Cross-Lingual Low-Resource Set-to-Description Retrieval for Global E-Commerce

With the prosperous of cross-border e-commerce, there is an urgent demand for designing intelligent approaches for assisting e-commerce sellers to offer local products for consumers from all over the world. In this paper, we explore a new task of cross-lingual information retrieval, i.e., cross-lingual set-to-description retrieval in cross-border e-commerce, which involves matching product attribute sets in the source language with persuasive product descriptions in the target language. We manually collect a new and high-quality paired dataset, where each pair contains an unordered product attribute set in the source language and an informative product description in the target language. As the dataset construction process is both time-consuming and costly, the new dataset only comprises of 13.5k pairs, which is a low-resource setting and can be viewed as a challenging testbed for model development and evaluation in cross-border e-commerce. To tackle this cross-lingual set-to-description retrieval task, we propose a novel cross-lingual matching network (CLMN) with the enhancement of context-dependent cross-lingual mapping upon the pre-trained monolingual BERT representations. Experimental results indicate that our proposed CLMN yields impressive results on the challenging task and the context-dependent cross-lingual mapping on BERT yields noticeable improvement over the pre-trained multi-lingual BERT model.Comment: AAAI 202

Application of pre-training and fine-tuning AI models to machine translation: a case study of multilingual text classification in Baidu

With the development of international information technology, we are producing a huge amount of information all the time. The processing ability of information in various languages is gradually replacing information and becoming a rarer resource. How to obtain the most effective information in such a large and complex amount of multilingual textual information is a major goal of multilingual information processing. Multilingual text classification helps users to break the language barrier and accurately locate the required information and triage information. At the same time, the rapid development of the Internet has accelerated the communication among users of various languages, giving rise to a large number of multilingual texts, such as book and movie reviews, online chats, product introductions and other forms, which contain a large amount of valuable implicit information and urgently need automated tools to categorize and process those multilingual texts. This work describes the Natural Language Process (NLP) sub-task known as Multilingual Text Classification (MTC) performed within the context of Baidu, a Chinese leading AI company with a strong Internet base, whose NLP division led the industry in deep learning technology to go online in Machine Translation (MT) and search. Multilingual text classification is an important module in NLP machine translation and a basic module in NLP tasks. It can be applied to many fields, such as Fake Reviews Detection, News Headlines Categories Classification, Analysis of positive and negative reviews and so on. In the following work, we will first define the AI model paradigm of 'pre-training and fine-tuning' in deep learning in the Baidu NLP department. Then investigated the application scenarios of multilingual text classification. Most of the text classification systems currently available in the Chinese market are designed for a single language, such as Alibaba's text classification system. If users need to classify texts of the same category in multiple languages, they need to train multiple single text classification systems and then classify them one by one. However, many internationalized products do not have a single text language, such as AliExpress cross-border e-commerce business, Airbnb B&B business, etc. Industry needs to understand and classify users’ reviews in various languages, and have conducted in-depth statistics and marketing strategy development, and multilingual text classification is particularly important in this scenario. Therefore, we focus on interpreting the methodology of multilingual text classification model of machine translation in Baidu NLP department, and capture sets of multilingual data of reviews, news headlines and other data for manual classification and labeling, use the labeling results for fine-tuning of multilingual text classification model, and output the quality evaluation data of Baidu multilingual text classification model after fine-tuning. We will discuss if the pre-training and fine-tuning of the large model can substantially improve the quality and performance of multilingual text classification. Finally, based on the machine translation-multilingual text classification model, we derive the application method of pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm in the current cutting-edge deep learning AI model under the NLP system and verify the generality and cutting-edge of the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm in the deep learning-intelligent search field.Com o desenvolvimento da tecnologia de informação internacional, estamos sempre a produzir uma enorme quantidade de informação e o recurso mais escasso já não é a informação, mas a capacidade de processar informação em cada língua. A maior parte da informação multilingue é expressa sob a forma de texto. Como obter a informação mais eficaz numa quantidade tão considerável e complexa de informação textual multilingue é um dos principais objetivos do processamento de informação multilingue. A classificação de texto multilingue ajuda os utilizadores a quebrar a barreira linguística e a localizar com precisão a informação necessária e a classificá-la. Ao mesmo tempo, o rápido desenvolvimento da Internet acelerou a comunicação entre utilizadores de várias línguas, dando origem a um grande número de textos multilingues, tais como críticas de livros e filmes, chats, introduções de produtos e outros distintos textos, que contêm uma grande quantidade de informação implícita valiosa e necessitam urgentemente de ferramentas automatizadas para categorizar e processar esses textos multilingues. Este trabalho descreve a subtarefa do Processamento de Linguagem Natural (PNL) conhecida como Classificação de Texto Multilingue (MTC), realizada no contexto da Baidu, uma empresa chinesa líder em IA, cuja equipa de PNL levou a indústria em tecnologia baseada em aprendizagem neuronal a destacar-se em Tradução Automática (MT) e pesquisa científica. A classificação multilingue de textos é um módulo importante na tradução automática de PNL e um módulo básico em tarefas de PNL. A MTC pode ser aplicada a muitos campos, tais como análise de sentimentos multilingues, categorização de notícias, filtragem de conteúdos indesejados (do inglês spam), entre outros. Neste trabalho, iremos primeiro definir o paradigma do modelo AI de 'pré-treino e afinação' em aprendizagem profunda no departamento de PNL da Baidu. Em seguida, realizaremos a pesquisa sobre outros produtos no mercado com capacidade de classificação de texto — a classificação de texto levada a cabo pela Alibaba. Após a pesquisa, verificamos que a maioria dos sistemas de classificação de texto atualmente disponíveis no mercado chinês são concebidos para uma única língua, tal como o sistema de classificação de texto Alibaba. Se os utilizadores precisarem de classificar textos da mesma categoria em várias línguas, precisam de aplicar vários sistemas de classificação de texto para cada língua e depois classificá-los um a um. No entanto, muitos produtos internacionalizados não têm uma única língua de texto, tais como AliExpress comércio eletrónico transfronteiriço, Airbnb B&B business, etc. A indústria precisa compreender e classificar as revisões dos utilizadores em várias línguas. Esta necessidade conduziu a um desenvolvimento aprofundado de estatísticas e estratégias de marketing, e a classificação de textos multilingues é particularmente importante neste cenário. Desta forma, concentrar-nos-emos na interpretação da metodologia do modelo de classificação de texto multilingue da tradução automática no departamento de PNL Baidu. Colhemos para o efeito conjuntos de dados multilingues de comentários e críticas, manchetes de notícias e outros dados para classificação manual, utilizamos os resultados dessa classificação para o aperfeiçoamento do modelo de classificação de texto multilingue e produzimos os dados de avaliação da qualidade do modelo de classificação de texto multilingue da Baidu. Discutiremos se o pré-treino e o aperfeiçoamento do modelo podem melhorar substancialmente a qualidade e o desempenho da classificação de texto multilingue. Finalmente, com base no modelo de classificação de texto multilingue de tradução automática, derivamos o método de aplicação do paradigma de pré-formação e afinação no atual modelo de IA de aprendizagem profunda de ponta sob o sistema de PNL, e verificamos a robustez e os resultados positivos do paradigma de pré-treino e afinação no campo de pesquisa de aprendizagem profunda

Sharing Semantic Resources

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information, so far created for human consumption, becomes machine readable, “enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. To turn into reality this vision several challenges are still open among which the most important is to share meaning formally represented with ontologies or more generally with semantic resources. This Semantic Web long-term goal has many convergences with the activities in the field of Human Language Technology and in particular in the development of Natural Language Processing applications where there is a great need of multilingual lexical resources. For instance, one of the most important lexical resources, WordNet, is also commonly regarded and used as an ontology. Nowadays, another important phenomenon is represented by the explosion of social collaboration, and Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, is object of research as an up to date omni comprehensive semantic resource. The main topic of this thesis is the management and exploitation of semantic resources in a collaborative way, trying to use the already available resources as Wikipedia and Wordnet. This work presents a general environment able to turn into reality the vision of shared and distributed semantic resources and describes a distributed three-layer architecture to enable a rapid prototyping of cooperative applications for developing semantic resources

Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning

Developing artificial learning systems that can understand and generate natural language has been one of the long-standing goals of artificial intelligence. Recent decades have witnessed an impressive progress on both of these problems, giving rise to a new family of approaches. Especially, the advances in deep learning over the past couple of years have led to neural approaches to natural language generation (NLG). These methods combine generative language learning techniques with neural-networks based frameworks. With a wide range of applications in natural language processing, neural NLG (NNLG) is a new and fast growing field of research. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate the recent developments and applications of NNLG in its full extent from a multidimensional view, covering critical perspectives such as multimodality, multilinguality, controllability and learning strategies. We summarize the fundamental building blocks of NNLG approaches from these aspects and provide detailed reviews of commonly used preprocessing steps and basic neural architectures. This report also focuses on the seminal applications of these NNLG models such as machine translation, description generation, automatic speech recognition, abstractive summarization, text simplification, question answering and generation, and dialogue generation. Finally, we conclude with a thorough discussion of the described frameworks by pointing out some open research directions.This work has been partially supported by the European Commission ICT COST Action “Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generation” (CA18231). AE was supported by BAGEP 2021 Award of the Science Academy. EE was supported in part by TUBA GEBIP 2018 Award. BP is in in part funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) grant 9063-00077B. IC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 838188. EL is partly funded by Generalitat Valenciana and the Spanish Government throught projects PROMETEU/2018/089 and RTI2018-094649-B-I00, respectively. SMI is partly funded by UNIRI project uniri-drustv-18-20. GB is partly supported by the Ministry of Innovation and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office within the framework of the Hungarian Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory Programme. COT is partially funded by the Romanian Ministry of European Investments and Projects through the Competitiveness Operational Program (POC) project “HOLOTRAIN” (grant no. 29/221 ap2/07.04.2020, SMIS code: 129077) and by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project “AWAKEN: content-Aware and netWork-Aware faKE News mitigation” (grant no. 91809005). ESA is partially funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project “Deep-Learning Anomaly Detection for Human and Automated Users Behavior” (grant no. 91809358)

