Álvaro Soto

Also published as: Alvaro Soto


2023

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A Memory Model for Question Answering from Streaming Data Supported by Rehearsal and Anticipation of Coreference Information
Vladimir Araujo | Alvaro Soto | Marie-Francine Moens
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Existing question answering methods often assume that the input content (e.g., documents or videos) is always accessible to solve the task. Alternatively, memory networks were introduced to mimic the human process of incremental comprehension and compression of the information in a fixed-capacity memory. However, these models only learn how to maintain memory by backpropagating errors in the answers through the entire network. Instead, it has been suggested that humans have effective mechanisms to boost their memorization capacities, such as rehearsal and anticipation. Drawing inspiration from these, we propose a memory model that performs rehearsal and anticipation while processing inputs to memorize important information for solving question answering tasks from streaming data. The proposed mechanisms are applied self-supervised during training through masked modeling tasks focused on coreference information. We validate our model on a short-sequence (bAbI) dataset as well as large-sequence textual (NarrativeQA) and video (ActivityNet-QA) question answering datasets, where it achieves substantial improvements over previous memory network approaches. Furthermore, our ablation study confirms the proposed mechanisms’ importance for memory models.

2022

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How Relevant is Selective Memory Population in Lifelong Language Learning?
Vladimir Araujo | Helena Balabin | Julio Hurtado | Alvaro Soto | Marie-Francine Moens
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Lifelong language learning seeks to have models continuously learn multiple tasks in a sequential order without suffering from catastrophic forgetting. State-of-the-art approaches rely on sparse experience replay as the primary approach to prevent forgetting. Experience replay usually adopts sampling methods for the memory population; however, the effect of the chosen sampling strategy on model performance has not yet been studied. In this paper, we investigate how relevant the selective memory population is in the lifelong learning process of text classification and question-answering tasks. We found that methods that randomly store a uniform number of samples from the entire data stream lead to high performances, especially for low memory size, which is consistent with computer vision studies.

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Evaluation Benchmarks for Spanish Sentence Representations
Vladimir Araujo | Andrés Carvallo | Souvik Kundu | José Cañete | Marcelo Mendoza | Robert E. Mercer | Felipe Bravo-Marquez | Marie-Francine Moens | Alvaro Soto
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Due to the success of pre-trained language models, versions of languages other than English have been released in recent years. This fact implies the need for resources to evaluate these models. In the case of Spanish, there are few ways to systematically assess the models’ quality. In this paper, we narrow the gap by building two evaluation benchmarks. Inspired by previous work (Conneau and Kiela, 2018; Chen et al., 2019), we introduce Spanish SentEval and Spanish DiscoEval, aiming to assess the capabilities of stand-alone and discourse-aware sentence representations, respectively. Our benchmarks include considerable pre-existing and newly constructed datasets that address different tasks from various domains. In addition, we evaluate and analyze the most recent pre-trained Spanish language models to exhibit their capabilities and limitations. As an example, we discover that for the case of discourse evaluation tasks, mBERT, a language model trained on multiple languages, usually provides a richer latent representation than models trained only with documents in Spanish. We hope our contribution will motivate a fairer, more comparable, and less cumbersome way to evaluate future Spanish language models.

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DACT-BERT: Differentiable Adaptive Computation Time for an Efficient BERT Inference
Cristobal Eyzaguirre | Felipe del Rio | Vladimir Araujo | Alvaro Soto
Proceedings of NLP Power! The First Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in NLP

Large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable results in diverse NLP applications. However, these performance gains have been accompanied by a significant increase in computation time and model size, stressing the need to develop new or complementary strategies to increase the efficiency of these models. This paper proposes DACT-BERT, a differentiable adaptive computation time strategy for BERT-like models. DACT-BERT adds an adaptive computational mechanism to BERT’s regular processing pipeline, which controls the number of Transformer blocks that need to be executed at inference time. By doing this, the model learns to combine the most appropriate intermediate representations for the task at hand. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach, when compared to the baselines, excels on a reduced computational regime and is competitive in other less restrictive ones. Code available at https://github.com/ceyzaguirre4/dact_bert.

2021

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Augmenting BERT-style Models with Predictive Coding to Improve Discourse-level Representations
Vladimir Araujo | Andrés Villa | Marcelo Mendoza | Marie-Francine Moens | Alvaro Soto
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Current language models are usually trained using a self-supervised scheme, where the main focus is learning representations at the word or sentence level. However, there has been limited progress in generating useful discourse-level representations. In this work, we propose to use ideas from predictive coding theory to augment BERT-style language models with a mechanism that allows them to learn suitable discourse-level representations. As a result, our proposed approach is able to predict future sentences using explicit top-down connections that operate at the intermediate layers of the network. By experimenting with benchmarks designed to evaluate discourse-related knowledge using pre-trained sentence representations, we demonstrate that our approach improves performance in 6 out of 11 tasks by excelling in discourse relationship detection.

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Inspecting the concept knowledge graph encoded by modern language models
Carlos Aspillaga | Marcelo Mendoza | Alvaro Soto
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020


Translating Natural Language Instructions for Behavioral Robot Navigation with a Multi-Head Attention Mechanism
Patricio Cerda-Mardini | Vladimir Araujo | Álvaro Soto
Proceedings of the Fourth Widening Natural Language Processing Workshop

We propose a multi-head attention mechanism as a blending layer in a neural network model that translates natural language to a high level behavioral language for indoor robot navigation. We follow the framework established by (Zang et al., 2018a) that proposes the use of a navigation graph as a knowledge base for the task. Our results show significant performance gains when translating instructions on previously unseen environments, therefore, improving the generalization capabilities of the model.

2018

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Translating Navigation Instructions in Natural Language to a High-Level Plan for Behavioral Robot Navigation
Xiaoxue Zang | Ashwini Pokle | Marynel Vázquez | Kevin Chen | Juan Carlos Niebles | Alvaro Soto | Silvio Savarese
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We propose an end-to-end deep learning model for translating free-form natural language instructions to a high-level plan for behavioral robot navigation. We use attention models to connect information from both the user instructions and a topological representation of the environment. We evaluate our model’s performance on a new dataset containing 10,050 pairs of navigation instructions. Our model significantly outperforms baseline approaches. Furthermore, our results suggest that it is possible to leverage the environment map as a relevant knowledge base to facilitate the translation of free-form navigational instruction.