Shankar Kumar


2024

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Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting
Yun Zhu | Yinxiao Liu | Felix Stahlberg | Shankar Kumar | Yu-Hui Chen | Liangchen Luo | Lei Shu | Renjie Liu | Jindong Chen | Lei Meng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting. However creating a smaller yet potent language model for text rewriting presents two formidable challenges: costly data collection and absence of emergent capabilities.In this paper we present solutions to address the above challenges.We propose an new instruction tuning method to develop a mo-bile text rewriting model that leverages LLM-generated data and heuristic reinforcement learning, eliminating the need for human data collection. Moreover, to bridge the performance gap from the constraint size, we pro-pose a cascading approach based on the confidence levels which are distilled from the large server model’s critiques. To evaluate the text rewriting tasks for mobile scenarios, we introduce MessageRewriteEval, a human-labeled benchmark that focuses on text rewriting of messages through natural language instructions. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate that our on-device model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size using public benchmark EditEval and our new benchmark. We also demonstrate that our proposed cascading approach improves model performance further.

2023

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Long-Form Speech Translation through Segmentation with Finite-State Decoding Constraints on Large Language Models
Arya McCarthy | Hao Zhang | Shankar Kumar | Felix Stahlberg | Ke Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

One challenge in speech translation is that plenty of spoken content is long-form, but short units are necessary for obtaining high-quality translations. To address this mismatch, we adapt large language models (LLMs) to split long ASR transcripts into segments that can be independently translated so as to maximize the overall translation quality. We overcome the tendency of hallucination in LLMs by incorporating finite-state constraints during decoding; these eliminate invalid outputs without requiring additional training. We discover that LLMs are adaptable to transcripts containing ASR errors through prompt-tuning or fine-tuning. Relative to a state-of-the-art automatic punctuation baseline, our best LLM improves the average BLEU by 2.9 points for English–German, English–Spanish, and English–Arabic TED talk translation in 9 test sets, just by improving segmentation.

2022

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Uncertainty Determines the Adequacy of the Mode and the Tractability of Decoding in Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Felix Stahlberg | Ilia Kulikov | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In many natural language processing (NLP) tasks the same input (e.g. source sentence) can have multiple possible outputs (e.g. translations). To analyze how this ambiguity (also known as intrinsic uncertainty) shapes the distribution learned by neural sequence models we measure sentence-level uncertainty by computing the degree of overlap between references in multi-reference test sets from two different NLP tasks: machine translation (MT) and grammatical error correction (GEC). At both the sentence- and the task-level, intrinsic uncertainty has major implications for various aspects of search such as the inductive biases in beam search and the complexity of exact search. In particular, we show that well-known pathologies such as a high number of beam search errors, the inadequacy of the mode, and the drop in system performance with large beam sizes apply to tasks with high level of ambiguity such as MT but not to less uncertain tasks such as GEC. Furthermore, we propose a novel exact n-best search algorithm for neural sequence models, and show that intrinsic uncertainty affects model uncertainty as the model tends to overly spread out the probability mass for uncertain tasks and sentences.

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Conciseness: An Overlooked Language Task
Felix Stahlberg | Aashish Kumar | Chris Alberti | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)

We report on novel investigations into training models that make sentences concise. We define the task and show that it is different from related tasks such as summarization and simplification. For evaluation, we release two test sets, consisting of 2000 sentences each, that were annotated by two and five human annotators, respectively. We demonstrate that conciseness is a difficult task for which zero-shot setups with large neural language models often do not perform well. Given the limitations of these approaches, we propose a synthetic data generation method based on round-trip translations. Using this data to either train Transformers from scratch or fine-tune T5 models yields our strongest baselines that can be further improved by fine-tuning on an artificial conciseness dataset that we derived from multi-annotator machine translation test sets.

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Scaling Language Model Size in Cross-Device Federated Learning
Jae Ro | Theresa Breiner | Lara McConnaughey | Mingqing Chen | Ananda Suresh | Shankar Kumar | Rajiv Mathews
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Federated Learning for Natural Language Processing (FL4NLP 2022)

Most studies in cross-device federated learning focus on small models, due to the server-client communication and on-device computation bottlenecks. In this work, we leverage various techniques for mitigating these bottlenecks to train larger language models in cross-device federated learning. With systematic applications of partial model training, quantization, efficient transfer learning, and communication-efficient optimizers, we are able to train a 21M parameter Transformer that achieves the same perplexity as that of a similarly sized LSTM with ∼10× smaller client-to-server communication cost and 11% lower perplexity than smaller LSTMs commonly studied in literature.

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Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES
Felix Stahlberg | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The softmax layer in neural machine translation is designed to model the distribution over mutually exclusive tokens. Machine translation, however, is intrinsically uncertain: the same source sentence can have multiple semantically equivalent translations. Therefore, we propose to replace the softmax activation with a multi-label classification layer that can model ambiguity more effectively. We call our loss function Single-label Contrastive Objective for Non-Exclusive Sequences (SCONES). We show that the multi-label output layer can still be trained on single reference training data using the SCONES loss function. SCONES yields consistent BLEU score gains across six translation directions, particularly for medium-resource language pairs and small beam sizes. By using smaller beam sizes we can speed up inference by a factor of 3.9x and still match or improve the BLEU score obtained using softmax. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCONES can be used to train NMT models that assign the highest probability to adequate translations, thus mitigating the “beam search curse”. Additional experiments on synthetic language pairs with varying levels of uncertainty suggest that the improvements from SCONES can be attributed to better handling of ambiguity.

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Text Generation with Text-Editing Models
Eric Malmi | Yue Dong | Jonathan Mallinson | Aleksandr Chuklin | Jakub Adamek | Daniil Mirylenka | Felix Stahlberg | Sebastian Krause | Shankar Kumar | Aliaksei Severyn
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Tutorial Abstracts

Text-editing models have recently become a prominent alternative to seq2seq models for monolingual text-generation tasks such as grammatical error correction, text simplification, and style transfer. These tasks share a common trait – they exhibit a large amount of textual overlap between the source and target texts. Text-editing models take advantage of this observation and learn to generate the output by predicting edit operations applied to the source sequence. In contrast, seq2seq models generate outputs word-by-word from scratch thus making them slow at inference time. Text-editing models provide several benefits over seq2seq models including faster inference speed, higher sample efficiency, and better control and interpretability of the outputs. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of the text-edit based models and current state-of-the-art approaches analyzing their pros and cons. We discuss challenges related to deployment and how these models help to mitigate hallucination and bias, both pressing challenges in the field of text generation.

2021

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Synthetic Data Generation for Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models
Felix Stahlberg | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Synthetic data generation is widely known to boost the accuracy of neural grammatical error correction (GEC) systems, but existing methods often lack diversity or are too simplistic to generate the broad range of grammatical errors made by human writers. In this work, we use error type tags from automatic annotation tools such as ERRANT to guide synthetic data generation. We compare several models that can produce an ungrammatical sentence given a clean sentence and an error type tag. We use these models to build a new, large synthetic pre-training data set with error tag frequency distributions matching a given development set. Our synthetic data set yields large and consistent gains, improving the state-of-the-art on the BEA-19 and CoNLL-14 test sets. We also show that our approach is particularly effective in adapting a GEC system, trained on mixed native and non-native English, to a native English test set, even surpassing real training data consisting of high-quality sentence pairs.

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Data Strategies for Low-Resource Grammatical Error Correction
Simon Flachs | Felix Stahlberg | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is a task that has been extensively investigated for the English language. However, for low-resource languages the best practices for training GEC systems have not yet been systematically determined. We investigate how best to take advantage of existing data sources for improving GEC systems for languages with limited quantities of high quality training data. We show that methods for generating artificial training data for GEC can benefit from including morphological errors. We also demonstrate that noisy error correction data gathered from Wikipedia revision histories and the language learning website Lang8, are valuable data sources. Finally, we show that GEC systems pre-trained on noisy data sources can be fine-tuned effectively using small amounts of high quality, human-annotated data.

2020

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Data Weighted Training Strategies for Grammatical Error Correction
Jared Lichtarge | Chris Alberti | Shankar Kumar
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

Recent progress in the task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has been driven by addressing data sparsity, both through new methods for generating large and noisy pretraining data and through the publication of small and higher-quality finetuning data in the BEA-2019 shared task. Building upon recent work in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), we make use of both kinds of data by deriving example-level scores on our large pretraining data based on a smaller, higher-quality dataset. In this work, we perform an empirical study to discover how to best incorporate delta-log-perplexity, a type of example scoring, into a training schedule for GEC. In doing so, we perform experiments that shed light on the function and applicability of delta-log-perplexity. Models trained on scored data achieve state- of-the-art results on common GEC test sets.

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Seq2Edits: Sequence Transduction Using Span-level Edit Operations
Felix Stahlberg | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We propose Seq2Edits, an open-vocabulary approach to sequence editing for natural language processing (NLP) tasks with a high degree of overlap between input and output texts. In this approach, each sequence-to-sequence transduction is represented as a sequence of edit operations, where each operation either replaces an entire source span with target tokens or keeps it unchanged. We evaluate our method on five NLP tasks (text normalization, sentence fusion, sentence splitting & rephrasing, text simplification, and grammatical error correction) and report competitive results across the board. For grammatical error correction, our method speeds up inference by up to 5.2x compared to full sequence models because inference time depends on the number of edits rather than the number of target tokens. For text normalization, sentence fusion, and grammatical error correction, our approach improves explainability by associating each edit operation with a human-readable tag.

2019

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Corpora Generation for Grammatical Error Correction
Jared Lichtarge | Chris Alberti | Shankar Kumar | Noam Shazeer | Niki Parmar | Simon Tong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has been recently modeled using the sequence-to-sequence framework. However, unlike sequence transduction problems such as machine translation, GEC suffers from the lack of plentiful parallel data. We describe two approaches for generating large parallel datasets for GEC using publicly available Wikipedia data. The first method extracts source-target pairs from Wikipedia edit histories with minimal filtration heuristics while the second method introduces noise into Wikipedia sentences via round-trip translation through bridge languages. Both strategies yield similar sized parallel corpora containing around 4B tokens. We employ an iterative decoding strategy that is tailored to the loosely supervised nature of our constructed corpora. We demonstrate that neural GEC models trained using either type of corpora give similar performance. Fine-tuning these models on the Lang-8 corpus and ensembling allows us to surpass the state of the art on both the CoNLL ‘14 benchmark and the JFLEG task. We present systematic analysis that compares the two approaches to data generation and highlights the effectiveness of ensembling.

2015

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Multilingual Open Relation Extraction Using Cross-lingual Projection
Manaal Faruqui | Shankar Kumar
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2010

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Expected Sequence Similarity Maximization
Cyril Allauzen | Shankar Kumar | Wolfgang Macherey | Mehryar Mohri | Michael Riley
Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Model Combination for Machine Translation
John DeNero | Shankar Kumar | Ciprian Chelba | Franz Och
Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2009

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Efficient Minimum Error Rate Training and Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for Translation Hypergraphs and Lattices
Shankar Kumar | Wolfgang Macherey | Chris Dyer | Franz Och
Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP

2008

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Lattice Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation
Roy Tromble | Shankar Kumar | Franz Och | Wolfgang Macherey
Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2007

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Improving Word Alignment with Bridge Languages
Shankar Kumar | Franz J. Och | Wolfgang Macherey
Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL)

2005

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Local Phrase Reordering Models for Statistical Machine Translation
Shankar Kumar | William Byrne
Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2004

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A Smorgasbord of Features for Statistical Machine Translation
Franz Josef Och | Daniel Gildea | Sanjeev Khudanpur | Anoop Sarkar | Kenji Yamada | Alex Fraser | Shankar Kumar | Libin Shen | David Smith | Katherine Eng | Viren Jain | Zhen Jin | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004

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Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation
Shankar Kumar | William Byrne
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004

2003

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A Weighted Finite State Transducer Implementation of the Alignment Template Model for Statistical Machine Translation
Shankar Kumar | William Byrne
Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2002

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Minimum Bayes-Risk Word Alignments of Bilingual Texts
Shankar Kumar | William Byrne
Proceedings of the 2002 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2002)