question to the corresponding speaker in the dialogue, and ignores the speaker-centric nature of utterances. This leads to wrong answer extraction from utterances in unrelated interlocutors' scopes; (2) the single utterance prediction, preferring utterances similar to the question, is limited in finding answer-contained utterances not similar to the question. To alleviate these problems, we first propose a new key utterances extracting method. It performs prediction on the unit formed by several contiguous utterances, which can realize more answer-contained utterances. Based on utterances in the extracted units, we then propose Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph (QuISG) modeling. As a graph constructed on the text of utterances, QuISG additionally involves the question and question-mentioning speaker names as nodes. To realize interlocutor scopes, speakers in the dialogue are connected with the words in their corresponding utterances. Experiments on the benchmarks show that our method can achieve better and competitive results against previous works.

Towards Robust k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation

k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) becomes an important research direction of NMT in recent years. Its main idea is to retrieve useful key-value pairs from an additional datastore to modify translations without updating the NMT model. However, the underlying retrieved noisy pairs will dramatically deteriorate the model performance. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study and find that this problem results from not fully exploiting the prediction of the NMT model. To alleviate the impact of noise, we propose a confidence-enhanced kNN-MT model with robust training. Concretely, we introduce the NMT confidence to refine the modeling of two important components of kNN-MT: kNN distribution and the interpolation weight. Meanwhile we inject two types of perturbations into the retrieved pairs for robust training. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model not only achieves significant improvements over current kNN-MT models, but also exhibits better robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Robust-knn-mt.

Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks. However, they have recently been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the translation of atoms (e.g., words) and their semantic composition (e.g., modification) from seen compounds (e.g., phrases), and thus suffering from significantly weakened translation performance on unseen compounds during inference. We address this issue by introducing categorization to the source contextualized representations. The main idea is to enhance generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting, which is achieved by finding prototypes of token representations over the training set and integrating their embeddings into the source encoding. Experiments on a dedicated MT dataset (i.e., CoGnition) show that our method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24\% error reduction. In addition, our conceptually simple method gives consistently better results than the Transformer baseline on a range of general MT datasets.

A Win-win Deal: Towards Sparse and Robust Pre-trained Language Models

Despite the remarkable success of pre-trained language models (PLMs), they still face two challenges: First, large-scale PLMs are inefficient in terms of memory footprint and computation. Second, on the downstream tasks, PLMs tend to rely on the dataset bias and struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In response to the efficiency problem, recent studies show that dense PLMs can be replaced with sparse subnetworks without hurting the performance. Such subnetworks can be found in three scenarios: 1) the fine-tuned PLMs, 2) the raw PLMs and then fine-tuned in isolation, and even inside 3) PLMs without any parameter fine-tuning. However, these results are only obtained in the in-distribution (ID) setting. In this paper, we extend the study on PLMs subnetworks to the OOD setting, investigating whether sparsity and robustness to dataset bias can be achieved simultaneously. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments with the pre-trained BERT model on three natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Our results demonstrate that \textbf{sparse and robust subnetworks (SRNets) can consistently be found in BERT}, across the aforementioned three scenarios, using different training and compression methods. Furthermore, we explore the upper bound of SRNets using the OOD information and show that \textbf{there exist sparse and almost unbiased BERT subnetworks}. Finally, we present 1) an analytical study that provides insights on how to promote the efficiency of SRNets searching process and 2) a solution to improve subnetworks' performance at high sparsity. The code is available at https://github.com/llyx97/sparse-and-robust-PLM.

Language Prior Is Not the Only Shortcut: A Benchmark for Shortcut Learning in VQA

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are prone to learn the shortcut solution formed by dataset biases rather than the intended solution. To evaluate the VQA models' reasoning ability beyond shortcut learning, the VQA-CP v2 dataset introduces a distribution shift between the training and test set given a question type. In this way, the model cannot use the training set shortcut (from question type to answer) to perform well on the test set. However, VQA-CP v2 only considers one type of shortcut and thus still cannot guarantee that the model relies on the intended solution rather than a solution specific to this shortcut. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new dataset that considers varying types of shortcuts by constructing different distribution shifts in multiple OOD test sets. In addition, we overcome the three troubling practices in the use of VQA-CP v2, e.g., selecting models using OOD test sets, and further standardize OOD evaluation procedure. Our benchmark provides a more rigorous and comprehensive testbed for shortcut learning in VQA. We benchmark recent methods and find that methods specifically designed for particular shortcuts fail to simultaneously generalize to our varying OOD test sets. We also systematically study the varying shortcuts and provide several valuable findings, which may promote the exploration of shortcut learning in VQA.

Towards Robust Visual Question Answering: Making the Most of Biased Samples via Contrastive Learning

Models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) often rely on the spurious correlations, i.e., the language priors, that appear in the biased samples of training set, which make them brittle against the out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Recent methods have achieved promising progress in overcoming this problem by reducing the impact of biased samples on model training. However, these models reveal a trade-off that the improvements on OOD data severely sacrifice the performance on the in-distribution (ID) data (which is dominated by the biased samples). Therefore, we propose a novel contrastive learning approach, MMBS, for building robust VQA models by Making the Most of Biased Samples. Specifically, we construct positive samples for contrastive learning by eliminating the information related to spurious correlation from the original training samples and explore several strategies to use the constructed positive samples for training. Instead of undermining the importance of biased samples in model training, our approach precisely exploits the biased samples for unbiased information that contributes to reasoning. The proposed method is compatible with various VQA backbones. We validate our contributions by achieving competitive performance on the OOD dataset VQA-CP v2 while preserving robust performance on the ID dataset VQA v2.

Cross-Align: Modeling Deep Cross-lingual Interactions for Word Alignment

Word alignment which aims to extract lexicon translation equivalents between source and target sentences, serves as a fundamental tool for natural language processing. Recent studies in this area have yielded substantial improvements by generating alignments from contextualized embeddings of the pre-trained multilingual language models. However, we find that the existing approaches capture few interactions between the input sentence pairs, which degrades the word alignment quality severely, especially for the ambiguous words in the monolingual context. To remedy this problem, we propose Cross-Align to model deep interactions between the input sentence pairs, in which the source and target sentences are encoded separately with the shared self-attention modules in the shallow layers, while cross-lingual interactions are explicitly constructed by the cross-attention modules in the upper layers. Besides, to train our model effectively, we propose a two-stage training framework, where the model is trained with a simple Translation Language Modeling (TLM) objective in the first stage and then finetuned with a self-supervised alignment objective in the second stage. Experiments show that the proposed Cross-Align achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four out of five language pairs.

Rethink about the Word-level Quality Estimation for Machine Translation from Human Judgement

Word-level Quality Estimation (QE) of Machine Translation (MT) aims to find out potential translation errors in the translated sentence without reference. Typically, conventional works on word-level QE are designed to predict the translation quality in terms of the post-editing effort, where the word labels ("OK" and "BAD") are automatically generated by comparing words between MT sentences and the post-edited sentences through a Translation Error Rate (TER) toolkit. While the post-editing effort can be used to measure the translation quality to some extent, we find it usually conflicts with the human judgement on whether the word is well or poorly translated. To overcome the limitation, we first create a golden benchmark dataset, namely \emph{HJQE} (Human Judgement on Quality Estimation), where the expert translators directly annotate the poorly translated words on their judgements. Additionally, to further make use of the parallel corpus, we propose the self-supervised pre-training with two tag correcting strategies, namely tag refinement strategy and tree-based annotation strategy, to make the TER-based artificial QE corpus closer to \emph{HJQE}. We conduct substantial experiments based on the publicly available WMT En-De and En-Zh corpora. The results not only show our proposed dataset is more consistent with human judgment but also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed tag correcting strategies.\footnote{The data can be found at \url{https://github.com/ZhenYangIACAS/HJQE}.}

Probing Causes of Hallucinations in Neural Machine Translations

Hallucination, one kind of pathological translations that bothers Neural Machine Translation, has recently drawn much attention. In simple terms, hallucinated translations are fluent sentences but barely related to source inputs. Arguably, it remains an open problem how hallucination occurs. In this paper, we propose to use probing methods to investigate the causes of hallucinations from the perspective of model architecture, aiming to avoid such problems in future architecture designs. By conducting experiments over various NMT datasets, we find that hallucination is often accompanied by the deficient encoder, especially embeddings, and vulnerable cross-attentions, while, interestingly, cross-attention mitigates some errors caused by the encoder.

Scheduled Multi-task Learning for Neural Chat Translation

Neural Chat Translation (NCT) aims to translate conversational text into different languages. Existing methods mainly focus on modeling the bilingual dialogue characteristics (e.g., coherence) to improve chat translation via multi-task learning on small-scale chat translation data. Although the NCT models have achieved impressive success, it is still far from satisfactory due to insufficient chat translation data and simple joint training manners. To address the above issues, we propose a scheduled multi-task learning framework for NCT. Specifically, we devise a three-stage training framework to incorporate the large-scale in-domain chat translation data into training by adding a second pre-training stage between the original pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Further, we investigate where and how to schedule the dialogue-related auxiliary tasks in multiple training stages to effectively enhance the main chat translation task. Extensive experiments in four language directions (English-Chinese and English-German) verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Additionally, we have made the large-scale in-domain paired bilingual dialogue dataset publicly available to the research community.