Xiao Pan


2023

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Masked Audio Text Encoders are Effective Multi-Modal Rescorers
Jinglun Cai | Monica Sunkara | Xilai Li | Anshu Bhatia | Xiao Pan | Sravan Bodapati
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have proven to be effective for second-pass rescoring in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this work, we propose Masked Audio Text Encoder (MATE), a multi-modal masked language model rescorer which incorporates acoustic representations into the input space of MLM. We adopt contrastive learning for effectively aligning the modalities by learning shared representations. We show that using a multi-modal rescorer is beneficial for domain generalization of the ASR system when target domain data is unavailable. MATE reduces word error rate (WER) by 4%-16% on in-domain, and 3%-7% on out-of-domain datasets, over the text-only baseline. Additionally, with very limited amount of training data (0.8 hours) MATE achieves a WER reduction of 8%-23% over the first-pass baseline.

2021

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Contrastive Learning for Many-to-many Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Xiao Pan | Mingxuan Wang | Liwei Wu | Lei Li
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)

Existing multilingual machine translation approaches mainly focus on English-centric directions, while the non-English directions still lag behind. In this work, we aim to build a many-to-many translation system with an emphasis on the quality of non-English language directions. Our intuition is based on the hypothesis that a universal cross-language representation leads to better multilingual translation performance. To this end, we propose mRASP2, a training method to obtain a single unified multilingual translation model. mRASP2 is empowered by two techniques: a) a contrastive learning scheme to close the gap among representations of different languages, and b) data augmentation on both multiple parallel and monolingual data to further align token representations. For English-centric directions, mRASP2 achieves competitive or even better performance than a strong pre-trained model mBART on tens of WMT benchmarks. For non-English directions, mRASP2 achieves an improvement of average 10+ BLEU compared with the multilingual baseline

2020

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The Volctrans Machine Translation System for WMT20
Liwei Wu | Xiao Pan | Zehui Lin | Yaoming Zhu | Mingxuan Wang | Lei Li
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes our submission systems for VolcTrans for WMT20 shared news translation task. We participated in 8 translation directions. Our basic systems are based on Transformer (CITATION), into which we also employed new architectures (bigger or deeper Transformers, dynamic convolution). The final systems include text pre-process, subword(a.k.a. BPE(CITATION)), baseline model training, iterative back-translation, model ensemble, knowledge distillation and multilingual pre-training.

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Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information
Zehui Lin | Xiao Pan | Mingxuan Wang | Xipeng Qiu | Jiangtao Feng | Hao Zhou | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We investigate the following question for machine translation (MT): can we develop a single universal MT model to serve as the common seed and obtain derivative and improved models on arbitrary language pairs? We propose mRASP, an approach to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model. Our key idea in mRASP is its novel technique of random aligned substitution, which brings words and phrases with similar meanings across multiple languages closer in the representation space. We pre-train a mRASP model on 32 language pairs jointly with only public datasets. The model is then fine-tuned on downstream language pairs to obtain specialized MT models. We carry out extensive experiments on 42 translation directions across a diverse settings, including low, medium, rich resource, and as well as transferring to exotic language pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that mRASP achieves significant performance improvement compared to directly training on those target pairs. It is the first time to verify that multiple lowresource language pairs can be utilized to improve rich resource MT. Surprisingly, mRASP is even able to improve the translation quality on exotic languages that never occur in the pretraining corpus. Code, data, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/linzehui/mRASP.

2012

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Chinese Name Disambiguation Based on Adaptive Clustering with the Attribute Features
Wei Tian | Xiao Pan | Zhengtao Yu | Yantuan Xian | Xiuzhen Yang
Proceedings of the Second CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing