Todd Ward


2021

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Bootstrapping Multilingual AMR with Contextual Word Alignments
Janaki Sheth | Young-Suk Lee | Ramón Fernandez Astudillo | Tahira Naseem | Radu Florian | Salim Roukos | Todd Ward
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

We develop high performance multilingual Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) systems by projecting English AMR annotations to other languages with weak supervision. We achieve this goal by bootstrapping transformer-based multilingual word embeddings, in particular those from cross-lingual RoBERTa (XLM-R large). We develop a novel technique for foreign-text-to-English AMR alignment, using the contextual word alignment between English and foreign language tokens. This word alignment is weakly supervised and relies on the contextualized XLM-R word embeddings. We achieve a highly competitive performance that surpasses the best published results for German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.

2020

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The TechQA Dataset
Vittorio Castelli | Rishav Chakravarti | Saswati Dana | Anthony Ferritto | Radu Florian | Martin Franz | Dinesh Garg | Dinesh Khandelwal | Scott McCarley | Michael McCawley | Mohamed Nasr | Lin Pan | Cezar Pendus | John Pitrelli | Saurabh Pujar | Salim Roukos | Andrzej Sakrajda | Avi Sil | Rosario Uceda-Sosa | Todd Ward | Rong Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We introduce TECHQA, a domain-adaptation question answering dataset for the technical support domain. The TECHQA corpus highlights two real-world issues from the automated customer support domain. First, it contains actual questions posed by users on a technical forum, rather than questions generated specifically for a competition or a task. Second, it has a real-world size – 600 training, 310 dev, and 490 evaluation question/answer pairs – thus reflecting the cost of creating large labeled datasets with actual data. Hence, TECHQA is meant to stimulate research in domain adaptation rather than as a resource to build QA systems from scratch. TECHQA was obtained by crawling the IBMDeveloper and DeveloperWorks forums for questions with accepted answers provided in an IBM Technote—a technical document that addresses a specific technical issue. We also release a collection of the 801,998 Technotes available on the web as of April 4, 2019 as a companion resource that can be used to learn representations of the IT domain language.

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Scalable Cross-lingual Treebank Synthesis for Improved Production Dependency Parsers
Yousef El-Kurdi | Hiroshi Kanayama | Efsun Sarioglu Kayi | Vittorio Castelli | Todd Ward | Radu Florian
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track

We present scalable Universal Dependency (UD) treebank synthesis techniques that exploit advances in language representation modeling which leverage vast amounts of unlabeled general-purpose multilingual text. We introduce a data augmentation technique that uses synthetic treebanks to improve production-grade parsers. The synthetic treebanks are generated using a state-of-the-art biaffine parser adapted with pretrained Transformer models, such as Multilingual BERT (M-BERT). The new parser improves LAS by up to two points on seven languages. The production models’ LAS performance improves as the augmented treebanks scale in size, surpassing performance of production models trained on originally annotated UD treebanks.

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Multi-Stage Pre-training for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation
Rong Zhang | Revanth Gangi Reddy | Md Arafat Sultan | Vittorio Castelli | Anthony Ferritto | Radu Florian | Efsun Sarioglu Kayi | Salim Roukos | Avi Sil | Todd Ward
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Transfer learning techniques are particularly useful for NLP tasks where a sizable amount of high-quality annotated data is difficult to obtain. Current approaches directly adapt a pretrained language model (LM) on in-domain text before fine-tuning to downstream tasks. We show that extending the vocabulary of the LM with domain-specific terms leads to further gains. To a bigger effect, we utilize structure in the unlabeled data to create auxiliary synthetic tasks, which helps the LM transfer to downstream tasks. We apply these approaches incrementally on a pretrained Roberta-large LM and show considerable performance gain on three tasks in the IT domain: Extractive Reading Comprehension, Document Ranking and Duplicate Question Detection.

2018

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Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Task-Specific Attention
Graeme Blackwood | Miguel Ballesteros | Todd Ward
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Multilingual machine translation addresses the task of translating between multiple source and target languages. We propose task-specific attention models, a simple but effective technique for improving the quality of sequence-to-sequence neural multilingual translation. Our approach seeks to retain as much of the parameter sharing generalization of NMT models as possible, while still allowing for language-specific specialization of the attention model to a particular language-pair or task. Our experiments on four languages of the Europarl corpus show that using a target-specific model of attention provides consistent gains in translation quality for all possible translation directions, compared to a model in which all parameters are shared. We observe improved translation quality even in the (extreme) low-resource zero-shot translation directions for which the model never saw explicitly paired parallel data.

2009

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Improving Coreference Resolution by Using Conversational Metadata
Xiaoqiang Luo | Radu Florian | Todd Ward
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Short Papers

2003

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TIPS: A Translingual Information Processing System
Yaser Al-Onaizan | Radu Florian | Martin Franz | Hany Hassan | Young-Suk Lee | J. Scott McCarley | Kishore Papineni | Salim Roukos | Jeffrey Sorensen | Christoph Tillmann | Todd Ward | Fei Xia
Companion Volume of the Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003 - Demonstrations

2002

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Bleu: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation
Kishore Papineni | Salim Roukos | Todd Ward | Wei-Jing Zhu
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1997

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Fertility Models for Statistical Natural Language Understanding
Stephen Della Pietra | Mark Epstein | Salim Roukos | Todd Ward
35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 8th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics