The effective use of monolingual and bilingual knowledge represents a critical challenge within the neural machine translation (NMT) community. In this paper, we propose a modular strategy that facilitates the cooperation of these two types of knowledge in translation tasks, while avoiding the issue of catastrophic forgetting and exhibiting superior model generalization and robustness. Our model is comprised of three functionally independent modules: an encoding module, a decoding module, and a transferring module. The former two acquire large-scale monolingual knowledge via self-supervised learning, while the latter is trained on parallel data and responsible for transferring latent features between the encoding and decoding modules. Extensive experiments in multi-domain translation tasks indicate our model yields remarkable performance, with up to 7 BLEU improvements in out-of-domain tests over the conventional pretrain-and-finetune approach. Our codes are available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/MoNMT.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based sparse architectures can significantly increase model capacity with sublinear computational overhead, which are hence widely used in massively multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT). However, they are prone to overfitting on low-resource language translation. In this paper, we propose a modularized MNMT framework that is able to flexibly assemble dense and MoE-based sparse modules to achieve the best of both worlds. The training strategy of the modularized MNMT framework consists of three stages: (1) Pre-training basic MNMT models with different training objectives or model structures, (2) Initializing modules of the framework with pre-trained couterparts (e.g., encoder, decoder and embedding layers) from the basic models and (3) Fine-tuning the modularized MNMT framework to fit modules from different models together. We pre-train three basic MNMT models from scratch: a dense model, an MoE-based sparse model and a new MoE model, termed as MoE-LGR that explores multiple Language-Group-specifc Routers to incorporate language group knowledge into MNMT. The strengths of these pre-trained models are either on low-resource language translation, high-resource language translation or zero-shot translation. Our modularized MNMT framework attempts to incorporate these advantages into a single model with reasonable initialization and fine-tuning. Experiments on widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed modularized MNMT framwork substantially outperforms both MoE and dense models on high- and low-resource language translation as well as zero-shot translation. Our framework facilitates the combination of different methods with their own strengths and recycling off-the-shelf models for multilingual neural machine translation. Codes are available at https://github.com/lishangjie1/MMNMT.

Similes occur in the creative context of describing a concept (i.e., tenor) by making a literally false yet figuratively meaningful comparison to another (i.e., vehicle). Previous efforts form simile generation as a context-free generation task, focusing on simile-style transfer or writing a simile from a given prefix. However, generated texts under such settings might be undesirable, such as hardly meeting the simile definition (e.g., missing vehicle) or difficult to address certain preferences of content as humans wish (e.g., describe the color of apples through the simile). We believe that a simile could be more qualified and user-oriented if incorporated with pre-specified constraints. To this end, we introduce controllable simile generation (CSG), a new task that requires the model to generate a simile with multiple simile elements, e.g., context and vehicle. To facilitate this task, we present GraCe, including 61.3k simile-element annotated Chinese similes. Based on it, we propose a CSG model Similor to benchmark this task, including a vehicle retrieval module Scorer to obtain the explicable comparison for a given tenor in the vehicle-unknown situation. Both statistical and experimental analyses show that GraCe is of high quality beyond all other Chinese simile datasets, in terms of the number (8 vs. 3) of annotation elements, Is-Simile accuracy (98.9% vs. 78.7%), and increasing model-performance gains for both uncontrollable and controllable simile generation. Meanwhile, Similor can serve as a strong baseline for CSG, especially with Scorer, which beats model-based retrieval methods without any re-training.

k-Nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to non-parametrically adapt to new translation domains. By using an upstream NMT model to traverse the downstream training corpus, it is equipped with a datastore containing vectorized key-value pairs, which are retrieved during inference to benefit translation.However, there often exists a significant gap between upstream and downstream domains, which hurts the datastore retrieval and the final translation quality.To deal with this issue, we propose a novel approach to boost the datastore retrieval of kNN-MT by reconstructing the original datastore.Concretely, we design a reviser to revise the key representations, making them better fit for the downstream domain. The reviser is trained using the collected semantically-related key-queries pairs, and optimized by two proposed losses: one is the key-queries semantic distance ensuring each revised key representation is semantically related to its corresponding queries, and the other is an L2-norm loss encouraging revised key representations to effectively retain the knowledge learned by the upstream NMT model. Extensive experiments on domain adaptation tasks demonstrate that our method can effectively boost the datastore retrieval and translation quality of kNN-MT.Our code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Revised-knn-mt.

The principal task in supervised neural machine translation (NMT) is to learn to generate target sentences conditioned on the source inputs from a set of parallel sentence pairs, and thus produce a model capable of generalizing to unseen instances. However, it is commonly observed that the generalization performance of the model is highly influenced by the amount of parallel data used in training. Although data augmentation is widely used to enrich the training data, conventional methods with discrete manipulations fail to generate diverse and faithful training samples. In this paper, we present a novel data augmentation paradigm termed Continuous Semantic Augmentation (CsaNMT), which augments each training instance with an adjacency semantic region that could cover adequate variants of literal expression under the same meaning. We conduct extensive experiments on both rich-resource and low-resource settings involving various language pairs, including WMT14 English→{German,French}, NIST Chinese→English and multiple low-resource IWSLT translation tasks. The provided empirical evidences show that CsaNMT sets a new level of performance among existing augmentation techniques, improving on the state-of-the-art by a large margin. The core codes are contained in Appendix E.

Machine Translation task has made great progress with the help of auto-regressive decoding paradigm and Transformer architecture. In this paradigm, though the encoder can obtain global source representations, the decoder can only use translation history to determine the current word. Previous promising works attempted to address this issue by applying a draft or a fixed-length semantic embedding as target-side global information. However, these methods either degrade model efficiency or show limitations in expressing semantics. Motivated by Functional Equivalence Theory, we extract several semantic kernels from a source sentence, each of which can express one semantic segment of the original sentence. Together, these semantic kernels can capture global semantic information, and we project them into target embedding space to guide target sentence generation. We further force our model to use semantic kernels at each decoding step through an adaptive mask algorithm. Empirical studies on various machine translation benchmarks show that our approach gains approximately an improvement of 1 BLEU score on most benchmarks over the Transformer baseline and about 1.7 times faster than previous works on average at inference time.

Keyphrase generation aims to automatically generate short phrases summarizing an input document. The recently emerged ONE2SET paradigm (Ye et al., 2021) generates keyphrases as a set and has achieved competitive performance. Nevertheless, we observe serious calibration errors outputted by ONE2SET, especially in the over-estimation of ∅ token (means “no corresponding keyphrase”). In this paper, we deeply analyze this limitation and identify two main reasons behind: 1) the parallel generation has to introduce excessive ∅ as padding tokens into training instances; and 2) the training mechanism assigning target to each slot is unstable and further aggravates the ∅ token over-estimation. To make the model well-calibrated, we propose WR-ONE2SET which extends ONE2SET with an adaptive instance-level cost Weighting strategy and a target Re-assignment mechanism. The former dynamically penalizes the over-estimated slots for different instances thus smoothing the uneven training distribution. The latter refines the original inappropriate assignment and reduces the supervisory signals of over-estimated slots. Experimental results on commonly-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed paradigm.

This paper aims to improve the performance of text-to-SQL parsing by exploring the intrinsic uncertainties in the neural network based approaches (called SUN). From the data uncertainty perspective, it is indisputable that a single SQL can be learned from multiple semantically-equivalent questions. Different from previous methods that are limited to one-to-one mapping, we propose a data uncertainty constraint to explore the underlying complementary semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent questions (many-to-one) and learn the robust feature representations with reduced spurious associations. In this way, we can reduce the sensitivity of the learned representations and improve the robustness of the parser. From the model uncertainty perspective, there is often structural information (dependence) among the weights of neural networks. To improve the generalizability and stability of neural text-to-SQL parsers, we propose a model uncertainty constraint to refine the query representations by enforcing the output representations of different perturbed encoding networks to be consistent with each other. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong competitors and achieves new state-of-the-art results.

Recent evidence reveals that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models with deeper neural networks can be more effective but are difficult to train. In this paper, we present a MultiScale Collaborative (MSC) framework to ease the training of NMT models that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly boost the gradient back-propagation from top to bottom levels by introducing a block-scale collaboration mechanism into deep NMT models. Then, instead of forcing the whole encoder stack directly learns a desired representation, we let each encoder block learns a fine-grained representation and enhance it by encoding spatial dependencies using a context-scale collaboration. We provide empirical evidence showing that the MSC nets are easy to optimize and can obtain improvements of translation quality from considerably increased depth. On IWSLT translation tasks with three translation directions, our extremely deep models (with 72-layer encoders) surpass strong baselines by +2.2 +3.1 BLEU points. In addition, our deep MSC achieves a BLEU score of 30.56 on WMT14 English-to-German task that significantly outperforms state-of-the-art deep NMT models. We have included the source code in supplementary materials.

In this paper we introduce the systems IIE submitted for the WMT20 shared task on German-French news translation. Our systems are based on the Transformer architecture with some effective improvements. Multiscale collaborative deep architecture, data selection, back translation, knowledge distillation, domain adaptation, model ensemble and re-ranking are employed and proven effective in our experiments. Our German-to-French system achieved 35.0 BLEU and ranked the second among all anonymous submissions, and our French-to-German system achieved 36.6 BLEU and ranked the fourth in all anonymous submissions.

We propose a novel Bi-directional Cognitive Knowledge Framework (BCKF) for reading comprehension from the perspective of complementary learning systems theory. It aims to simulate two ways of thinking in the brain to answer questions, including reverse thinking and inertial thinking. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we design a corresponding Bi-directional Cognitive Thinking Network (BCTN) to encode the passage and generate a question (answer) given an answer (question) and decouple the bi-directional knowledge. The model has the ability to reverse reasoning questions which can assist inertial thinking to generate more accurate answers. Competitive improvement is observed in DuReader dataset, confirming our hypothesis that bi-directional knowledge helps the QA task. The novel framework shows an interesting perspective on machine reading comprehension and cognitive science.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved great success due to the ability to generate high-quality sentences. Compared with human translations, one of the drawbacks of current NMT is that translations are not usually faithful to the input, e.g., omitting information or generating unrelated fragments, which inevitably decreases the overall quality, especially for human readers. In this paper, we propose a novel training strategy with a multi-task learning paradigm to build a faithfulness enhanced NMT model (named FEnmt). During the NMT training process, we sample a subset from the training set and translate them to get fragments that have been mistranslated. Afterward, the proposed multi-task learning paradigm is employed on both encoder and decoder to guide NMT to correctly translate these fragments. Both automatic and human evaluations verify that our FEnmt could improve translation quality by effectively reducing unfaithful translations.

As a sequence-to-sequence generation task, neural machine translation (NMT) naturally contains intrinsic uncertainty, where a single sentence in one language has multiple valid counterparts in the other. However, the dominant methods for NMT only observe one of them from the parallel corpora for the model training but have to deal with adequate variations under the same meaning at inference. This leads to a discrepancy of the data distribution between the training and the inference phases. To address this problem, we propose uncertainty-aware semantic augmentation, which explicitly captures the universal semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent source sentences and enhances the hidden representations with this information for better translations. Extensive experiments on various translation tasks reveal that our approach significantly outperforms the strong baselines and the existing methods.

In this paper, we alleviate the local optimality of back-translation by learning a policy (takes the form of an encoder-decoder and is defined by its parameters) with future rewarding under the reinforcement learning framework, which aims to optimize the global word predictions for unsupervised neural machine translation. To this end, we design a novel reward function to characterize high-quality translations from two aspects: n-gram matching and semantic adequacy. The n-gram matching is defined as an alternative for the discrete BLEU metric, and the semantic adequacy is used to measure the adequacy of conveying the meaning of the source sentence to the target. During training, our model strives for earning higher rewards by learning to produce grammatically more accurate and semantically more adequate translations. Besides, a variational inference network (VIN) is proposed to constrain the corresponding sentences in two languages have the same or similar latent semantic code. On the widely used WMT’14 English-French, WMT’16 English-German and NIST Chinese-to-English benchmarks, our models respectively obtain 27.59/27.15, 19.65/23.42 and 22.40 BLEU points without using any labeled data, demonstrating consistent improvements over previous unsupervised NMT models.