Linguistically-driven Multi-task Pre-training for Low-resource Neural Machine Translation

In the present study, we propose novel sequence-to-sequence pre-training objectives for low-resource machine translation (NMT): Japanese-specific sequence to sequence (JASS) for language pairs involving Japanese as the source or target language, and English-specific sequence to sequence (ENSS) for language pairs involving English. JASS focuses on masking and reordering Japanese linguistic units known as bunsetsu, whereas ENSS is proposed based on phrase structure masking and reordering tasks. Experiments on ASPEC Japanese–English & Japanese–Chinese, Wikipedia Japanese–Chinese, News English–Korean corpora demonstrate that JASS and ENSS outperform MASS and other existing language-agnostic pre-training methods by up to +2.9 BLEU points for the Japanese–English tasks, up to +7.0 BLEU points for the Japanese–Chinese tasks and up to +1.3 BLEU points for English–Korean tasks. Empirical analysis, which focuses on the relationship between individual parts in JASS and ENSS, reveals the complementary nature of the subtasks of JASS and ENSS. Adequacy evaluation using LASER, human evaluation, and case studies reveals that our proposed methods significantly outperform pre-training methods without injected linguistic knowledge and they have a larger positive impact on the adequacy as compared to the fluency

Modélisation des comportements de recherche basé sur les interactions des utilisateurs

Les utilisateurs de systèmes d'information divisent normalement les tâches en une séquence de plusieurs étapes pour les résoudre. En particulier, les utilisateurs divisent les tâches de recherche en séquences de requêtes, en interagissant avec les systèmes de recherche pour mener à bien le processus de recherche d'informations. Les interactions des utilisateurs sont enregistrées dans des journaux de requêtes, ce qui permet de développer des modèles pour apprendre automatiquement les comportements de recherche à partir des interactions des utilisateurs avec les systèmes de recherche. Ces modèles sont à la base de multiples applications d'assistance aux utilisateurs qui aident les systèmes de recherche à être plus interactifs, faciles à utiliser, et cohérents. Par conséquent, nous proposons les contributions suivantes : un modèle neuronale pour apprendre à détecter les limites des tâches de recherche dans les journaux de requête ; une architecture de regroupement profond récurrent qui apprend simultanément les représentations de requête et regroupe les requêtes en tâches de recherche ; un modèle non supervisé et indépendant d'utilisateur pour l'identification des tâches de recherche prenant en charge les requêtes dans seize langues ; et un modèle de tâche de recherche multilingue, une approche non supervisée qui modélise simultanément l'intention de recherche de l'utilisateur et les tâches de recherche. Les modèles proposés améliorent les méthodes existantes de modélisation, en tenant compte de la confidentialité des utilisateurs, des réponses en temps réel et de l'accessibilité linguistique. Le respect de la vie privée de l'utilisateur est une préoccupation majeure, tandis que des réponses rapides sont essentielles pour les systèmes de recherche qui interagissent avec les utilisateurs en temps réel, en particulier dans la recherche par conversation. Dans le même temps, l'accessibilité linguistique est essentielle pour aider les utilisateurs du monde entier, qui interagissent avec les systèmes de recherche dans de nombreuses langues. Les contributions proposées peuvent bénéficier à de nombreuses applications d'assistance aux utilisateurs, en aidant ces derniers à mieux résoudre leurs tâches de recherche lorsqu'ils accèdent aux systèmes de recherche pour répondre à leurs besoins d'information.Users of information systems normally divide tasks in a sequence of multiple steps to solve them. In particular, users divide search tasks into sequences of queries, interacting with search systems to carry out the information seeking process. User interactions are registered on search query logs, enabling the development of models to automatically learn search patterns from the users' interactions with search systems. These models underpin multiple user assisting applications that help search systems to be more interactive, user-friendly, and coherent. User assisting applications include query suggestion, the ranking of search results based on tasks, query reformulation analysis, e-commerce applications, retrieval of advertisement, query-term prediction, mapping of queries to search tasks, and so on. Consequently, we propose the following contributions: a neural model for learning to detect search task boundaries in query logs; a recurrent deep clustering architecture that simultaneously learns query representations through self-training, and cluster queries into groups of search tasks; Multilingual Graph-Based Clustering, an unsupervised, user-agnostic model for search task identification supporting queries in sixteen languages; and Language-agnostic Search Task Model, an unsupervised approach that simultaneously models user search intent and search tasks. Proposed models improve on existing methods for modeling user interactions, taking into account user privacy, realtime response times, and language accessibility. User privacy is a major concern in Ethics for intelligent systems, while fast responses are critical for search systems interacting with users in realtime, particularly in conversational search. At the same time, language accessibility is essential to assist users worldwide, who interact with search systems in many languages. The proposed contributions can benefit many user assisting applications, helping users to better solve their search tasks when accessing search systems to fulfill their information needs

Character Mapping and Ad-hoc Adaptation: Edinburgh's IWSLT 2020 Open Domain Translation System

This paper describes the University of Edinburgh’s neural machine translation systems submitted to the IWSLT 2020 open domain Japanese Chinese translation task. On top of commonplace techniques like tokenisation and corpus cleaning, we explore character mapping and unsupervised decoding-time adaptation. Our techniques focus on leveraging the provided data, and we show the positive impact of each technique through the gradual improvement of BLEU

Leveraging Personal Navigation Assistant Systems Using Automated Social Media Traffic Reporting

Modern urbanization is demanding smarter technologies to improve a variety of applications in intelligent transportation systems to relieve the increasing amount of vehicular traffic congestion and incidents. Existing incident detection techniques are limited to the use of sensors in the transportation network and hang on human-inputs. Despite of its data abundance, social media is not well-exploited in such context. In this paper, we develop an automated traffic alert system based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) that filters this flood of information and extract important traffic-related bullets. To this end, we employ the fine-tuning Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language embedding model to filter the related traffic information from social media. Then, we apply a question-answering model to extract necessary information characterizing the report event such as its exact location, occurrence time, and nature of the events. We demonstrate the adopted NLP approaches outperform other existing approach and, after effectively training them, we focus on real-world situation and show how the developed approach can, in real-time, extract traffic-related information and automatically convert them into alerts for navigation assistance applications such as navigation apps.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology Engineering Management Society International Conference (TEMSCON'20), Metro Detroit, Michigan (USA

Assisting Language Learners: Automated Trans-Lingual Definition Generation via Contrastive Prompt Learning

The standard definition generation task requires to automatically produce mono-lingual definitions (e.g., English definitions for English words), but ignores that the generated definitions may also consist of unfamiliar words for language learners. In this work, we propose a novel task of Trans-Lingual Definition Generation (TLDG), which aims to generate definitions in another language, i.e., the native speaker's language. Initially, we explore the unsupervised manner of this task and build up a simple implementation of fine-tuning the multi-lingual machine translation model. Then, we develop two novel methods, Prompt Combination and Contrastive Prompt Learning, for further enhancing the quality of the generation. Our methods are evaluated against the baseline Pipeline method in both rich- and low-resource settings, and we empirically establish its superiority in generating higher-quality trans-lingual definitions.Comment: Accepted by ACL-BEA worksho

Automated Question-Answering for Interactive Decision Support in Operations & Maintenance of Wind Turbines

Intelligent question-answering (QA) systems have witnessed increased interest in recent years, particularly in their ability to facilitate information access, data interpretation or decision support. The wind energy sector is one of the most promising sources of renewable energy, yet turbines regularly suffer from failures and operational inconsistencies, leading to downtimes and significant maintenance costs. Addressing these issues requires rapid interpretation of complex and dynamic data patterns under time-critical conditions. In this article, we present a novel approach that leverages interactive, natural language-based decision support for operations & maintenance (O&M) of wind turbines. The proposed interactive QA system allows engineers to pose domain-specific questions in natural language, and provides answers (in natural language) based on the automated retrieval of information on turbine sub-components, their properties and interactions, from a bespoke domain-specific knowledge graph. As data for specific faults is often sparse, we propose the use of paraphrase generation as a way to augment the existing dataset. Our QA system leverages encoder-decoder models to generate Cypher queries to obtain domain-specific facts from the KG database in response to user-posed natural language questions. Experiments with an attention-based sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model and a transformer show that the transformer accurately predicts up to 89.75% of responses to input questions, outperforming the Seq2Seq model marginally by 0.76%, though being 9.46 times more computationally efficient. The proposed QA system can help support engineers and technicians during O&M to reduce turbine downtime and operational costs, thus improving the reliability of wind energy as a source of renewable energy