This paper proposes the building of Xiaomingbot, an intelligent, multilingual and multimodal software robot equipped with four inte- gral capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. Its system summarizes Chinese news that it automatically generates from data tables. Next, it translates the summary or the full article into multiple languages, and reads the multi- lingual rendition through synthesized speech. Notably, Xiaomingbot utilizes a voice cloning technology to synthesize the speech trained from a real person’s voice data in one input language. The proposed system enjoys several merits: it has an animated avatar, and is able to generate and read multilingual news. Since it was put into practice, Xiaomingbot has written over 600,000 articles, and gained over 150,000 followers on social media platforms.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) for CoNLL 2019 shared task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing. We extended the basic transition-based parser with two improvements: a) Efficient Training by realizing Stack LSTM parallel training; b) Effective Encoding via adopting deep contextualized word embeddings BERT. Generally, we proposed a unified pipeline to meaning representation parsing, including framework-specific transition-based parsers, BERT-enhanced word representation, and post-processing. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to ALL-F1 (86.2%) and especially ranked first in UCCA framework (81.67%).

This paper investigates the problem of learning cross-lingual representations in a contextual space. We propose Cross-Lingual BERT Transformation (CLBT), a simple and efficient approach to generate cross-lingual contextualized word embeddings based on publicly available pre-trained BERT models (Devlin et al., 2018). In this approach, a linear transformation is learned from contextual word alignments to align the contextualized embeddings independently trained in different languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer parsing. Experiments show that our embeddings substantially outperform the previous state-of-the-art that uses static embeddings. We further compare our approach with XLM (Lample and Conneau, 2019), a recently proposed cross-lingual language model trained with massive parallel data, and achieve highly competitive results.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) submitted to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. We base our submission on Stanford’s winning system for the CoNLL 2017 shared task and make two effective extensions: 1) incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings into both the part of speech tagger and parser; 2) ensembling parsers trained with different initialization. We also explore different ways of concatenating treebanks for further improvements. Experimental results on the development data show the effectiveness of our methods. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to LAS (75.84%) and outperformed the other systems by a large margin.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) for the CoNLL 2017 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system includes three pipelined components: tokenization, Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. We use character-based bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for both tokenization and POS tagging. Afterwards, we employ a list-based transition-based algorithm for general non-projective parsing and present an improved Stack-LSTM-based architecture for representing each transition state and making predictions. Furthermore, to parse low/zero-resource languages and cross-domain data, we use a model transfer approach to make effective use of existing resources. We demonstrate substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 3.76% in LAS of all languages. And finally, we rank the 4th place on the official test sets.