Yoshua Bengio


2023

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Combining Parameter-efficient Modules for Task-level Generalisation
Edoardo Maria Ponti | Alessandro Sordoni | Yoshua Bengio | Siva Reddy
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A modular design encourages neural models to disentangle and recombine different facets of knowledge to generalise more systematically to new tasks. In this work, we assume that each task is associated with a subset of latent skills from an (arbitrary size) inventory. In turn, each skill corresponds to a parameter-efficient (sparse / low-rank) model adapter. By jointly learning adapters and a routing function that allocates skills to each task, the full network is instantiated as the average of the parameters of active skills. We propose several inductive biases that encourage re-usage and composition of the skills, including variable-size skill allocation and a dual-speed learning rate. We evaluate our latent-skill model in two main settings: 1) multitask reinforcement learning for instruction following on 8 levels of the BabyAI platform; and 2) few-shot fine-tuning of language models on 160 NLP tasks of the CrossFit benchmark. We find that the modular design of our network enhances sample efficiency in reinforcement learning and few-shot generalisation in supervised learning, compared to a series of baselines. These include models where parameters are fully shared, task-specific, conditionally generated (HyperFormer), or sparse mixture-of-experts (TaskMoE).

2021

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hBERT + BiasCorp - Fighting Racism on the Web
Olawale Onabola | Zhuang Ma | Xie Yang | Benjamin Akera | Ibraheem Abdulrahman | Jia Xue | Dianbo Liu | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Subtle and overt racism is still present both in physical and online communities today and has impacted many lives in different segments of the society. In this short piece of work, we present how we’re tackling this societal issue with Natural Language Processing. We are releasing BiasCorp, a dataset containing 139,090 comments and news segment from three specific sources - Fox News, BreitbartNews and YouTube. The first batch (45,000 manually annotated) is ready for publication. We are currently in the final phase of manually labeling the remaining dataset using Amazon Mechanical Turk. BERT has been used widely in several downstream tasks. In this work, we present hBERT, where we modify certain layers of the pretrained BERT model with the new Hopfield Layer. hBert generalizes well across different distributions with the added advantage of a reduced model complexity. We are also releasing a JavaScript library 3 and a Chrome Extension Application, to help developers make use of our trained model in web applications (say chat application) and for users to identify and report racially biased contents on the web respectively

2020

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Exploiting Syntactic Structure for Better Language Modeling: A Syntactic Distance Approach
Wenyu Du | Zhouhan Lin | Yikang Shen | Timothy J. O’Donnell | Yoshua Bengio | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

It is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally efficiently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic. In this paper, we make use of a multi-task objective, i.e., the models simultaneously predict words as well as ground truth parse trees in a form called “syntactic distances”, where information between these two separate objectives shares the same intermediate representation. Experimental results on the Penn Treebank and Chinese Treebank datasets show that when ground truth parse trees are provided as additional training signals, the model is able to achieve lower perplexity and induce trees with better quality.

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Compositional Generalization by Factorizing Alignment and Translation
Jacob Russin | Jason Jo | Randall O’Reilly | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Standard methods in deep learning for natural language processing fail to capture the compositional structure of human language that allows for systematic generalization outside of the training distribution. However, human learners readily generalize in this way, e.g. by applying known grammatical rules to novel words. Inspired by work in cognitive science suggesting a functional distinction between systems for syntactic and semantic processing, we implement a modification to an existing approach in neural machine translation, imposing an analogous separation between alignment and translation. The resulting architecture substantially outperforms standard recurrent networks on the SCAN dataset, a compositional generalization task, without any additional supervision. Our work suggests that learning to align and to translate in separate modules may be a useful heuristic for capturing compositional structure.

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Experience Grounds Language
Yonatan Bisk | Ari Holtzman | Jesse Thomason | Jacob Andreas | Yoshua Bengio | Joyce Chai | Mirella Lapata | Angeliki Lazaridou | Jonathan May | Aleksandr Nisnevich | Nicolas Pinto | Joseph Turian
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle tasks after being trained on text alone, successful linguistic communication relies on a shared experience of the world. It is this shared experience that makes utterances meaningful. Natural language processing is a diverse field, and progress throughout its development has come from new representational theories, modeling techniques, data collection paradigms, and tasks. We posit that the present success of representation learning approaches trained on large, text-only corpora requires the parallel tradition of research on the broader physical and social context of language to address the deeper questions of communication.

2019

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Interactive Language Learning by Question Answering
Xingdi Yuan | Marc-Alexandre Côté | Jie Fu | Zhouhan Lin | Chris Pal | Yoshua Bengio | Adam Trischler
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Humans observe and interact with the world to acquire knowledge. However, most existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks miss the interactive, information-seeking component of comprehension. Such tasks present models with static documents that contain all necessary information, usually concentrated in a single short substring. Thus, models can achieve strong performance through simple word- and phrase-based pattern matching. We address this problem by formulating a novel text-based question answering task: Question Answering with Interactive Text (QAit). In QAit, an agent must interact with a partially observable text-based environment to gather information required to answer questions. QAit poses questions about the existence, location, and attributes of objects found in the environment. The data is built using a text-based game generator that defines the underlying dynamics of interaction with the environment. We propose and evaluate a set of baseline models for the QAit task that includes deep reinforcement learning agents. Experiments show that the task presents a major challenge for machine reading systems, while humans solve it with relative ease.

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Do Neural Dialog Systems Use the Conversation History Effectively? An Empirical Study
Chinnadhurai Sankar | Sandeep Subramanian | Chris Pal | Sarath Chandar | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Neural generative models have been become increasingly popular when building conversational agents. They offer flexibility, can be easily adapted to new domains, and require minimal domain engineering. A common criticism of these systems is that they seldom understand or use the available dialog history effectively. In this paper, we take an empirical approach to understanding how these models use the available dialog history by studying the sensitivity of the models to artificially introduced unnatural changes or perturbations to their context at test time. We experiment with 10 different types of perturbations on 4 multi-turn dialog datasets and find that commonly used neural dialog architectures like recurrent and transformer-based seq2seq models are rarely sensitive to most perturbations such as missing or reordering utterances, shuffling words, etc. Also, by open-sourcing our code, we believe that it will serve as a useful diagnostic tool for evaluating dialog systems in the future.

2018

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Commonsense mining as knowledge base completion? A study on the impact of novelty
Stanislaw Jastrzębski | Dzmitry Bahdanau | Seyedarian Hosseini | Michael Noukhovitch | Yoshua Bengio | Jackie Cheung
Proceedings of the Workshop on Generalization in the Age of Deep Learning

Commonsense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet represent knowledge in the form of relational triples. Inspired by recent work by Li et al., we analyse if knowledge base completion models can be used to mine commonsense knowledge from raw text. We propose novelty of predicted triples with respect to the training set as an important factor in interpreting results. We critically analyse the difficulty of mining novel commonsense knowledge, and show that a simple baseline method that outperforms the previous state of the art on predicting more novel triples.

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Neural Models for Key Phrase Extraction and Question Generation
Sandeep Subramanian | Tong Wang | Xingdi Yuan | Saizheng Zhang | Adam Trischler | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

We propose a two-stage neural model to tackle question generation from documents. First, our model estimates the probability that word sequences in a document are ones that a human would pick when selecting candidate answers by training a neural key-phrase extractor on the answers in a question-answering corpus. Predicted key phrases then act as target answers and condition a sequence-to-sequence question-generation model with a copy mechanism. Empirically, our key-phrase extraction model significantly outperforms an entity-tagging baseline and existing rule-based approaches. We further demonstrate that our question generation system formulates fluent, answerable questions from key phrases. This two-stage system could be used to augment or generate reading comprehension datasets, which may be leveraged to improve machine reading systems or in educational settings.

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Learning Hierarchical Structures On-The-Fly with a Recurrent-Recursive Model for Sequences
Athul Paul Jacob | Zhouhan Lin | Alessandro Sordoni | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

We propose a hierarchical model for sequential data that learns a tree on-the-fly, i.e. while reading the sequence. In the model, a recurrent network adapts its structure and reuses recurrent weights in a recursive manner. This creates adaptive skip-connections that ease the learning of long-term dependencies. The tree structure can either be inferred without supervision through reinforcement learning, or learned in a supervised manner. We provide preliminary experiments in a novel Math Expression Evaluation (MEE) task, which is created to have a hierarchical tree structure that can be used to study the effectiveness of our model. Additionally, we test our model in a well-known propositional logic and language modelling tasks. Experimental results have shown the potential of our approach.

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HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering
Zhilin Yang | Peng Qi | Saizheng Zhang | Yoshua Bengio | William Cohen | Ruslan Salakhutdinov | Christopher D. Manning
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. We introduce HotpotQA, a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) we provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning, allowing QA systems to reason with strong supervision and explain the predictions; (4) we offer a new type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems’ ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. We show that HotpotQA is challenging for the latest QA systems, and the supporting facts enable models to improve performance and make explainable predictions.

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Straight to the Tree: Constituency Parsing with Neural Syntactic Distance
Yikang Shen | Zhouhan Lin | Athul Paul Jacob | Alessandro Sordoni | Aaron Courville | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In this work, we propose a novel constituency parsing scheme. The model first predicts a real-valued scalar, named syntactic distance, for each split position in the sentence. The topology of grammar tree is then determined by the values of syntactic distances. Compared to traditional shift-reduce parsing schemes, our approach is free from the potentially disastrous compounding error. It is also easier to parallelize and much faster. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art single model F1 score of 92.1 on PTB and 86.4 on CTB dataset, which surpasses the previous single model results by a large margin.

2017

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Plan, Attend, Generate: Character-Level Neural Machine Translation with Planning
Caglar Gulcehre | Francis Dutil | Adam Trischler | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

We investigate the integration of a planning mechanism into an encoder-decoder architecture with attention. We develop a model that can plan ahead when it computes alignments between the source and target sequences not only for a single time-step but for the next k time-steps as well by constructing a matrix of proposed future alignments and a commitment vector that governs whether to follow or recompute the plan. This mechanism is inspired by strategic attentive reader and writer (STRAW) model, a recent neural architecture for planning with hierarchical reinforcement learning that can also learn higher level temporal abstractions. Our proposed model is end-to-end trainable with differentiable operations. We show that our model outperforms strong baselines on character-level translation task from WMT’15 with fewer parameters and computes alignments that are qualitatively intuitive.

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Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses
Ryan Lowe | Michael Noseworthy | Iulian Vlad Serban | Nicolas Angelard-Gontier | Yoshua Bengio | Joelle Pineau
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Automatically evaluating the quality of dialogue responses for unstructured domains is a challenging problem. Unfortunately, existing automatic evaluation metrics are biased and correlate very poorly with human judgements of response quality (Liu et al., 2016). Yet having an accurate automatic evaluation procedure is crucial for dialogue research, as it allows rapid prototyping and testing of new models with fewer expensive human evaluations. In response to this challenge, we formulate automatic dialogue evaluation as a learning problem. We present an evaluation model (ADEM)that learns to predict human-like scores to input responses, using a new dataset of human response scores. We show that the ADEM model’s predictions correlate significantly, and at a level much higher than word-overlap metrics such as BLEU, with human judgements at both the utterance and system-level. We also show that ADEM can generalize to evaluating dialogue mod-els unseen during training, an important step for automatic dialogue evaluation.

2016

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NYU-MILA Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT’16
Junyoung Chung | Kyunghyun Cho | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

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Pointing the Unknown Words
Caglar Gulcehre | Sungjin Ahn | Ramesh Nallapati | Bowen Zhou | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Generating Factoid Questions With Recurrent Neural Networks: The 30M Factoid Question-Answer Corpus
Iulian Vlad Serban | Alberto García-Durán | Caglar Gulcehre | Sungjin Ahn | Sarath Chandar | Aaron Courville | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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A Character-level Decoder without Explicit Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Junyoung Chung | Kyunghyun Cho | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Multi-Way, Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with a Shared Attention Mechanism
Orhan Firat | Kyunghyun Cho | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Learning to Understand Phrases by Embedding the Dictionary
Felix Hill | Kyunghyun Cho | Anna Korhonen | Yoshua Bengio
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4

Distributional models that learn rich semantic word representations are a success story of recent NLP research. However, developing models that learn useful representations of phrases and sentences has proved far harder. We propose using the definitions found in everyday dictionaries as a means of bridging this gap between lexical and phrasal semantics. Neural language embedding models can be effectively trained to map dictionary definitions (phrases) to (lexical) representations of the words defined by those definitions. We present two applications of these architectures: reverse dictionaries that return the name of a concept given a definition or description and general-knowledge crossword question answerers. On both tasks, neural language embedding models trained on definitions from a handful of freely-available lexical resources perform as well or better than existing commercial systems that rely on significant task-specific engineering. The results highlight the effectiveness of both neural embedding architectures and definition-based training for developing models that understand phrases and sentences.

2015

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On Using Very Large Target Vocabulary for Neural Machine Translation
Sébastien Jean | Kyunghyun Cho | Roland Memisevic | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Montreal Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT’15
Sébastien Jean | Orhan Firat | Kyunghyun Cho | Roland Memisevic | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2014

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Overcoming the Curse of Sentence Length for Neural Machine Translation using Automatic Segmentation
Jean Pouget-Abadie | Dzmitry Bahdanau | Bart van Merriënboer | Kyunghyun Cho | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of SSST-8, Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation

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On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder–Decoder Approaches
Kyunghyun Cho | Bart van Merriënboer | Dzmitry Bahdanau | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of SSST-8, Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation

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Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder–Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation
Kyunghyun Cho | Bart van Merriënboer | Caglar Gulcehre | Dzmitry Bahdanau | Fethi Bougares | Holger Schwenk | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

2012

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Deep Learning for NLP (without Magic)
Richard Socher | Yoshua Bengio | Christopher D. Manning
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

2010

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Word Representations: A Simple and General Method for Semi-Supervised Learning
Joseph Turian | Lev-Arie Ratinov | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2009

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Quadratic Features and Deep Architectures for Chunking
Joseph Turian | James Bergstra | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Short Papers

2004

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Approche statistique pour le repérage de mots informatifs dans les textes oraux
Narjès Boufaden | Yoshua Bengio | Guy Lapalme
Actes de la 11ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Articles longs

Nous présentons les résultats de l’approche statistique que nous avons développée pour le repérage de mots informatifs à partir de textes oraux. Ce travail fait partie d’un projet lancé par le département de la défense canadienne pour le développement d’un système d’extraction d’information dans le domaine de la Recherche et Sauvetage maritime (SAR). Il s’agit de trouver et annoter les mots pertinents avec des étiquettes sémantiques qui sont les concepts d’une ontologie du domaine (SAR). Notre méthode combine deux types d’information : les vecteurs de similarité générés grâce à l’ontologie du domaine et le dictionnaire-thésaurus Wordsmyth ; le contexte d’énonciation représenté par le thème. L’évaluation est effectuée en comparant la sortie du système avec les réponses de formulaires d’extraction d’information prédéfinis. Les résultats obtenus sur les textes oraux sont comparables à ceux obtenus dans le cadre de MUC7 pour des textes écrits.

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Unsupervised Sense Disambiguation Using Bilingual Probabilistic Models
Indrajit Bhattacharya | Lise Getoor | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-04)

2002

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Segmentation en thèmes de conversations téléphoniques : traitement en amont pour l’extraction d’information
Narjès Boufaden | Guy Lapalme | Yoshua Bengio
Actes de la 9ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Posters

Nous présentons une approche de découpage thématique que nous utiliserons pour faciliter l’extraction d’information à partir de conversations téléphoniques transcrites. Nous expérimentons avec un modèle de Markov caché utilisant des informations de différents niveaux linguistiques, des marques d’extra-grammaticalités et les entités nommées comme source additionnelle d’information. Nous comparons le modèle obtenu avec notre modèle de base utilisant uniquement les marques linguistiques et les extra-grammaticalités. Les résultats montrent l’efficacité de l’approche utilisant les entités nommées.