Marzieh Fadaee


2020

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The Unreasonable Volatility of Neural Machine Translation Models
Marzieh Fadaee | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation

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 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.

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A New Neural Search and Insights Platform for Navigating and Organizing AI Research
Marzieh Fadaee | Olga Gureenkova | Fernando Rejon Barrera | Carsten Schnober | Wouter Weerkamp | Jakub Zavrel
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing

To provide AI researchers with modern tools for dealing with the explosive growth of the research literature in their field, we introduce a new platform, AI Research Navigator, that combines classical keyword search with neural retrieval to discover and organize relevant literature. The system provides search at multiple levels of textual granularity, from sentences to aggregations across documents, both in natural language and through navigation in a domain specific Knowledge Graph. We give an overview of the overall architecture of the system and of the components for document analysis, question answering, search, analytics, expert search, and recommendations.

2018

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Back-Translation Sampling by Targeting Difficult Words in Neural Machine Translation
Marzieh Fadaee | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural Machine Translation has achieved state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs using a combination of parallel and synthetic data. Synthetic data is often generated by back-translating sentences randomly sampled from monolingual data using a reverse translation model. While back-translation has been shown to be very effective in many cases, it is not entirely clear why. In this work, we explore different aspects of back-translation, and show that words with high prediction loss during training benefit most from the addition of synthetic data. We introduce several variations of sampling strategies targeting difficult-to-predict words using prediction losses and frequencies of words. In addition, we also target the contexts of difficult words and sample sentences that are similar in context. Experimental results for the WMT news translation task show that our method improves translation quality by up to 1.7 and 1.2 Bleu points over back-translation using random sampling for German-English and English-German, respectively.

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Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation
Marzieh Fadaee | Arianna Bisazza | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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Learning Topic-Sensitive Word Representations
Marzieh Fadaee | Arianna Bisazza | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Distributed word representations are widely used for modeling words in NLP tasks. Most of the existing models generate one representation per word and do not consider different meanings of a word. We present two approaches to learn multiple topic-sensitive representations per word by using Hierarchical Dirichlet Process. We observe that by modeling topics and integrating topic distributions for each document we obtain representations that are able to distinguish between different meanings of a given word. Our models yield statistically significant improvements for the lexical substitution task indicating that commonly used single word representations, even when combined with contextual information, are insufficient for this task.

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Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Marzieh Fadaee | Arianna Bisazza | Christof Monz
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

The quality of a Neural Machine Translation system depends substantially on the availability of sizable parallel corpora. For low-resource language pairs this is not the case, resulting in poor translation quality. Inspired by work in computer vision, we propose a novel data augmentation approach that targets low-frequency words by generating new sentence pairs containing rare words in new, synthetically created contexts. Experimental results on simulated low-resource settings show that our method improves translation quality by up to 2.9 BLEU points over the baseline and up to 3.2 BLEU over back-translation.