Complete Multi-lingual Neural Machine Translation (C-MNMT) achieves superior performance against the conventional MNMT by constructing multi-way aligned corpus, i.e., aligning bilingual training examples from different language pairs when either their source or target sides are identical. However, since exactly identical sentences from different language pairs are scarce, the power of the multi-way aligned corpus is limited by its scale. To handle this problem, this paper proposes “Extract and Generate” (EAG), a two-step approach to construct large-scale and high-quality multi-way aligned corpus from bilingual data. Specifically, we first extract candidate aligned examples by pairing the bilingual examples from different language pairs with highly similar source or target sentences; and then generate the final aligned examples from the candidates with a well-trained generation model. With this two-step pipeline, EAG can construct a large-scale and multi-way aligned corpus whose diversity is almost identical to the original bilingual corpus. Experiments on two publicly available datasets i.e., WMT-5 and OPUS-100, show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over strong baselines, with +1.1 and +1.4 BLEU points improvements on the two datasets respectively.

Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE) aims to discover the potential causes behind an emotion in a conversational utterance. Previous works formalize CEE as independent utterance pair classification problems, with emotion and speaker information neglected. From a new perspective, this paper considers CEE in a joint framework. We classify multiple utterances synchronously to capture the correlations between utterances in a global view and propose a Two-Stream Attention Model (TSAM) to effectively model the speaker’s emotional influences in the conversational history. Specifically, the TSAM comprises three modules: Emotion Attention Network (EAN), Speaker Attention Network (SAN), and interaction module. The EAN and SAN incorporate emotion and speaker information in parallel, and the subsequent interaction module effectively interchanges relevant information between the EAN and SAN via a mutual BiAffine transformation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance and outperforms baselines remarkably.

Generating adversarial examples for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with single Round-Trip Translation (RTT) has achieved promising results by releasing the meaning-preserving restriction. However, a potential pitfall for this approach is that we cannot decide whether the generated examples are adversarial to the target NMT model or the auxiliary backward one, as the reconstruction error through the RTT can be related to either. To remedy this problem, we propose a new definition for NMT adversarial examples based on the Doubly Round-Trip Translation (DRTT). Specifically, apart from the source-target-source RTT, we also consider the target-source-target one, which is utilized to pick out the authentic adversarial examples for the target NMT model. Additionally, to enhance the robustness of the NMT model, we introduce the masked language models to construct bilingual adversarial pairs based on DRTT, which are used to train the NMT model directly. Extensive experiments on both the clean and noisy test sets (including the artificial and natural noise) show that our approach substantially improves the robustness of NMT models.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, inflammatory and degenerative neurological disease, which is monitored by a specialist using the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) and recorded in unstructured text in the form of a neurology consult note. An EDSS measurement contains an overall ‘EDSS’ score and several functional subscores. Typically, expert knowledge is required to interpret consult notes and generate these scores. Previous approaches used limited context length Word2Vec embeddings and keyword searches to predict scores given a consult note, but often failed when scores were not explicitly stated. In this work, we present MS-BERT, the first publicly available transformer model trained on real clinical data other than MIMIC. Next, we present MSBC, a classifier that applies MS-BERT to generate embeddings and predict EDSS and functional subscores. Lastly, we explore combining MSBC with other models through the use of Snorkel to generate scores for unlabelled consult notes. MSBC achieves state-of-the-art performance on all metrics and prediction tasks and outperforms the models generated from the Snorkel ensemble. We improve Macro-F1 by 0.12 (to 0.88) for predicting EDSS and on average by 0.29 (to 0.63) for predicting functional subscores over previous Word2Vec CNN and rule-based approaches.

This paper proposes a new pre-training method, called Code-Switching Pre-training (CSP for short) for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Unlike traditional pre-training method which randomly masks some fragments of the input sentence, the proposed CSP randomly replaces some words in the source sentence with their translation words in the target language. Specifically, we firstly perform lexicon induction with unsupervised word embedding mapping between the source and target languages, and then randomly replace some words in the input sentence with their translation words according to the extracted translation lexicons. CSP adopts the encoder-decoder framework: its encoder takes the code-mixed sentence as input, and its decoder predicts the replaced fragment of the input sentence. In this way, CSP is able to pre-train the NMT model by explicitly making the most of the alignment information extracted from the source and target monolingual corpus. Additionally, we relieve the pretrain-finetune discrepancy caused by the artificial symbols like [mask]. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on unsupervised and supervised NMT. Experimental results show that CSP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods.

This paper proposes an approach for applying GANs to NMT. We build a conditional sequence generative adversarial net which comprises of two adversarial sub models, a generator and a discriminator. The generator aims to generate sentences which are hard to be discriminated from human-translated sentences ( i.e., the golden target sentences); And the discriminator makes efforts to discriminate the machine-generated sentences from human-translated ones. The two sub models play a mini-max game and achieve the win-win situation when they reach a Nash Equilibrium. Additionally, the static sentence-level BLEU is utilized as the reinforced objective for the generator, which biases the generation towards high BLEU points. During training, both the dynamic discriminator and the static BLEU objective are employed to evaluate the generated sentences and feedback the evaluations to guide the learning of the generator. Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the traditional RNNSearch and the newly emerged state-of-the-art Transformer on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks.

While the disfluency detection has achieved notable success in the past years, it still severely suffers from the data scarcity. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach which can utilize large amounts of unlabelled data. In this work, a light-weight neural net is proposed to extract the hidden features based solely on self-attention without any Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In addition, we use the unlabelled corpus to enhance the performance. Besides, the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) training is applied to enforce the similar distribution between the labelled and unlabelled data. The experimental results show that our approach achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) is a recently proposed approach for machine translation which aims to train the model without using any labeled data. The models proposed for unsupervised NMT often use only one shared encoder to map the pairs of sentences from different languages to a shared-latent space, which is weak in keeping the unique and internal characteristics of each language, such as the style, terminology, and sentence structure. To address this issue, we introduce an extension by utilizing two independent encoders but sharing some partial weights which are responsible for extracting high-level representations of the input sentences. Besides, two different generative adversarial networks (GANs), namely the local GAN and global GAN, are proposed to enhance the cross-language translation. With this new approach, we achieve significant improvements on English-German, English-French and Chinese-to-English translation tasks.

This article proposes a novel character-aware neural machine translation (NMT) model that views the input sequences as sequences of characters rather than words. On the use of row convolution (Amodei et al., 2015), the encoder of the proposed model composes word-level information from the input sequences of characters automatically. Since our model doesn’t rely on the boundaries between each word (as the whitespace boundaries in English), it is also applied to languages without explicit word segmentations (like Chinese). Experimental results on Chinese-English translation tasks show that the proposed character-aware NMT model can achieve comparable translation performance with the traditional word based NMT models. Despite the target side is still word based, the proposed model is able to generate much less unknown words.