We propose knowledge internalization (KI), which aims to complement the lexical knowledge into neural dialog models. Instead of further conditioning the knowledge-grounded dialog (KGD) models on externally retrieved knowledge, we seek to integrate knowledge about each input token internally into the model’s parameters. To tackle the challenge due to the large scale of lexical knowledge, we adopt the contrastive learning approach and create an effective token-level lexical knowledge retriever that requires only weak supervision mined from Wikipedia. We demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of our approach on various datasets and diversified model structures.

Recently, dataset-generation-based zero-shot learning has shown promising results by training a task-specific model with a dataset synthesized from large pre-trained language models (PLMs). The final task-specific model often achieves compatible or even better performance than PLMs under the zero-shot setting, with orders of magnitude fewer parameters.However, synthetic datasets have their drawbacks. They have long being suffering from the low-quality issue (e.g., low informativeness, redundancy). This explains why the massive synthetic data does not lead to better performance – a scenario we would expect in the human-labeled data. To improve the quality in dataset synthesis, we propose a progressive zero-shot dataset generation framework, ProGen, which leverages the feedback from the task-specific model to guide the generation of new training data via in-context examples.Extensive experiments on five text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We also show ProGen achieves on-par or superior performance with only 1% synthetic dataset size, when comparing to baseline methods without in-context feedback.

There is a growing interest in dataset generation recently due to the superior generative capacity of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this paper, we study a flexible and efficient zero-short learning method, ZeroGen.Given a zero-shot task, we first generate a dataset from scratch using PLMs in an unsupervised manner. Then, we train a tiny task model (e.g., LSTM) under the supervision of the synthesized dataset. This approach allows highly efficient inference as the final task model only has orders of magnitude fewer parameters comparing to PLMs (e.g., GPT2-XL).Apart from being annotation-free and efficient, we argue that ZeroGen can also provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation, and unreferenced text generation evaluation. Experiments and analysis on different NLP tasks, namely, text classification, question answering, and natural language inference, show the effectiveness of ZeroGen.

Traditional training paradigms for extractive and abstractive summarization systems always only use token-level or sentence-level training objectives. However, the output summary is always evaluated from summary-level which leads to the inconsistency in training and evaluation. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning based re-ranking framework for one-stage summarization called CoLo. By modeling a contrastive objective, we show that the summarization model is able to directly generate summaries according to the summary-level score without additional modules and parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoLo boosts the extractive and abstractive results of one-stage systems on CNN/DailyMail benchmark to 44.58 and 46.33 ROUGE-1 score while preserving the parameter efficiency and inference efficiency. Compared with state-of-the-art multi-stage systems, we save more than 100 GPU training hours and obtaining 3x 8x speed-up ratio during inference while maintaining comparable results.

Naturalness and expressiveness are crucial for audiobook speech synthesis, but now are limited by the averaged global-scale speaking style representation. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised multi-scale context-sensitive text-to-speech model for audiobooks. A multi-scale hierarchical context encoder is specially designed to predict both global-scale context style embedding and local-scale context style embedding from a wider context of input text in a hierarchical manner. Likewise, a multi-scale reference encoder is introduced to extract reference style embeddings at both global and local scales from the reference speech, which is used to guide the prediction of speaking styles. On top of these, a bi-reference attention mechanism is used to align both local-scale reference style embedding sequence and local-scale context style embedding sequence with corresponding phoneme embedding sequence. Both objective and subjective experiment results on a real-world multi-speaker Mandarin novel audio dataset demonstrate the excellent performance of our proposed method over all baselines in terms of naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech.

Lack of training data presents a grand challenge to scaling out spoken language understanding (SLU) to low-resource languages. Although various data augmentation approaches have been proposed to synthesize training data in low-resource target languages, the augmented data sets are often noisy, and thus impede the performance of SLU models. In this paper we focus on mitigating noise in augmented data. We develop a denoising training approach. Multiple models are trained with data produced by various augmented methods. Those models provide supervision signals to each other. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing state of the art by 3.05 and 4.24 percentage points on two benchmark datasets, respectively. The code will be made open sourced on github.

Transformers have advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP) on a variety of important tasks. At the cornerstone of the Transformer architecture is the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism which models pairwise interactions between the elements of the sequence. Despite its massive success, the current framework ignores interactions among different heads, leading to the problem that many of the heads are redundant in practice, which greatly wastes the capacity of the model. To improve parameter efficiency, we re-formulate the MHA as a latent variable model from a probabilistic perspective. We present cascaded head-colliding attention (CODA) which explicitly models the interactions between attention heads through a hierarchical variational distribution. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that CODA outperforms the transformer baseline, by 0.6 perplexity on Wikitext-103 in language modeling, and by 0.6 BLEU on WMT14 EN-DE in machine translation, due to its improvements on the parameter efficiency.

A neural multimodal machine translation (MMT) system is one that aims to perform better translation by extending conventional text-only translation models with multimodal information. Many recent studies report improvements when equipping their models with the multimodal module, despite the controversy of whether such improvements indeed come from the multimodal part. We revisit the contribution of multimodal information in MMT by devising two interpretable MMT models. To our surprise, although our models replicate similar gains as recently developed multimodal-integrated systems achieved, our models learn to ignore the multimodal information. Upon further investigation, we discover that the improvements achieved by the multimodal models over text-only counterparts are in fact results of the regularization effect. We report empirical findings that highlight the importance of MMT models’ interpretability, and discuss how our findings will benefit future research.

Unlike non-conversation scenes, emotion recognition in dialogues (ERD) poses more complicated challenges due to its interactive nature and intricate contextual information. All present methods model historical utterances without considering the content of the target utterance. However, different parts of a historical utterance may contribute differently to emotion inference of different target utterances. Therefore we propose Fine-grained Extraction and Reasoning Network (FERNet) to generate target-specific historical utterance representations. The reasoning module effectively handles both local and global sequential dependencies to reason over context, and updates target utterance representations to more informed vectors. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our method achieves competitive performance compared with previous methods.

By introducing a small set of additional parameters, a probe learns to solve specific linguistic tasks (e.g., dependency parsing) in a supervised manner using feature representations (e.g., contextualized embeddings). The effectiveness of such probing tasks is taken as evidence that the pre-trained model encodes linguistic knowledge. However, this approach of evaluating a language model is undermined by the uncertainty of the amount of knowledge that is learned by the probe itself. Complementary to those works, we propose a parameter-free probing technique for analyzing pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT). Our method does not require direct supervision from the probing tasks, nor do we introduce additional parameters to the probing process. Our experiments on BERT show that syntactic trees recovered from BERT using our method are significantly better than linguistically-uninformed baselines. We further feed the empirically induced dependency structures into a downstream sentiment classification task and find its improvement compatible with or even superior to a human-designed dependency schema.