Gholamreza Haffari

Also published as: Reza Haffari


2023

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The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Human and Machine Translations for Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Active Learning
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Philip Cohen | Raj Tumuluri | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multilingual semantic parsing aims to leverage the knowledge from the high-resource languages to improve low-resource semantic parsing, yet commonly suffers from the data imbalance problem. Prior works propose to utilize the translations by either humans or machines to alleviate such issues. However, human translations are expensive, while machine translations are cheap but prone to error and bias. In this work, we propose an active learning approach that exploits the strengths of both human and machine translations by iteratively adding small batches of human translations into the machine-translated training set. Besides, we propose novel aggregated acquisition criteria that help our active learning method select utterances to be manually translated. Our experiments demonstrate that an ideal utterance selection can significantly reduce the error and bias in the translated data, resulting in higher parser accuracies than the parsers merely trained on the machine-translated data.

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Document Flattening: Beyond Concatenating Context for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Minghao Wu | George Foster | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing work in document-level neural machine translation commonly concatenates several consecutive sentences as a pseudo-document, and then learns inter-sentential dependencies. This strategy limits the model’s ability to leverage information from distant context. We overcome this limitation with a novel Document Flattening (DocFlat) technique that integrates Flat-Batch Attention (FBA) and Neural Context Gate (NCG) into Transformer model to utilizes information beyond the pseudo-document boundaries. FBA allows the model to attend to all the positions in the batch and model the relationships between positions explicitly and NCG identifies the useful information from the distant context. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses on three benchmark datasets for English-German translation, and validate the effectiveness of two variants of DocFlat. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms strong baselines with statistical significance on BLEU, COMET and accuracy on the contrastive test set. The analyses highlight that DocFlat is highly effective in capturing the long-range information.

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On Robustness of Prompt-based Semantic Parsing with Large Pre-trained Language Model: An Empirical Study on Codex
Terry Yue Zhuo | Zhuang Li | Yujin Huang | Fatemeh Shiri | Weiqing Wang | Gholamreza Haffari | Yuan-Fang Li
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Semantic parsing is a technique aimed at constructing a structured representation of the meaning of a natural-language question. Recent advances in language models trained on code have shown superior performance in generating these representations compared to language models trained solely on natural language text. The existing fine-tuned neural semantic parsers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks on natural-language inputs. While it has been established that the robustness of smaller semantic parsers can be enhanced through adversarial training, this approach is not feasible for large language models in real-world scenarios, as it requires both substantial computational resources and expensive human annotation on in-domain semantic parsing data. This paper presents the first empirical study on the adversarial robustness of a prompt-based semantic parser based on CODEX, a stateof-the-art (SOTA) language model trained on code. Our results demonstrate that the large language model of code is vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. To overcome this challenge, we propose methods for enhancing robustness without requiring substantial amounts of labelled data or intensive computational resources.

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Less is More: Mitigate Spurious Correlations for Open-Domain Dialogue Response Generation Models by Causal Discovery
Tao Feng | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

In this paper, we conduct the first study on spurious correlations for open-domain response generation models based on a corpus CGDialog curated by ourselves. The current models indeed suffer from spurious correlations and have a tendency to generate irrelevant and generic responses. Inspired by causal discovery algorithms, we propose a novel model-agnostic method for training and inference using a conditional independence classifier. The classifier is trained by a constrained self-training method, coined ConSTrain, to overcome data sparsity. The experimental results based on both human and automatic evaluation show that our method significantly outperforms the competitive baselines in terms of relevance, informativeness, and fluency.

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Active Learning for Multilingual Semantic Parser
Zhuang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Current multilingual semantic parsing (MSP) datasets are almost all collected by translating the utterances in the existing datasets from the resource-rich language to the target language. However, manual translation is costly. To reduce the translation effort, this paper proposes the first active learning procedure for MSP (AL-MSP). AL-MSP selects only a subset from the existing datasets to be translated. We also propose a novel selection method that prioritizes the examples diversifying the logical form structures with more lexical choices, and a novel hyperparameter tuning method that needs no extra annotation cost. Our experiments show that AL-MSP significantly reduces translation costs with ideal selection methods. Our selection method with proper hyperparameters yields better parsing performance than the other baselines on two multilingual datasets.

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Generating Synthetic Speech from SpokenVocab for Speech Translation
Jinming Zhao | Gholamreza Haffari | Ehsan Shareghi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Training end-to-end speech translation (ST) systems requires sufficiently large-scale data, which is unavailable for most language pairs and domains. One practical solution to the data scarcity issue is to convert text-based machine translation (MT) data to ST data via text-to-speech (TTS) systems.Yet, using TTS systems can be tedious and slow. In this work, we propose SpokenVocab, a simple, scalable and effective data augmentation technique to convert MT data to ST data on-the-fly. The idea is to retrieve and stitch audio snippets, corresponding to words in an MT sentence, from a spoken vocabulary bank. Our experiments on multiple language pairs show that stitched speech helps to improve translation quality by an average of 1.83 BLEU score, while performing equally well as TTS-generated speech in improving translation quality. We also showcase how SpokenVocab can be applied in code-switching ST for which often no TTS systems exit.

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NormMark: A Weakly Supervised Markov Model for Socio-cultural Norm Discovery
Farhad Moghimifar | Shilin Qu | Tongtong Wu | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model’s ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.

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FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing
Zhuang Li | Yuyang Chai | Terry Yue Zhuo | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari | Fei Li | Donghong Ji | Quan Hung Tran
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Textual scene graph parsing has become increasingly important in various vision-language applications, including image caption evaluation and image retrieval. However, existing scene graph parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from two types of errors. First, the generated scene graphs fail to capture the true semantics of the captions or the corresponding images, resulting in a lack of faithfulness. Second, the generated scene graphs have high inconsistency, with the same semantics represented by different annotations.To address these challenges, we propose a novel dataset, which involves re-annotating the captions in Visual Genome (VG) using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR. FACTUAL-MR can be directly converted into faithful and consistent scene graph annotations. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that the parser trained on our dataset outperforms existing approaches in terms of faithfulness and consistency. This improvement leads to a significant performance boost in both image caption evaluation and zero-shot image retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel metric for measuring scene graph similarity, which, when combined with the improved scene graph parser, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple benchmark datasets for the aforementioned tasks.

2022

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Teaching Neural Module Networks to Do Arithmetic
Jiayi Chen | Xiao-Yu Guo | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Answering complex questions that require multi-step multi-type reasoning over raw text is challenging, especially when conducting numerical reasoning. Neural Module Networks (NMNs), follow the programmer-interpreter framework and design trainable modules to learn different reasoning skills. However, NMNs only have limited reasoning abilities, and lack numerical reasoning capability. We upgrade NMNs by: (a) bridging the gap between its interpreter and the complex questions; (b) introducing addition and subtraction modules that perform numerical reasoning over numbers. On a subset of DROP, experimental results show that our proposed methods enhance NMNs’ numerical reasoning skills by 17.7% improvement of F1 score and significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art models.

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Student Surpasses Teacher: Imitation Attack for Black-Box NLP APIs
Qiongkai Xu | Xuanli He | Lingjuan Lyu | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) has attracted millions of users to their splendid large-scale models. Although published as black-box APIs, the valuable models behind these services are still vulnerable to imitation attacks. Recently, a series of works have demonstrated that attackers manage to steal or extract the victim models. Nonetheless, none of the previous stolen models can outperform the original black-box APIs. In this work, we conduct unsupervised domain adaptation and multi-victim ensemble to showing that attackers could potentially surpass victims, which is beyond previous understanding of model extraction. Extensive experiments on both benchmark datasets and real-world APIs validate that the imitators can succeed in outperforming the original black-box models on transferred domains. We consider our work as a milestone in the research of imitation attack, especially on NLP APIs, as the superior performance could influence the defense or even publishing strategy of API providers.

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Can Domains Be Transferred across Languages in Multi-Domain Multilingual Neural Machine Translation?
Thuy-trang Vu | Shahram Khadivi | Xuanli He | Dinh Phung | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

Previous works mostly focus on either multilingual or multi-domain aspects of neural machine translation (NMT). This paper investigates whether the domain information can be transferred across languages on the composition of multi-domain and multilingual NMT, particularly for the incomplete data condition where in-domain bitext is missing for some language pairs. Our results in the curated leave-one-domain-out experiments show that multi-domain multilingual (MDML) NMT can boost zero-shot translation performance up to +10 gains on BLEU, as well as aid the generalisation of multi-domain NMT to the missing domain. We also explore strategies for effective integration of multilingual and multi-domain NMT, including language and domain tag combination and auxiliary task training. We find that learning domain-aware representations and adding target-language tags to the encoder leads to effective MDML-NMT.

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TCG-Event: Effective Task Conditioning for Generation-based Event Extraction
Fatemeh Shiri | Tongtong Wu | Yuanfang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the The 20th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

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Complex Reading Comprehension Through Question Decomposition
Xiao-Yu Guo | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the The 20th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

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Domain Generalisation of NMT: Fusing Adapters with Leave-One-Domain-Out Training
Thuy-Trang Vu | Shahram Khadivi | Dinh Phung | Gholamreza Haffari
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Generalising to unseen domains is under-explored and remains a challenge in neural machine translation. Inspired by recent research in parameter-efficient transfer learning from pretrained models, this paper proposes a fusion-based generalisation method that learns to combine domain-specific parameters. We propose a leave-one-domain-out training strategy to avoid information leaking to address the challenge of not knowing the test domain during training time. Empirical results on three language pairs show that our proposed fusion method outperforms other baselines up to +0.8 BLEU score on average.

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Self-supervised Rewiring of Pre-trained Speech Encoders:Towards Faster Fine-tuning with Less Labels in Speech Processing
Hao Yang | Jinming Zhao | Gholamreza Haffari | Ehsan Shareghi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Pre-trained speech Transformers have facilitated great success across various speech processing tasks. However, fine-tuning these encoders for downstream tasks require sufficiently large training data to converge or to achieve state-of-the-art. In text domain this has been partly attributed to sub-optimality of the representation space in pre-trained Transformers. In this work, we take a sober look into pre-trained speech encoders and rewire their representation space without requiring any task-specific labels. Our method utilises neutrally synthesised version of audio inputs along with frame masking to construct positive pairs for contrastive self-supervised learning. When used for augmenting the wav2vec 2 encoder, we observe consistent improvement of isotropy in the representation space. Our experiments on 6 speech processing tasks, exhibit a significant convergence speedup during task fine-tuning as well as consistent task improvement, specially in low-resource settings.

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RedApt: An Adaptor for wav2vec 2 EncodingFaster and Smaller Speech Translation without Quality Compromise
Jinming Zhao | Hao Yang | Gholamreza Haffari | Ehsan Shareghi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Pre-trained speech Transformers in speech translation (ST) have facilitated state-of-the-art (SotA) results; yet, using such encoders is computationally expensive. To improve this, we present a novel Reducer Adaptor block, RedApt, that could be seamlessly integrated within any Transformer-based speech encoding architecture. Integrating the pretrained wav2vec 2 speech encoder with RedAptbrings 41% speedup, 33% memory reduction with 24% fewer FLOPs at inference. To our positive surprise, our ST model with RedApt outperforms the SotA architecture by an average of 0.68 BLEU score on 8 language pairs from Must-C.

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Generate, Annotate, and Learn: NLP with Synthetic Text
Xuanli He | Islam Nassar | Jamie Kiros | Gholamreza Haffari | Mohammad Norouzi
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

This paper studies the use of language models as a source of synthetic unlabeled text for NLP. We formulate a general framework called “generate, annotate, and learn (GAL)” to take advantage of synthetic text within knowledge distillation, self-training, and few-shot learning applications. To generate high-quality task-specific text, we either fine-tune LMs on inputs from the task of interest, or prompt large LMs with few examples. We use the best available classifier to annotate synthetic text with soft pseudo labels for knowledge distillation and self-training, and use LMs to obtain hard labels for few-shot learning. We train new supervised models on the combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data, which results in significant gains across several applications. We investigate key components of GAL and present theoretical and empirical arguments against the use of class-conditional LMs to generate synthetic labeled text instead of unlabeled text. GAL achieves new state-of-the-art knowledge distillation results for 6-layer transformers on the GLUE leaderboard.

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Variational Autoencoder with Disentanglement Priors for Low-Resource Task-Specific Natural Language Generation
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Qiongkai Xu | Tongtong Wu | Tianyang Zhan | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we propose a variational autoencoder with disentanglement priors, VAE-Dprior, for task-specific natural language generation with none or a handful of task-specific labeled examples. In order to tackle compositional generalization across tasks, our model performs disentangled representation learning by introducing a conditional prior for the latent content space and another conditional prior for the latent label space. Both types of priors satisfy a novel property called 𝜖-disentangled. We show both empirically and theoretically that the novel priors can disentangle representations even without specific regularizations as in the prior work. The content prior enables directly sampling diverse content representations from the content space learned from the seen tasks, and fuse them with the representations of novel tasks for generating semantically diverse texts in the low-resource settings. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our model over competitive baselines in terms of i) data augmentation in continuous zero/few-shot learning, and ii) text style transfer in the few-shot setting.

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Towards relation extraction from speech
Tongtong Wu | Guitao Wang | Jinming Zhao | Zhaoran Liu | Guilin Qi | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Relation extraction typically aims to extract semantic relationships between entities from the unstructured text.One of the most essential data sources for relation extraction is the spoken language, such as interviews and dialogues.However, the error propagation introduced in automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been ignored in relation extraction, and the end-to-end speech-based relation extraction method has been rarely explored.In this paper, we propose a new listening information extraction task, i.e., speech relation extraction.We construct the training dataset for speech relation extraction via text-to-speech systems, and we construct the testing dataset via crowd-sourcing with native English speakers.We explore speech relation extraction via two approaches: the pipeline approach conducting text-based extraction with a pretrained ASR module, and the end2end approach via a new proposed encoder-decoder model, or what we called SpeechRE.We conduct comprehensive experiments to distinguish the challenges in speech relation extraction, which may shed light on future explorations. We share the code and data on https://github.com/wutong8023/SpeechRE.

2021

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Few-Shot Semantic Parsing for New Predicates
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Shuo Huang | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

In this work, we investigate the problems of semantic parsing in a few-shot learning setting. In this setting, we are provided with k utterance-logical form pairs per new predicate. The state-of-the-art neural semantic parsers achieve less than 25% accuracy on benchmark datasets when k = 1. To tackle this problem, we proposed to i) apply a designated meta-learning method to train the model; ii) regularize attention scores with alignment statistics; iii) apply a smoothing technique in pretraining. As a result, our method consistently outperforms all the baselines in both one and two-shot settings.

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Learning Coupled Policies for Simultaneous Machine Translation using Imitation Learning
Philip Arthur | Trevor Cohn | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

We present a novel approach to efficiently learn a simultaneous translation model with coupled programmer-interpreter policies. First, we present an algorithmic oracle to produce oracle READ/WRITE actions for training bilingual sentence-pairs using the notion of word alignments. This oracle actions are designed to capture enough information from the partial input before writing the output. Next, we perform a coupled scheduled sampling to effectively mitigate the exposure bias when learning both policies jointly with imitation learning. Experiments on six language-pairs show our method outperforms strong baselines in terms of translation quality quality while keeping the delay low.

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Cognition-aware Cognate Detection
Diptesh Kanojia | Prashant Sharma | Sayali Ghodekar | Pushpak Bhattacharyya | Gholamreza Haffari | Malhar Kulkarni
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Automatic detection of cognates helps downstream NLP tasks of Machine Translation, Cross-lingual Information Retrieval, Computational Phylogenetics and Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition. Previous approaches for the task of cognate detection use orthographic, phonetic and semantic similarity based features sets. In this paper, we propose a novel method for enriching the feature sets, with cognitive features extracted from human readers’ gaze behaviour. We collect gaze behaviour data for a small sample of cognates and show that extracted cognitive features help the task of cognate detection. However, gaze data collection and annotation is a costly task. We use the collected gaze behaviour data to predict cognitive features for a larger sample and show that predicted cognitive features, also, significantly improve the task performance. We report improvements of 10% with the collected gaze features, and 12% using the predicted gaze features, over the previously proposed approaches. Furthermore, we release the collected gaze behaviour data along with our code and cross-lingual models.

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Adaptive Knowledge-Enhanced Bayesian Meta-Learning for Few-shot Event Detection
Shirong Shen | Tongtong Wu | Guilin Qi | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari | Sheng Bi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Multilingual Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation
Philip Arthur | Dongwon Ryu | Gholamreza Haffari
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: Can Linguistic Hierarchies Help?
Fahimeh Saleh | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari | Lan Du
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) trains a single NMT model that supports translation between multiple languages, rather than training separate models for different languages. Learning a single model can enhance the low-resource translation by leveraging data from multiple languages. However, the performance of an MNMT model is highly dependent on the type of languages used in training, as transferring knowledge from a diverse set of languages degrades the translation performance due to negative transfer. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation (HKD) approach for MNMT which capitalises on language groups generated according to typological features and phylogeny of languages to overcome the issue of negative transfer. HKD generates a set of multilingual teacher-assistant models via a selective knowledge distillation mechanism based on the language groups, and then distills the ultimate multilingual model from those assistants in an adaptive way. Experimental results derived from the TED dataset with 53 languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in avoiding the negative transfer effect in MNMT, leading to an improved translation performance (about 1 BLEU score in average) compared to strong baselines.

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Improving Numerical Reasoning Skills in the Modular Approach for Complex Question Answering on Text
Xiao-Yu Guo | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Numerical reasoning skills are essential for complex question answering (CQA) over text. It requires opertaions including counting, comparison, addition and subtraction. A successful approach to CQA on text, Neural Module Networks (NMNs), follows the programmer-interpreter paradigm and leverages specialised modules to perform compositional reasoning. However, the NMNs framework does not consider the relationship between numbers and entities in both questions and paragraphs. We propose effective techniques to improve NMNs’ numerical reasoning capabilities by making the interpreter question-aware and capturing the relationship between entities and numbers. On the same subset of the DROP dataset for CQA on text, experimental results show that our additions outperform the original NMNs by 3.0 points for the overall F1 score.

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Curriculum Learning Effectively Improves Low Data VQA
Narjes Askarian | Ehsan Abbasnejad | Ingrid Zukerman | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the The 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Visual question answering (VQA) models, in particular modular ones, are commonly trained on large-scale datasets to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, such datasets are sometimes not available. Further, it has been shown that training these models on small datasets significantly reduces their accuracy. In this paper, we propose curriculum-based learning (CL) regime to increase the accuracy of VQA models trained on small datasets. Specifically, we offer three criteria to rank the samples in these datasets and propose a training strategy for each criterion. Our results show that, for small datasets, our CL approach yields more accurate results than those obtained when training with no curriculum.

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Document Level Hierarchical Transformer
Najam Zaidi | Trevor Cohn | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the The 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Generating long and coherent text is an important and challenging task encompassing many application areas such as summarization, document level machine translation and story generation. Despite the success in modeling intra-sentence coherence, existing long text generation models (e.g., BART and GPT-3) still struggle to maintain a coherent event sequence throughout the generated text. We conjecture that this is because of the difficulty for the model to revise, replace, revoke or delete any part that has been generated by the model. In this paper, we present a novel semi-autoregressive document generation model capable of revising and editing the generated text. Building on recent models by (Gu et al., 2019; Xu and Carpuat, 2020) we propose document generation as a hierarchical Markov decision process with a two level hierarchy, where the high and low level editing programs. We train our model using imitation learning (Hussein et al., 2017) and introduce roll-in policy such that each policy learns on the output of applying the previous action. Experiments applying the proposed approach sheds various insights on the problems of long text generation using our model. We suggest various remedies such as using distilled dataset, designing better attention mechanisms and using autoregressive models as a low level program.

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Lifelong Explainer for Lifelong Learners
Xuelin Situ | Sameen Maruf | Ingrid Zukerman | Cecile Paris | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Lifelong Learning (LL) black-box models are dynamic in that they keep learning from new tasks and constantly update their parameters. Owing to the need to utilize information from previously seen tasks, and capture commonalities in potentially diverse data, it is hard for automatic explanation methods to explain the outcomes of these models. In addition, existing explanation methods, e.g., LIME, which are computationally expensive when explaining a static black-box model, are even more inefficient in the LL setting. In this paper, we propose a novel Lifelong Explanation (LLE) approach that continuously trains a student explainer under the supervision of a teacher – an arbitrary explanation algorithm – on different tasks undertaken in LL. We also leverage the Experience Replay (ER) mechanism to prevent catastrophic forgetting in the student explainer. Our experiments comparing LLE to three baselines on text classification tasks show that LLE can enhance the stability of the explanations for all seen tasks and maintain the same level of faithfulness to the black-box model as the teacher, while being up to 10ˆ2 times faster at test time. Our ablation study shows that the ER mechanism in our LLE approach enhances the learning capabilities of the student explainer. Our code is available at https://github.com/situsnow/LLE.

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Generalised Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation with Cross-Lingual Data Selection
Thuy-Trang Vu | Xuanli He | Dinh Phung | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper considers the unsupervised domain adaptation problem for neural machine translation (NMT), where we assume the access to only monolingual text in either the source or target language in the new domain. We propose a cross-lingual data selection method to extract in-domain sentences in the missing language side from a large generic monolingual corpus. Our proposed method trains an adaptive layer on top of multilingual BERT by contrastive learning to align the representation between the source and target language. This then enables the transferability of the domain classifier between the languages in a zero-shot manner. Once the in-domain data is detected by the classifier, the NMT model is then adapted to the new domain by jointly learning translation and domain discrimination tasks. We evaluate our cross-lingual data selection method on NMT across five diverse domains in three language pairs, as well as a real-world scenario of translation for COVID-19. The results show that our proposed method outperforms other selection baselines up to +1.5 BLEU score.

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Total Recall: a Customized Continual Learning Method for Neural Semantic Parsers
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper investigates continual learning for semantic parsing. In this setting, a neural semantic parser learns tasks sequentially without accessing full training data from previous tasks. Direct application of the SOTA continual learning algorithms to this problem fails to achieve comparable performance with re-training models with all seen tasks because they have not considered the special properties of structured outputs yielded by semantic parsers. Therefore, we propose TotalRecall, a continual learning method designed for neural semantic parsers from two aspects: i) a sampling method for memory replay that diversifies logical form templates and balances distributions of parse actions in a memory; ii) a two-stage training method that significantly improves generalization capability of the parsers across tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to study the research problems involved in continual semantic parsing and demonstrate that a neural semantic parser trained with TotalRecall achieves superior performance than the one trained directly with the SOTA continual learning algorithms and achieve a 3-6 times speedup compared to re-training from scratch.

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It Is Not As Good As You Think! Evaluating Simultaneous Machine Translation on Interpretation Data
Jinming Zhao | Philip Arthur | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn | Ehsan Shareghi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Most existing simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) systems are trained and evaluated on offline translation corpora. We argue that SiMT systems should be trained and tested on real interpretation data. To illustrate this argument, we propose an interpretation test set and conduct a realistic evaluation of SiMT trained on offline translations. Our results, on our test set along with 3 existing smaller scale language pairs, highlight the difference of up-to 13.83 BLEU score when SiMT models are evaluated on translation vs interpretation data. In the absence of interpretation training data, we propose a translation-to-interpretation (T2I) style transfer method which allows converting existing offline translations into interpretation-style data, leading to up-to 2.8 BLEU improvement. However, the evaluation gap remains notable, calling for constructing large-scale interpretation corpora better suited for evaluating and developing SiMT systems.

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Uncertainty-Aware Balancing for Multilingual and Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation Training
Minghao Wu | Yitong Li | Meng Zhang | Liangyou Li | Gholamreza Haffari | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Learning multilingual and multi-domain translation model is challenging as the heterogeneous and imbalanced data make the model converge inconsistently over different corpora in real world. One common practice is to adjust the share of each corpus in the training, so that the learning process is balanced and low-resource cases can benefit from the high resource ones. However, automatic balancing methods usually depend on the intra- and inter-dataset characteristics, which is usually agnostic or requires human priors. In this work, we propose an approach, MultiUAT, that dynamically adjusts the training data usage based on the model’s uncertainty on a small set of trusted clean data for multi-corpus machine translation. We experiments with two classes of uncertainty measures on multilingual (16 languages with 4 settings) and multi-domain settings (4 for in-domain and 2 for out-of-domain on English-German translation) and demonstrate our approach MultiUAT substantially outperforms its baselines, including both static and dynamic strategies. We analyze the cross-domain transfer and show the deficiency of static and similarity based methods.

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Learning to Explain: Generating Stable Explanations Fast
Xuelin Situ | Ingrid Zukerman | Cecile Paris | Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The importance of explaining the outcome of a machine learning model, especially a black-box model, is widely acknowledged. Recent approaches explain an outcome by identifying the contributions of input features to this outcome. In environments involving large black-box models or complex inputs, this leads to computationally demanding algorithms. Further, these algorithms often suffer from low stability, with explanations varying significantly across similar examples. In this paper, we propose a Learning to Explain (L2E) approach that learns the behaviour of an underlying explanation algorithm simultaneously from all training examples. Once the explanation algorithm is distilled into an explainer network, it can be used to explain new instances. Our experiments on three classification tasks, which compare our approach to six explanation algorithms, show that L2E is between 5 and 7.5×10ˆ4 times faster than these algorithms, while generating more stable explanations, and having comparable faithfulness to the black-box model.

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Neural-Symbolic Commonsense Reasoner with Relation Predictors
Farhad Moghimifar | Lizhen Qu | Terry Yue Zhuo | Gholamreza Haffari | Mahsa Baktashmotlagh
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Commonsense reasoning aims to incorporate sets of commonsense facts, retrieved from Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (CKG), to draw conclusion about ordinary situations. The dynamic nature of commonsense knowledge postulates models capable of performing multi-hop reasoning over new situations. This feature also results in having large-scale sparse Knowledge Graphs, where such reasoning process is needed to predict relations between new events. However, existing approaches in this area are limited by considering CKGs as a limited set of facts, thus rendering them unfit for reasoning over new unseen situations and events. In this paper, we present a neural-symbolic reasoner, which is capable of reasoning over large-scale dynamic CKGs. The logic rules for reasoning over CKGs are learned during training by our model. In addition to providing interpretable explanation, the learned logic rules help to generalise prediction to newly introduced events. Experimental results on the task of link prediction on CKGs prove the effectiveness of our model by outperforming the state-of-the-art models.

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Explaining Decision-Tree Predictions by Addressing Potential Conflicts between Predictions and Plausible Expectations
Sameen Maruf | Ingrid Zukerman | Ehud Reiter | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We offer an approach to explain Decision Tree (DT) predictions by addressing potential conflicts between aspects of these predictions and plausible expectations licensed by background information. We define four types of conflicts, operationalize their identification, and specify explanatory schemas that address them. Our human evaluation focused on the effect of explanations on users’ understanding of a DT’s reasoning and their willingness to act on its predictions. The results show that (1) explanations that address potential conflicts are considered at least as good as baseline explanations that just follow a DT path; and (2) the conflict-based explanations are deemed especially valuable when users’ expectations disagree with the DT’s predictions.

2020

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Findings of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Chat Translation
M. Amin Farajian | António V. Lopes | André F. T. Martins | Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

We report the results of the first edition of the WMT shared task on chat translation. The task consisted of translating bilingual conversational text, in particular customer support chats for the English-German language pair (English agent, German customer). This task varies from the other translation shared tasks, i.e. news and biomedical, mainly due to the fact that the conversations are bilingual, less planned, more informal, and often ungrammatical. Furthermore, such conversations are usually characterized by shorter and simpler sentences and contain more pronouns. We received 14 submissions from 6 participating teams, all of them covering both directions, i.e. En->De for agent utterances and De->En for customer messages. We used automatic metrics (BLEU and TER) for evaluating the translations of both agent and customer messages and human document-level direct assessments (DDA) to evaluate the agent translations.

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Harnessing Cross-lingual Features to Improve Cognate Detection for Low-resource Languages
Diptesh Kanojia | Raj Dabre | Shubham Dewangan | Pushpak Bhattacharyya | Gholamreza Haffari | Malhar Kulkarni
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Cognates are variants of the same lexical form across different languages; for example “fonema” in Spanish and “phoneme” in English are cognates, both of which mean “a unit of sound”. The task of automatic detection of cognates among any two languages can help downstream NLP tasks such as Cross-lingual Information Retrieval, Computational Phylogenetics, and Machine Translation. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of cross-lingual word embeddings for detecting cognates among fourteen Indian Languages. Our approach introduces the use of context from a knowledge graph to generate improved feature representations for cognate detection. We, then, evaluate the impact of our cognate detection mechanism on neural machine translation (NMT), as a downstream task. We evaluate our methods to detect cognates on a challenging dataset of twelve Indian languages, namely, Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese, Oriya, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Malayalam. Additionally, we create evaluation datasets for two more Indian languages, Konkani and Nepali. We observe an improvement of up to 18% points, in terms of F-score, for cognate detection. Furthermore, we observe that cognates extracted using our method help improve NMT quality by up to 2.76 BLEU. We also release our code, newly constructed datasets and cross-lingual models publicly.

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Context Dependent Semantic Parsing: A Survey
Zhuang Li | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into machine-readable meaning representations. Currently, most semantic parsing methods are not able to utilize the contextual information (e.g. dialogue and comments history), which has a great potential to boost the semantic parsing systems. To address this issue, context dependent semantic parsing has recently drawn a lot of attention. In this survey, we investigate progress on the methods for the context dependent semantic parsing, together with the current datasets and tasks. We then point out open problems and challenges for future research in this area.

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Collective Wisdom: Improving Low-resource Neural Machine Translation using Adaptive Knowledge Distillation
Fahimeh Saleh | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Scarcity of parallel sentence-pairs poses a significant hurdle for training high-quality Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models in bilingually low-resource scenarios. A standard approach is transfer learning, which involves taking a model trained on a high-resource language-pair and fine-tuning it on the data of the low-resource MT condition of interest. However, it is not clear generally which high-resource language-pair offers the best transfer learning for the target MT setting. Furthermore, different transferred models may have complementary semantic and/or syntactic strengths, hence using only one model may be sub-optimal. In this paper, we tackle this problem using knowledge distillation, where we propose to distill the knowledge of ensemble of teacher models to a single student model. As the quality of these teacher models varies, we propose an effective adaptive knowledge distillation approach to dynamically adjust the contribution of the teacher models during the distillation process. Experiments on transferring from a collection of six language pairs from IWSLT to five low-resource language-pairs from TED Talks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving up to +0.9 BLEU score improvements compared to strong baselines.

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Leveraging Discourse Rewards for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Inigo Jauregi Unanue | Nazanin Esmaili | Gholamreza Haffari | Massimo Piccardi
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Document-level machine translation focuses on the translation of entire documents from a source to a target language. It is widely regarded as a challenging task since the translation of the individual sentences in the document needs to retain aspects of the discourse at document level. However, document-level translation models are usually not trained to explicitly ensure discourse quality. Therefore, in this paper we propose a training approach that explicitly optimizes two established discourse metrics, lexical cohesion and coherence, by using a reinforcement learning objective. Experiments over four different language pairs and three translation domains have shown that our training approach has been able to achieve more cohesive and coherent document translations than other competitive approaches, yet without compromising the faithfulness to the reference translation. In the case of the Zh-En language pair, our method has achieved an improvement of 2.46 percentage points (pp) in LC and 1.17 pp in COH over the runner-up, while at the same time improving 0.63 pp in BLEU score and 0.47 pp in F-BERT.

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Understanding Unnatural Questions Improves Reasoning over Text
Xiaoyu Guo | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Complex question answering (CQA) over raw text is a challenging task. A prominent approach to this task is based on the programmer-interpreter framework, where the programmer maps the question into a sequence of reasoning actions and the interpreter then executes these actions on the raw text. Learning an effective CQA model requires large amounts of human-annotated data, consisting of the ground-truth sequence of reasoning actions, which is time-consuming and expensive to collect at scale. In this paper, we address the challenge of learning a high-quality programmer (parser) by projecting natural human-generated questions into unnatural machine-generated questions which are more convenient to parse. We firstly generate synthetic (question, action sequence) pairs by a data generator, and train a semantic parser that associates synthetic questions with their corresponding action sequences. To capture the diversity when applied to natural questions, we learn a projection model to map natural questions into their most similar unnatural questions for which the parser can work well. Without any natural training data, our projection model provides high-quality action sequences for the CQA task. Experimental results show that the QA model trained exclusively with synthetic data outperforms its state-of-the-art counterpart trained on human-labeled data.

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CosMo: Conditional Seq2Seq-based Mixture Model for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering
Farhad Moghimifar | Lizhen Qu | Yue Zhuo | Mahsa Baktashmotlagh | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Commonsense reasoning refers to the ability of evaluating a social situation and acting accordingly. Identification of the implicit causes and effects of a social context is the driving capability which can enable machines to perform commonsense reasoning. The dynamic world of social interactions requires context-dependent on-demand systems to infer such underlying information. However, current approaches in this realm lack the ability to perform commonsense reasoning upon facing an unseen situation, mostly due to incapability of identifying a diverse range of implicit social relations. Hence they fail to estimate the correct reasoning path. In this paper, we present Conditional Seq2Seq-based Mixture model (CosMo), which provides us with the capabilities of dynamic and diverse content generation. We use CosMo to generate context-dependent clauses, which form a dynamic Knowledge Graph (KG) on-the-fly for commonsense reasoning. To show the adaptability of our model to context-dependant knowledge generation, we address the task of zero-shot commonsense question answering. The empirical results indicate an improvement of up to +5.2% over the state-of-the-art models.

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Domain Adaptative Causality Encoder
Farhad Moghimifar | Gholamreza Haffari | Mahsa Baktashmotlagh
Proceedings of the The 18th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Automated discovery of causal relationships from text is a challenging task. Current approaches which are mainly based on the extraction of low-level relations among individual events are limited by the shortage of publicly available labelled data. Therefore, the resulting models perform poorly when applied to a distributionally different domain for which labelled data did not exist at the time of training. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we leverage the characteristics of dependency trees and adversarial learning to address the tasks of adaptive causality identification and localisation. The term adaptive is used since the training and test data come from two distributionally different datasets, which to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to address. Moreover, we present a new causality dataset, namely MedCaus, which integrates all types of causality in the text. Our experiments on four different benchmark causality datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the existing baselines, by up to 7% improvement, on the tasks of identification and localisation of the causal relations from the text.

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Dynamic Programming Encoding for Subword Segmentation in Neural Machine Translation
Xuanli He | Gholamreza Haffari | Mohammad Norouzi
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces Dynamic Programming Encoding (DPE), a new segmentation algorithm for tokenizing sentences into subword units. We view the subword segmentation of output sentences as a latent variable that should be marginalized out for learning and inference. A mixed character-subword transformer is proposed, which enables exact log marginal likelihood estimation and exact MAP inference to find target segmentations with maximum posterior probability. DPE uses a lightweight mixed character-subword transformer as a means of pre-processing parallel data to segment output sentences using dynamic programming. Empirical results on machine translation suggest that DPE is effective for segmenting output sentences and can be combined with BPE dropout for stochastic segmentation of source sentences. DPE achieves an average improvement of 0.9 BLEU over BPE (Sennrich et al., 2016) and an average improvement of 0.55 BLEU over BPE dropout (Provilkov et al., 2019) on several WMT datasets including English <=> (German, Romanian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian).

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Contextual Neural Machine Translation Improves Translation of Cataphoric Pronouns
KayYen Wong | Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The advent of context-aware NMT has resulted in promising improvements in the overall translation quality and specifically in the translation of discourse phenomena such as pronouns. Previous works have mainly focused on the use of past sentences as context with a focus on anaphora translation. In this work, we investigate the effect of future sentences as context by comparing the performance of a contextual NMT model trained with the future context to the one trained with the past context. Our experiments and evaluation, using generic and pronoun-focused automatic metrics, show that the use of future context not only achieves significant improvements over the context-agnostic Transformer, but also demonstrates comparable and in some cases improved performance over its counterpart trained on past context. We also perform an evaluation on a targeted cataphora test suite and report significant gains over the context-agnostic Transformer in terms of BLEU.

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Few-Shot Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering via Meta Reinforcement Learning
Yuncheng Hua | Yuan-Fang Li | Gholamreza Haffari | Guilin Qi | Tongtong Wu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Complex question-answering (CQA) involves answering complex natural-language questions on a knowledge base (KB). However, the conventional neural program induction (NPI) approach exhibits uneven performance when the questions have different types, harboring inherently different characteristics, e.g., difficulty level. This paper proposes a meta-reinforcement learning approach to program induction in CQA to tackle the potential distributional bias in questions. Our method quickly and effectively adapts the meta-learned programmer to new questions based on the most similar questions retrieved from the training data. The meta-learned policy is then used to learn a good programming policy, utilizing the trial trajectories and their rewards for similar questions in the support set. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CQA dataset (Saha et al., 2018) while using only five trial trajectories for the top-5 retrieved questions in each support set, and meta-training on tasks constructed from only 1% of the training set. We have released our code at https://github.com/DevinJake/MRL-CQA.

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Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Adversarially Trained Language Models
Thuy-Trang Vu | Dinh Phung | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recent work has shown the importance of adaptation of broad-coverage contextualised embedding models on the domain of the target task of interest. Current self-supervised adaptation methods are simplistic, as the training signal comes from a small percentage of randomly masked-out tokens. In this paper, we show that careful masking strategies can bridge the knowledge gap of masked language models (MLMs) about the domains more effectively by allocating self-supervision where it is needed. Furthermore, we propose an effective training strategy by adversarially masking out those tokens which are harder to reconstruct by the underlying MLM. The adversarial objective leads to a challenging combinatorial optimisation problem over subsets of tokens, which we tackle efficiently through relaxation to a variational lowerbound and dynamic programming. On six unsupervised domain adaptation tasks involving named entity recognition, our method strongly outperforms the random masking strategy and achieves up to +1.64 F1 score improvements.

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Personal Information Leakage Detection in Conversations
Qiongkai Xu | Lizhen Qu | Zeyu Gao | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The global market size of conversational assistants (chatbots) is expected to grow to USD 9.4 billion by 2024, according to MarketsandMarkets. Despite the wide use of chatbots, leakage of personal information through chatbots poses serious privacy concerns for their users. In this work, we propose to protect personal information by warning users of detected suspicious sentences generated by conversational assistants. The detection task is formulated as an alignment optimization problem and a new dataset PERSONA-LEAKAGE is collected for evaluation. In this paper, we propose two novel constrained alignment models, which consistently outperform baseline methods on Moreover, we conduct analysis on the behavior of recently proposed personalized chit-chat dialogue systems. The empirical results show that those systems suffer more from personal information disclosure than the widely used Seq2Seq model and the language model. In those cases, a significant number of information leaking utterances can be detected by our models with high precision.

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Challenge Dataset of Cognates and False Friend Pairs from Indian Languages
Diptesh Kanojia | Malhar Kulkarni | Pushpak Bhattacharyya | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Cognates are present in multiple variants of the same text across different languages (e.g., “hund” in German and “hound” in the English language mean “dog”). They pose a challenge to various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Machine Translation, Cross-lingual Sense Disambiguation, Computational Phylogenetics, and Information Retrieval. A possible solution to address this challenge is to identify cognates across language pairs. In this paper, we describe the creation of two cognate datasets for twelve Indian languages namely Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese, Oriya, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Malayalam. We digitize the cognate data from an Indian language cognate dictionary and utilize linked Indian language Wordnets to generate cognate sets. Additionally, we use the Wordnet data to create a False Friends’ dataset for eleven language pairs. We also evaluate the efficacy of our dataset using previously available baseline cognate detection approaches. We also perform a manual evaluation with the help of lexicographers and release the curated gold-standard dataset with this paper.

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Scene Graph Modification Based on Natural Language Commands
Xuanli He | Quan Hung Tran | Gholamreza Haffari | Walter Chang | Zhe Lin | Trung Bui | Franck Dernoncourt | Nhan Dam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Structured representations like graphs and parse trees play a crucial role in many Natural Language Processing systems. In recent years, the advancements in multi-turn user interfaces necessitate the need for controlling and updating these structured representations given new sources of information. Although there have been many efforts focusing on improving the performance of the parsers that map text to graphs or parse trees, very few have explored the problem of directly manipulating these representations. In this paper, we explore the novel problem of graph modification, where the systems need to learn how to update an existing scene graph given a new user’s command. Our novel models based on graph-based sparse transformer and cross attention information fusion outperform previous systems adapted from the machine translation and graph generation literature. We further contribute our large graph modification datasets to the research community to encourage future research for this new problem.

2019

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Neural Speech Translation using Lattice Transformations and Graph Networks
Daniel Beck | Trevor Cohn | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-13)

Speech translation systems usually follow a pipeline approach, using word lattices as an intermediate representation. However, previous work assume access to the original transcriptions used to train the ASR system, which can limit applicability in real scenarios. In this work we propose an approach for speech translation through lattice transformations and neural models based on graph networks. Experimental results show that our approach reaches competitive performance without relying on transcriptions, while also being orders of magnitude faster than previous work.

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Adaptively Scheduled Multitask Learning: The Case of Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Poorya Zaremoodi | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT), a data-hungry technology, suffers from the lack of bilingual data in low-resource scenarios. Multitask learning (MTL) can alleviate this issue by injecting inductive biases into NMT, using auxiliary syntactic and semantic tasks. However, an effective training schedule is required to balance the importance of tasks to get the best use of the training signal. The role of training schedule becomes even more crucial in biased-MTL where the goal is to improve one (or a subset) of tasks the most, e.g. translation quality. Current approaches for biased-MTL are based on brittle hand-engineered heuristics that require trial and error, and should be (re-)designed for each learning scenario. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work on adaptively and dynamically changing the training schedule in biased-MTL. We propose a rigorous approach for automatically reweighing the training data of the main and auxiliary tasks throughout the training process based on their contributions to the generalisability of the main NMT task. Our experiments on translating from English to Vietnamese/Turkish/Spanish show improvements of up to +1.2 BLEU points, compared to strong baselines. Additionally, our analyses shed light on the dynamic of needs throughout the training of NMT: from syntax to semantic.

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Monash University’s Submissions to the WNGT 2019 Document Translation Task
Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation

We describe the work of Monash University for the shared task of Rotowire document translation organised by the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT 2019). We submitted systems for both directions of the English-German language pair. Our main focus is on employing an established document-level neural machine translation model for this task. We achieve a BLEU score of 39.83 (41.46 BLEU per WNGT evaluation) for En-De and 45.06 (47.39 BLEU per WNGT evaluation) for De-En translation directions on the Rotowire test set. All experiments conducted in the process are also described.

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo 2019)
Colin Cherry | Greg Durrett | George Foster | Reza Haffari | Shahram Khadivi | Nanyun Peng | Xiang Ren | Swabha Swayamdipta
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo 2019)

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Selective Attention for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation
Sameen Maruf | André F. T. Martins | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Despite the progress made in sentence-level NMT, current systems still fall short at achieving fluent, good quality translation for a full document. Recent works in context-aware NMT consider only a few previous sentences as context and may not scale to entire documents. To this end, we propose a novel and scalable top-down approach to hierarchical attention for context-aware NMT which uses sparse attention to selectively focus on relevant sentences in the document context and then attends to key words in those sentences. We also propose single-level attention approaches based on sentence or word-level information in the context. The document-level context representation, produced from these attention modules, is integrated into the encoder or decoder of the Transformer model depending on whether we use monolingual or bilingual context. Our experiments and evaluation on English-German datasets in different document MT settings show that our selective attention approach not only significantly outperforms context-agnostic baselines but also surpasses context-aware baselines in most cases.

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A Pointer Network Architecture for Context-Dependent Semantic Parsing
Xuanli He | Quan Tran | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the The 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

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Neural Versus Non-Neural Text Simplification: A Case Study
Islam Nassar | Michelle Ananda-Rajah | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the The 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

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Learning How to Active Learn by Dreaming
Thuy-Trang Vu | Ming Liu | Dinh Phung | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Heuristic-based active learning (AL) methods are limited when the data distribution of the underlying learning problems vary. Recent data-driven AL policy learning methods are also restricted to learn from closely related domains. We introduce a new sample-efficient method that learns the AL policy directly on the target domain of interest by using wake and dream cycles. Our approach interleaves between querying the annotation of the selected datapoints to update the underlying student learner and improving AL policy using simulation where the current student learner acts as an imperfect annotator. We evaluate our method on cross-domain and cross-lingual text classification and named entity recognition tasks. Experimental results show that our dream-based AL policy training strategy is more effective than applying the pretrained policy without further fine-tuning and better than the existing strong baseline methods that use heuristics or reinforcement learning.

2018

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Iterative Back-Translation for Neural Machine Translation
Vu Cong Duy Hoang | Philipp Koehn | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Neural Machine Translation and Generation

We present iterative back-translation, a method for generating increasingly better synthetic parallel data from monolingual data to train neural machine translation systems. Our proposed method is very simple yet effective and highly applicable in practice. We demonstrate improvements in neural machine translation quality in both high and low resourced scenarios, including the best reported BLEU scores for the WMT 2017 German↔English tasks.

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP
Reza Haffari | Colin Cherry | George Foster | Shahram Khadivi | Bahar Salehi
Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP

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Contextual Neural Model for Translating Bilingual Multi-Speaker Conversations
Sameen Maruf | André F. T. Martins | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers

Recent works in neural machine translation have begun to explore document translation. However, translating online multi-speaker conversations is still an open problem. In this work, we propose the task of translating Bilingual Multi-Speaker Conversations, and explore neural architectures which exploit both source and target-side conversation histories for this task. To initiate an evaluation for this task, we introduce datasets extracted from Europarl v7 and OpenSubtitles2016. Our experiments on four language-pairs confirm the significance of leveraging conversation history, both in terms of BLEU and manual evaluation.

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Graph-to-Sequence Learning using Gated Graph Neural Networks
Daniel Beck | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Many NLP applications can be framed as a graph-to-sequence learning problem. Previous work proposing neural architectures on graph-to-sequence obtained promising results compared to grammar-based approaches but still rely on linearisation heuristics and/or standard recurrent networks to achieve the best performance. In this work propose a new model that encodes the full structural information contained in the graph. Our architecture couples the recently proposed Gated Graph Neural Networks with an input transformation that allows nodes and edges to have their own hidden representations, while tackling the parameter explosion problem present in previous work. Experimental results shows that our model outperforms strong baselines in generation from AMR graphs and syntax-based neural machine translation.

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Document Context Neural Machine Translation with Memory Networks
Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a document-level neural machine translation model which takes both source and target document context into account using memory networks. We model the problem as a structured prediction problem with interdependencies among the observed and hidden variables, i.e., the source sentences and their unobserved target translations in the document. The resulting structured prediction problem is tackled with a neural translation model equipped with two memory components, one each for the source and target side, to capture the documental interdependencies. We train the model end-to-end, and propose an iterative decoding algorithm based on block coordinate descent. Experimental results of English translations from French, German, and Estonian documents show that our model is effective in exploiting both source and target document context, and statistically significantly outperforms the previous work in terms of BLEU and METEOR.

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Learning How to Actively Learn: A Deep Imitation Learning Approach
Ming Liu | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Heuristic-based active learning (AL) methods are limited when the data distribution of the underlying learning problems vary. We introduce a method that learns an AL “policy” using “imitation learning” (IL). Our IL-based approach makes use of an efficient and effective “algorithmic expert”, which provides the policy learner with good actions in the encountered AL situations. The AL strategy is then learned with a feedforward network, mapping situations to most informative query datapoints. We evaluate our method on two different tasks: text classification and named entity recognition. Experimental results show that our IL-based AL strategy is more effective than strong previous methods using heuristics and reinforcement learning.

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Adaptive Knowledge Sharing in Multi-Task Learning: Improving Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Poorya Zaremoodi | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is notorious for its need for large amounts of bilingual data. An effective approach to compensate for this requirement is Multi-Task Learning (MTL) to leverage different linguistic resources as a source of inductive bias. Current MTL architectures are based on the Seq2Seq transduction, and (partially) share different components of the models among the tasks. However, this MTL approach often suffers from task interference and is not able to fully capture commonalities among subsets of tasks. We address this issue by extending the recurrent units with multiple “blocks” along with a trainable “routing network”. The routing network enables adaptive collaboration by dynamic sharing of blocks conditioned on the task at hand, input, and model state. Empirical evaluation of two low-resource translation tasks, English to Vietnamese and Farsi, show +1 BLEU score improvements compared to strong baselines.

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Incorporating Syntactic Uncertainty in Neural Machine Translation with a Forest-to-Sequence Model
Poorya Zaremoodi | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Incorporating syntactic information in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can lead to better reorderings, particularly useful when the language pairs are syntactically highly divergent or when the training bitext is not large. Previous work on using syntactic information, provided by top-1 parse trees generated by (inevitably error-prone) parsers, has been promising. In this paper, we propose a forest-to-sequence NMT model to make use of exponentially many parse trees of the source sentence to compensate for the parser errors. Our method represents the collection of parse trees as a packed forest, and learns a neural transducer to translate from the input forest to the target sentence. Experiments on English to German, Chinese and Farsi translation tasks show the superiority of our approach over the sequence-to-sequence and tree-to-sequence neural translation models.

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Improved Neural Machine Translation using Side Information
Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2018

In this work, we investigate whether side information is helpful in neural machine translation (NMT). We study various kinds of side information, including topical information, personal trait, then propose different ways of incorporating them into the existing NMT models. Our experimental results show the benefits of side information in improving the NMT models.

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Exploring Textual and Speech information in Dialogue Act Classification with Speaker Domain Adaptation
Xuanli He | Quan Tran | William Havard | Laurent Besacier | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2018

In spite of the recent success of Dialogue Act (DA) classification, the majority of prior works focus on text-based classification with oracle transcriptions, i.e. human transcriptions, instead of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)’s transcriptions. In spoken dialog systems, however, the agent would only have access to noisy ASR transcriptions, which may further suffer performance degradation due to domain shift. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of using both acoustic and textual signals, either oracle or ASR transcriptions, and investigate speaker domain adaptation for DA classification. Our multimodal model proves to be superior to the unimodal models, particularly when the oracle transcriptions are not available. We also propose an effective method for speaker domain adaptation, which achieves competitive results.

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The Context-Dependent Additive Recurrent Neural Net
Quan Hung Tran | Tuan Lai | Gholamreza Haffari | Ingrid Zukerman | Trung Bui | Hung Bui
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Contextual sequence mapping is one of the fundamental problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here, instead of relying solely on the information presented in the text, the learning agents have access to a strong external signal given to assist the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel family of Recurrent Neural Network unit: the Context-dependent Additive Recurrent Neural Network (CARNN) that is designed specifically to address this type of problem. The experimental results on public datasets in the dialog problem (Babi dialog Task 6 and Frame), contextual language model (Switchboard and Penn Tree Bank) and question answering (Trec QA) show that our novel CARNN-based architectures outperform previous methods.

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Neural Machine Translation for Bilingually Scarce Scenarios: a Deep Multi-Task Learning Approach
Poorya Zaremoodi | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Neural machine translation requires large amount of parallel training text to learn a reasonable quality translation model. This is particularly inconvenient for language pairs for which enough parallel text is not available. In this paper, we use monolingual linguistic resources in the source side to address this challenging problem based on a multi-task learning approach. More specifically, we scaffold the machine translation task on auxiliary tasks including semantic parsing, syntactic parsing, and named-entity recognition. This effectively injects semantic and/or syntactic knowledge into the translation model, which would otherwise require a large amount of training bitext to learn from. We empirically analyze and show the effectiveness of our multitask learning approach on three translation tasks: English-to-French, English-to-Farsi, and English-to-Vietnamese.

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Automatic Post-Editing of Machine Translation: A Neural Programmer-Interpreter Approach
Thuy-Trang Vu | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Automated Post-Editing (PE) is the task of automatically correct common and repetitive errors found in machine translation (MT) output. In this paper, we present a neural programmer-interpreter approach to this task, resembling the way that human perform post-editing using discrete edit operations, wich we refer to as programs. Our model outperforms previous neural models for inducing PE programs on the WMT17 APE task for German-English up to +1 BLEU score and -0.7 TER scores.

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Learning to Actively Learn Neural Machine Translation
Ming Liu | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Traditional active learning (AL) methods for machine translation (MT) rely on heuristics. However, these heuristics are limited when the characteristics of the MT problem change due to e.g. the language pair or the amount of the initial bitext. In this paper, we present a framework to learn sentence selection strategies for neural MT. We train the AL query strategy using a high-resource language-pair based on AL simulations, and then transfer it to the low-resource language-pair of interest. The learned query strategy capitalizes on the shared characteristics between the language pairs to make an effective use of the AL budget. Our experiments on three language-pairs confirms that our method is more effective than strong heuristic-based methods in various conditions, including cold-start and warm-start as well as small and extremely small data conditions.

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Sequence to Sequence Mixture Model for Diverse Machine Translation
Xuanli He | Gholamreza Haffari | Mohammad Norouzi
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Sequence to sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models lack diversity in their generated translations. This can be attributed to their limitations in capturing lexical and syntactic variations in parallel corpora, due to different styles, genres, topics, or ambiguity of human translation process. In this paper, we develop a novel sequence to sequence mixture (S2SMIX) model that improves both translation diversity and quality by adopting a committee of specialized translation models rather than a single translation model. Each mixture component selects its own training dataset via optimization of the marginal log-likelihood, which leads to a soft clustering of the parallel corpus. Experiments on four language pairs demonstrate the superiority of our mixture model compared to SEQ2SEQ model with the standard and diversity encouraged beam search. Our mixture model incurs negligible additional parameters and no extra computation in the decoding time.

2017

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Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2017
Jojo Sze-Meng Wong | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2017

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Leveraging Linguistic Resources for Improving Neural Text Classification
Ming Liu | Gholamreza Haffari | Wray Buntine | Michelle Ananda-Rajah
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2017

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A Generative Attentional Neural Network Model for Dialogue Act Classification
Quan Hung Tran | Gholamreza Haffari | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We propose a novel generative neural network architecture for Dialogue Act classification. Building upon the Recurrent Neural Network framework, our model incorporates a novel attentional technique and a label to label connection for sequence learning, akin to Hidden Markov Models. The experiments show that both of these innovations lead our model to outperform strong baselines for dialogue act classification on MapTask and Switchboard corpora. We further empirically analyse the effectiveness of each of the new innovations.

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Persian-Spanish Low-Resource Statistical Machine Translation Through English as Pivot Language
Benyamin Ahmadnia | Javier Serrano | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017

This paper is an attempt to exclusively focus on investigating the pivot language technique in which a bridging language is utilized to increase the quality of the Persian-Spanish low-resource Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In this case, English is used as the bridging language, and the Persian-English SMT is combined with the English-Spanish one, where the relatively large corpora of each may be used in support of the Persian-Spanish pairing. Our results indicate that the pivot language technique outperforms the direct SMT processes currently in use between Persian and Spanish. Furthermore, we investigate the sentence translation pivot strategy and the phrase translation in turn, and demonstrate that, in the context of the Persian-Spanish SMT system, the phrase-level pivoting outperforms the sentence-level pivoting. Finally we suggest a method called combination model in which the standard direct model and the best triangulation pivoting model are blended in order to reach a high-quality translation.

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Efficient Benchmarking of NLP APIs using Multi-armed Bandits
Gholamreza Haffari | Tuan Dung Tran | Mark Carman
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

Comparing NLP systems to select the best one for a task of interest, such as named entity recognition, is critical for practitioners and researchers. A rigorous approach involves setting up a hypothesis testing scenario using the performance of the systems on query documents. However, often the hypothesis testing approach needs to send a lot of document queries to the systems, which can be problematic. In this paper, we present an effective alternative based on the multi-armed bandit (MAB). We propose a hierarchical generative model to represent the uncertainty in the performance measures of the competing systems, to be used by Thompson Sampling to solve the resulting MAB. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data show that our approach requires significantly fewer queries compared to the standard benchmarking technique to identify the best system according to F-measure.

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A Hierarchical Neural Model for Learning Sequences of Dialogue Acts
Quan Hung Tran | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

We propose a novel hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for learning sequences of Dialogue Acts (DAs). The input in this task is a sequence of utterances (i.e., conversational contributions) comprising a sequence of tokens, and the output is a sequence of DA labels (one label per utterance). Our model leverages the hierarchical nature of dialogue data by using two nested RNNs that capture long-range dependencies at the dialogue level and the utterance level. This model is combined with an attention mechanism that focuses on salient tokens in utterances. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on two popular datasets, Switchboard and MapTask; and our detailed empirical analysis highlights the impact of each aspect of our model.

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Word Representation Models for Morphologically Rich Languages in Neural Machine Translation
Ekaterina Vylomova | Trevor Cohn | Xuanli He | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Subword and Character Level Models in NLP

Out-of-vocabulary words present a great challenge for Machine Translation. Recently various character-level compositional models were proposed to address this issue. In current research we incorporate two most popular neural architectures, namely LSTM and CNN, into hard- and soft-attentional models of translation for character-level representation of the source. We propose semantic and morphological intrinsic evaluation of encoder-level representations. Our analysis of the learned representations reveals that character-based LSTM seems to be better at capturing morphological aspects compared to character-based CNN. We also show that hard-attentional model provides better character-level representations compared to vanilla one.

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Towards Decoding as Continuous Optimisation in Neural Machine Translation
Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We propose a novel decoding approach for neural machine translation (NMT) based on continuous optimisation. We reformulate decoding, a discrete optimization problem, into a continuous problem, such that optimization can make use of efficient gradient-based techniques. Our powerful decoding framework allows for more accurate decoding for standard neural machine translation models, as well as enabling decoding in intractable models such as intersection of several different NMT models. Our empirical results show that our decoding framework is effective, and can leads to substantial improvements in translations, especially in situations where greedy search and beam search are not feasible. Finally, we show how the technique is highly competitive with, and complementary to, reranking.

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Preserving Distributional Information in Dialogue Act Classification
Quan Hung Tran | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper introduces a novel training/decoding strategy for sequence labeling. Instead of greedily choosing a label at each time step, and using it for the next prediction, we retain the probability distribution over the current label, and pass this distribution to the next prediction. This approach allows us to avoid the effect of label bias and error propagation in sequence learning/decoding. Our experiments on dialogue act classification demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Even though our underlying neural network model is relatively simple, it outperforms more complex neural models, achieving state-of-the-art results on the MapTask and Switchboard corpora.

2016

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Richer Interpolative Smoothing Based on Modified Kneser-Ney Language Modeling
Ehsan Shareghi | Trevor Cohn | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Improving Word Alignment of Rare Words with Word Embeddings
Masoud Jalili Sabet | Heshaam Faili | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We address the problem of inducing word alignment for language pairs by developing an unsupervised model with the capability of getting applied to other generative alignment models. We approach the task by: i)proposing a new alignment model based on the IBM alignment model 1 that uses vector representation of words, and ii)examining the use of similar source words to overcome the problem of rare source words and improving the alignments. We apply our method to English-French corpora and run the experiments with different sizes of sentence pairs. Our results show competitive performance against the baseline and in some cases improve the results up to 6.9% in terms of precision.

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Fast, Small and Exact: Infinite-order Language Modelling with Compressed Suffix Trees
Ehsan Shareghi | Matthias Petri | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4

Efficient methods for storing and querying are critical for scaling high-order m-gram language models to large corpora. We propose a language model based on compressed suffix trees, a representation that is highly compact and can be easily held in memory, while supporting queries needed in computing language model probabilities on-the-fly. We present several optimisations which improve query runtimes up to 2500×, despite only incurring a modest increase in construction time and memory usage. For large corpora and high Markov orders, our method is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art KenLM package. It imposes much lower memory requirements, often by orders of magnitude, and has runtimes that are either similar (for training) or comparable (for querying).

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A Latent Variable Recurrent Neural Network for Discourse-Driven Language Models
Yangfeng Ji | Gholamreza Haffari | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Inter-document Contextual Language model
Quan Hung Tran | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Incorporating Structural Alignment Biases into an Attentional Neural Translation Model
Trevor Cohn | Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Ekaterina Vymolova | Kaisheng Yao | Chris Dyer | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Incorporating Side Information into Recurrent Neural Network Language Models
Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Trevor Cohn | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Improving Neural Translation Models with Linguistic Factors
Cong Duy Vu Hoang | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2016

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Learning cascaded latent variable models for biomedical text classification
Ming Liu | Gholamreza Haffari | Wray Buntine
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2016

2015

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Automated Analysis of Bangla Poetry for Classification and Poet Identification
Geetanjali Rakshit | Anupam Ghosh | Pushpak Bhattacharyya | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Optimizing Multivariate Performance Measures for Learning Relation Extraction Models
Gholamreza Haffari | Ajay Nagesh | Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Compact, Efficient and Unlimited Capacity: Language Modeling with Compressed Suffix Trees
Ehsan Shareghi | Matthias Petri | Gholamreza Haffari | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2014

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Noisy Or-based model for Relation Extraction using Distant Supervision
Ajay Nagesh | Gholamreza Haffari | Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

2013

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Scalable Variational Inference for Extracting Hierarchical Phrase-based Translation Rules
Baskaran Sankaran | Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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The Haves and the Have-Nots: Leveraging Unlabelled Corpora for Sentiment Analysis
Kashyap Popat | Balamurali A.R | Pushpak Bhattacharyya | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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An Infinite Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Phrasal Translation
Trevor Cohn | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Graph Propagation for Paraphrasing Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Statistical Machine Translation
Majid Razmara | Maryam Siahbani | Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2012

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Compact Rule Extraction for Hierarchical Phrase-based Translation
Baskaran Sankaran | Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers

This paper introduces two novel approaches for extracting compact grammars for hierarchical phrase-based translation. The first is a combinatorial optimization approach and the second is a Bayesian model over Hiero grammars using Variational Bayes for inference. In contrast to the conventional Hiero (Chiang, 2007) rule extraction algorithm , our methods extract compact models reducing model size by 17.8% to 57.6% without impacting translation quality across several language pairs. The Bayesian model is particularly effective for resource-poor languages with evidence from Korean-English translation. To our knowledge, this is the first alternative to Hiero-style rule extraction that finds a more compact synchronous grammar without hurting translation performance.

2011

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Bayesian Extraction of Minimal SCFG Rules for Hierarchical Phrase-based Translation
Baskaran Sankaran | Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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An Ensemble Model that Combines Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Discriminative Dependency Parsing
Gholamreza Haffari | Marzieh Razavi | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2009

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Hierarchical Dirichlet Trees for Information Retrieval
Gholamreza Haffari | Yee Whye Teh
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Active Learning for Statistical Phrase-based Machine Translation
Gholamreza Haffari | Maxim Roy | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Machine Learning Approaches for Dealing with Bilingual Data in Statistical Machine Translation
Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XII: Tutorials

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Active Learning for Multilingual Statistical Machine Translation
Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP

2008

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Homotopy-Based Semi-Supervised Hidden Markov Models for Sequence Labeling
Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008)

2007

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Transductive learning for statistical machine translation
Nicola Ueffing | Gholamreza Haffari | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics

2006

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Tutorial on Inductive Semi-supervised Learning Methods: with Applicability to Natural Language Processing
Anoop Sarkar | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL, Companion Volume: Tutorial Abstracts

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