PersoNER: Persian named-entity recognition

© 1963-2018 ACL. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging task for languages with low digital resources. The main difficulties arise from the scarcity of annotated corpora and the consequent problematic training of an effective NER pipeline. To abridge this gap, in this paper we target the Persian language that is spoken by a population of over a hundred million people world-wide. We first present and provide ArmanPerosNERCorpus, the first manually-annotated Persian NER corpus. Then, we introduce PersoNER, an NER pipeline for Persian that leverages a word embedding and a sequential max-margin classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving interesting MUC7 and CoNNL scores while outperforming two alternatives based on a CRF and a recurrent neural network

Predicate Matrix: an interoperable lexical knowledge base for predicates

183 p.La Matriz de Predicados (Predicate Matrix en inglés) es un nuevo recurso léxico-semántico resultado de la integración de múltiples fuentes de conocimiento, entre las cuales se encuentran FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank y WordNet. La Matriz de Predicados proporciona un léxico extenso y robusto que permite mejorar la interoperabilidad entre los recursos semánticos mencionados anteriormente. La creación de la Matriz de Predicados se basa en la integración de Semlink y nuevos mappings obtenidos utilizando métodos automáticos que enlazan el conocimiento semántico a nivel léxico y de roles. Asimismo, hemos ampliado la Predicate Matrix para cubrir los predicados nominales (inglés, español) y predicados en otros idiomas (castellano, catalán y vasco). Como resultado, la Matriz de predicados proporciona un léxico multilingüe que permite el análisis semántico interoperable en múltiples idiomas

Cross-language Information Retrieval

Two key assumptions shape the usual view of ranked retrieval: (1) that the searcher can choose words for their query that might appear in the documents that they wish to see, and (2) that ranking retrieved documents will suffice because the searcher will be able to recognize those which they wished to find. When the documents to be searched are in a language not known by the searcher, neither assumption is true. In such cases, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is needed. This chapter reviews the state of the art for CLIR and outlines some open research questions.Comment: 49 pages, 0 figure

A semantic and agent-based approach to support information retrieval, interoperability and multi-lateral viewpoints for heterogeneous environmental databases

PhDData stored in individual autonomous databases often needs to be combined and interrelated. For example, in the Inland Water (IW) environment monitoring domain, the spatial and temporal variation of measurements of different water quality indicators stored in different databases are of interest. Data from multiple data sources is more complex to combine when there is a lack of metadata in a computation forin and when the syntax and semantics of the stored data models are heterogeneous. The main types of information retrieval (IR) requirements are query transparency and data harmonisation for data interoperability and support for multiple user views. A combined Semantic Web based and Agent based distributed system framework has been developed to support the above IR requirements. It has been implemented using the Jena ontology and JADE agent toolkits. The semantic part supports the interoperability of autonomous data sources by merging their intensional data, using a Global-As-View or GAV approach, into a global semantic model, represented in DAML+OIL and in OWL. This is used to mediate between different local database views. The agent part provides the semantic services to import, align and parse semantic metadata instances, to support data mediation and to reason about data mappings during alignment. The framework has applied to support information retrieval, interoperability and multi-lateral viewpoints for four European environmental agency databases. An extended GAV approach has been developed and applied to handle queries that can be reformulated over multiple user views of the stored data. This allows users to retrieve data in a conceptualisation that is better suited to them rather than to have to understand the entire detailed global view conceptualisation. User viewpoints are derived from the global ontology or existing viewpoints of it. This has the advantage that it reduces the number of potential conceptualisations and their associated mappings to be more computationally manageable. Whereas an ad hoc framework based upon conventional distributed programming language and a rule framework could be used to support user views and adaptation to user views, a more formal framework has the benefit in that it can support reasoning about the consistency, equivalence, containment and conflict resolution when traversing data models. A preliminary formulation of the formal model has been undertaken and is based upon extending a Datalog type algebra with hierarchical, attribute and instance value operators. These operators can be applied to support compositional mapping and consistency checking of data views. The multiple viewpoint system was implemented as a Java-based application consisting of two sub-systems, one for viewpoint adaptation and management, the other for query processing and query result adjustment