While large scale pre-training has achieved great achievements in bridging the gap between vision and language, it still faces several challenges. First, the cost for pre-training is expensive. Second, there is no efficient way to handle the data noise which degrades model performance. Third, previous methods only leverage limited image-text paired data, while ignoring richer single-modal data, which may result in poor generalization to single-modal downstream tasks. In this work, we propose an EfficientCLIP method via Ensemble Confident Learning to obtain a less noisy data subset. Extra rich non-paired single-modal text data is used for boosting the generalization of text branch. We achieve the state-of-the-art performance on Chinese cross-modal retrieval tasks with only 1/10 training resources compared to CLIP and WenLan, while showing excellent generalization to single-modal tasks, including text retrieval and text classification.
Humans have the capability, aided by the expressive compositionality of their language, to learn quickly by demonstration. They are able to describe unseen task-performing procedures and generalize their execution to other contexts. In this work, we introduce DescribeWorld, an environment designed to test this sort of generalization skill in grounded agents, where tasks are linguistically and procedurally composed of elementary concepts. The agent observes a single task demonstration in a Minecraft-like grid world, and is then asked to carry out the same task in a new map. To enable such a level of generalization, we propose a neural agent infused with hierarchical latent language--both at the level of task inference and subtask planning. Our agent first generates a textual description of the demonstrated unseen task, then leverages this description to replicate it. Through multiple evaluation scenarios and a suite of generalization tests, we find that agents that perform text-based inference are better equipped for the challenge under a random split of tasks.
The main goal of this paper is to develop a spell checker module for clinical text in Russian. The described approach combines string distance measure algorithms with technics of machine learning embedding methods. Our overall precision is 0.86, lexical precision - 0.975 and error precision is 0.74. We develop spell checker as a part of medical text mining tool regarding the problems of misspelling, negation, experiencer and temporality detection.
Text summarization is a personalized and customized task, i.e., for one document, users often have different preferences for the summary. As a key aspect of customization in summarization, granularity is used to measure the semantic coverage between summary and source document. Coarse-grained summaries can only contain the most central event in the original text, while fine-grained summaries cover more sub-events and corresponding details. However, previous studies mostly develop systems in the single-granularity scenario. And models that can generate summaries with customizable semantic coverage still remain an under-explored topic. In this paper, we propose the first unsupervised multi-granularity summarization framework, GranuSum. We take events as the basic semantic units of the source documents and propose to rank these events by their salience. We also develop a model to summarize input documents with given events as anchors and hints. By inputting different numbers of events, GranuSum is capable of producing multi-granular summaries in an unsupervised manner. Meanwhile, to evaluate multi-granularity summarization models, we annotate a new benchmark GranuDUC, in which we write multiple summaries of different granularities for each document cluster. Experimental results confirm the substantial superiority of GranuSum on multi-granularity summarization over several baseline systems. Furthermore, by experimenting on conventional unsupervised abstractive summarization tasks, we find that GranuSum, by exploiting the event information, can also achieve new state-of-the-art results under this scenario, outperforming strong baselines.
Machine-in-the-loop writing aims to enable humans to collaborate with models to complete their writing tasks more effectively. Prior work has found that providing humans a machine-written draft or sentence-level continuations has limited success since the generated text tends to deviate from humans' intention. To allow the user to retain control over the content, we train a rewriting model that, when prompted, modifies specified spans of text within the user's original draft to introduce descriptive and figurative elements locally in the text. We evaluate the model on its ability to collaborate with humans on the task of creative image captioning. On a user study through Amazon Mechanical Turk, our model is rated to be more helpful than a baseline infilling language model. In addition, third-party evaluation shows that users write more descriptive and figurative captions when collaborating with our model compared to completing the task alone.
The connection between messaging and action is fundamental both to web applications, such as web search and sentiment analysis, and to economics. However, while prominent online applications exploit messaging in natural (human) language in order to predict non-strategic action selection, the economics literature focuses on the connection between structured stylized messaging to strategic decisions in games and multi-agent encounters. This paper aims to connect these two strands of research, which we consider highly timely and important due to the vast online textual communication on the web. Particularly, we introduce the following question: can free text expressed in natural language serve for the prediction of action selection in an economic context, modeled as a game? In order to initiate the research on this question, we introduce the study of an individual's action prediction in a one-shot game based on free text he/she provides, while being unaware of the game to be played. We approach the problem by attributing commonsensical personality attributes via crowd-sourcing to free texts written by individuals, and employing transductive learning to predict actions taken by these individuals in one-shot games based on these attributes. Our approach allows us to train a single classifier that can make predictions with respect to actions taken in multiple games. In experiments with three well-studied games, our algorithm compares favorably with strong alternative approaches. In ablation analysis, we demonstrate the importance of our modeling choices -- the representation of the text with the commonsensical personality attributes and our classifier -- to the predictive power of our model.
What are the units of text that we want to model? From bytes to multi-word expressions, text can be analyzed and generated at many granularities. Until recently, most natural language processing (NLP) models operated over words, treating those as discrete and atomic tokens, but starting with byte-pair encoding (BPE), subword-based approaches have become dominant in many areas, enabling small vocabularies while still allowing for fast inference. Is the end of the road character-level model or byte-level processing? In this survey, we connect several lines of work from the pre-neural and neural era, by showing how hybrid approaches of words and characters as well as subword-based approaches based on learned segmentation have been proposed and evaluated. We conclude that there is and likely will never be a silver bullet singular solution for all applications and that thinking seriously about tokenization remains important for many applications.
Extreme Multi-label text Classification (XMC) is a task of finding the most relevant labels from a large label set. Nowadays deep learning-based methods have shown significant success in XMC. However, the existing methods (e.g., AttentionXML and X-Transformer etc) still suffer from 1) combining several models to train and predict for one dataset, and 2) sampling negative labels statically during the process of training label ranking model, which reduces both the efficiency and accuracy of the model. To address the above problems, we proposed LightXML, which adopts end-to-end training and dynamic negative labels sampling. In LightXML, we use generative cooperative networks to recall and rank labels, in which label recalling part generates negative and positive labels, and label ranking part distinguishes positive labels from these labels. Through these networks, negative labels are sampled dynamically during label ranking part training by feeding with the same text representation. Extensive experiments show that LightXML outperforms state-of-the-art methods in five extreme multi-label datasets with much smaller model size and lower computational complexity. In particular, on the Amazon dataset with 670K labels, LightXML can reduce the model size up to 72% compared to AttentionXML.
Human speakers encode information into raw speech which is then decoded by the listeners. This complex relationship between encoding (production) and decoding (perception) is often modeled separately. Here, we test how encoding and decoding of lexical semantic information can emerge automatically from raw speech in unsupervised generative deep convolutional networks that combine the production and perception principles of speech. We introduce, to our knowledge, the most challenging objective in unsupervised lexical learning: a network that must learn unique representations for lexical items with no direct access to training data. We train several models (ciwGAN and fiwGAN arXiv:2006.02951) and test how the networks classify acoustic lexical items in unobserved test data. Strong evidence in favor of lexical learning and a causal relationship between latent codes and meaningful sublexical units emerge. The architecture that combines the production and perception principles is thus able to learn to decode unique information from raw acoustic data without accessing real training data directly. We propose a technique to explore lexical (holistic) and sublexical (featural) learned representations in the classifier network. The results bear implications for unsupervised speech technology, as well as for unsupervised semantic modeling as language models increasingly bypass text and operate from raw acoustics.
Text generation tasks, including translation, summarization, language models, and etc. see rapid growth during recent years. Despite the remarkable achievements, the repetition problem has been observed in nearly all text generation models undermining the generation performance extensively. To solve the repetition problem, many methods have been proposed, but there is no existing theoretical analysis to show why this problem happens and how it is resolved. In this paper, we propose a new framework for theoretical analysis for the repetition problem. We first define the Average Repetition Probability (ARP) to characterize the repetition problem quantitatively. Then, we conduct an extensive analysis of the Markov generation model and derive several upper bounds of the average repetition probability with intuitive understanding. We show that most of the existing methods are essentially minimizing the upper bounds explicitly or implicitly. Grounded on our theory, we show that the repetition problem is, unfortunately, caused by the traits of our language itself. One major reason is attributed to the fact that there exist too many words predicting the same word as the subsequent word with high probability. Consequently, it is easy to go back to that word and form repetitions and we dub it as the high inflow problem. Furthermore, we derive a concentration bound of the average repetition probability for a general generation model. Finally, based on the theoretical upper bounds, we propose a novel rebalanced encoding approach to alleviate the high inflow problem. The experimental results show that our theoretical framework is applicable in general generation models and our proposed rebalanced encoding approach alleviates the repetition problem significantly. The source code of this paper can be obtained from \url{https://github.com/fuzihaofzh/repetition-problem-nlg}.