Rongxiang Weng


2022

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Learning to Generalize to More: Continuous Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Xiangpeng Wei | Heng Yu | Yue Hu | Rongxiang Weng | Weihua Luo | Rong Jin
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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 ChineseEnglish 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.

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Learning Decoupled Retrieval Representation for Nearest Neighbour Neural Machine Translation
Qiang Wang | Rongxiang Weng | Ming Chen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

K-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (kNNMT) successfully incorporates external corpus by retrieving word-level representations at test time. Generally, kNNMT borrows the off-the-shelf context representation in the translation task, e.g., the output of the last decoder layer, as the query vector of the retrieval task. In this work, we highlight that coupling the representations of these two tasks is sub-optimal for fine-grained retrieval. To alleviate it, we leverage supervised contrastive learning to learn the distinctive retrieval representation derived from the original context representation. We also propose a fast and effective approach to constructing hard negative samples. Experimental results on five domains show that our approach improves the retrieval accuracy and BLEU score compared to vanilla kNNMT.

2020

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Multiscale Collaborative Deep Models for Neural Machine Translation
Xiangpeng Wei | Heng Yu | Yue Hu | Yue Zhang | Rongxiang Weng | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

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Towards Enhancing Faithfulness for Neural Machine Translation
Rongxiang Weng | Heng Yu | Xiangpeng Wei | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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.

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Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Xiangpeng Wei | Heng Yu | Yue Hu | Rongxiang Weng | Luxi Xing | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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.

2019

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Learning Representation Mapping for Relation Detection in Knowledge Base Question Answering
Peng Wu | Shujian Huang | Rongxiang Weng | Zaixiang Zheng | Jianbing Zhang | Xiaohui Yan | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Relation detection is a core step in many natural language process applications including knowledge base question answering. Previous efforts show that single-fact questions could be answered with high accuracy. However, one critical problem is that current approaches only get high accuracy for questions whose relations have been seen in the training data. But for unseen relations, the performance will drop rapidly. The main reason for this problem is that the representations for unseen relations are missing. In this paper, we propose a simple mapping method, named representation adapter, to learn the representation mapping for both seen and unseen relations based on previously learned relation embedding. We employ the adversarial objective and the reconstruction objective to improve the mapping performance. We re-organize the popular SimpleQuestion dataset to reveal and evaluate the problem of detecting unseen relations. Experiments show that our method can greatly improve the performance of unseen relations while the performance for those seen part is kept comparable to the state-of-the-art.

2017

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Neural Machine Translation with Word Predictions
Rongxiang Weng | Shujian Huang | Zaixiang Zheng | Xinyu Dai | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In the encoder-decoder architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), the hidden states of the recurrent structures in the encoder and decoder carry the crucial information about the sentence. These vectors are generated by parameters which are updated by back-propagation of translation errors through time.We argue that propagating errors through the end-to-end recurrent structures are not a direct way of control the hidden vectors. In this paper, we propose to use word predictions as a mechanism for direct supervision. More specifically, we require these vectors to be able to predict the vocabulary in target sentence. Our simple mechanism ensures better representations in the encoder and decoder without using any extra data or annotation. It is also helpful in reducing the target side vocabulary and improving the decoding efficiency. Experiments on Chinese-English machine translation task show an average BLEU improvement by 4.53, respectively.