Generative Models For Deep Learning with Very Scarce Data

The goal of this paper is to deal with a data scarcity scenario where deep learning techniques use to fail. We compare the use of two well established techniques, Restricted Boltzmann Machines and Variational Auto-encoders, as generative models in order to increase the training set in a classification framework. