We investigate what kind of structural knowledge learned in neural network encoders is transferable to processing natural language. We design artificial languages with structural properties that mimic natural language, pretrain encoders on the data, and see how much performance the encoder exhibits on downstream tasks in natural language.Our experimental results show that pretraining with an artificial language with a nesting dependency structure provides some knowledge transferable to natural language.A follow-up probing analysis indicates that its success in the transfer is related to the amount of encoded contextual information and what is transferred is the knowledge of position-aware context dependence of language.Our results provide insights into how neural network encoders process human languages and the source of cross-lingual transferability of recent multilingual language models.

Recent studies have shown that multilingual pretrained language models can be effectively improved with cross-lingual alignment information from Wikipedia entities. However, existing methods only exploit entity information in pretraining and do not explicitly use entities in downstream tasks. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of leveraging entity representations for downstream cross-lingual tasks. We train a multilingual language model with 24 languages with entity representations and showthe model consistently outperforms word-based pretrained models in various cross-lingual transfer tasks. We also analyze the model and the key insight is that incorporating entity representations into the input allows us to extract more language-agnostic features. We also evaluate the model with a multilingual cloze prompt task with the mLAMA dataset. We show that entity-based prompt elicits correct factual knowledge more likely than using only word representations.

When mapping a natural language instruction to a sequence of actions, it is often useful toidentify sub-tasks in the instruction. Such sub-task segmentation, however, is not necessarily provided in the training data. We present the A2LCTC (Action-to-Language Connectionist Temporal Classification) algorithm to automatically discover a sub-task segmentation of an action sequence.A2LCTC does not require annotations of correct sub-task segments and learns to find them from pairs of instruction and action sequence in a weakly-supervised manner. We experiment with the ALFRED dataset and show that A2LCTC accurately finds the sub-task structures. With the discovered sub-tasks segments, we also train agents that work on the downstream task and empirically show that our algorithm improves the performance.

We present EASE, a novel method for learning sentence embeddings via contrastive learning between sentences and their related entities. The advantage of using entity supervision is twofold: (1) entities have been shown to be a strong indicator of text semantics and thus should provide rich training signals for sentence embeddings; (2) entities are defined independently of languages and thus offer useful cross-lingual alignment supervision. We evaluate EASE against other unsupervised models both in monolingual and multilingual settings. We show that EASE exhibits competitive or better performance in English semantic textual similarity (STS) and short text clustering (STC) tasks and it significantly outperforms baseline methods in multilingual settings on a variety of tasks. Our source code, pre-trained models, and newly constructed multi-lingual STC dataset are available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/ease.

For Japanese-to-English translation, zero pronouns in Japanese pose a challenge, since the model needs to infer and produce the corresponding pronoun in the target side of the English sentence. However, although fully resolving zero pronouns often needs discourse context, in some cases, the local context within a sentence gives clues to the inference of the zero pronoun. In this study, we propose a data augmentation method that provides additional training signals for the translation model to learn correlations between local context and zero pronouns. We show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of zero pronoun translation with machine translation experiments in the conversational domain.

Placeholder translation systems enable the users to specify how a specific phrase is translated in the output sentence. The system is trained to output special placeholder tokens and the user-specified term is injected into the output through the context-free replacement of the placeholder token. However and this approach could result in ungrammatical sentences because it is often the case that the specified term needs to be inflected according to the context of the output and which is unknown before the translation. To address this problem and we propose a novel method of placeholder translation that can inflect specified terms according to the grammatical construction of the output sentence. We extend the seq2seq architecture with a character-level decoder that takes the lemma of a user-specified term and the words generated from the word-level decoder to output a correct inflected form of the lemma. We evaluate our approach with a Japanese-to-English translation task in the scientific writing domain and and show our model can incorporate specified terms in a correct form more successfully than other comparable models.

Unsupervised cross-lingual word embedding(CLWE) methods learn a linear transformation matrix that maps two monolingual embedding spaces that are separately trained with monolingual corpora. This method relies on the assumption that the two embedding spaces are structurally similar, which does not necessarily hold true in general. In this paper, we argue that using a pseudo-parallel corpus generated by an unsupervised machine translation model facilitates the structural similarity of the two embedding spaces and improves the quality of CLWEs in the unsupervised mapping method. We show that our approach outperforms other alternative approaches given the same amount of data, and, through detailed analysis, we show that data augmentation with the pseudo data from unsupervised machine translation is especially effective for mapping-based CLWEs because (1) the pseudo data makes the source and target corpora (partially) parallel; (2) the pseudo data contains information on the original language that helps to learn similar embedding spaces between the source and target languages.

Existing approaches to mapping-based cross-lingual word embeddings are based on the assumption that the source and target embedding spaces are structurally similar. The structures of embedding spaces largely depend on the co-occurrence statistics of each word, which the choice of context window determines. Despite this obvious connection between the context window and mapping-based cross-lingual embeddings, their relationship has been underexplored in prior work. In this work, we provide a thorough evaluation, in various languages, domains, and tasks, of bilingual embeddings trained with different context windows. The highlight of our findings is that increasing the size of both the source and target window sizes improves the performance of bilingual lexicon induction, especially the performance on frequent nouns.

Sentence-level (SL) machine translation (MT) has reached acceptable quality for many high-resourced languages, but not document-level (DL) MT, which is difficult to 1) train with little amount of DL data; and 2) evaluate, as the main methods and data sets focus on SL evaluation. To address the first issue, we present a document-aligned Japanese-English conversation corpus, including balanced, high-quality business conversation data for tuning and testing. As for the second issue, we manually identify the main areas where SL MT fails to produce adequate translations in lack of context. We then create an evaluation set where these phenomena are annotated to alleviate automatic evaluation of DL systems. We train MT models using our corpus to demonstrate how using context leads to improvements.

The paper describes the development process of the The University of Tokyo’s NMT systems that were submitted to the WAT 2020 Document-level Business Scene Dialogue Translation sub-task. We describe the data processing workflow, NMT system training architectures, and automatic evaluation results. For the WAT 2020 shared task, we submitted 12 systems (both constrained and unconstrained) for English-Japanese and Japanese-English translation directions. The submitted systems were trained using Transformer models and one was a SMT baseline.

While the progress of machine translation of written text has come far in the past several years thanks to the increasing availability of parallel corpora and corpora-based training technologies, automatic translation of spoken text and dialogues remains challenging even for modern systems. In this paper, we aim to boost the machine translation quality of conversational texts by introducing a newly constructed Japanese-English business conversation parallel corpus. A detailed analysis of the corpus is provided along with challenging examples for automatic translation. We also experiment with adding the corpus in a machine translation training scenario and show how the resulting system benefits from its use.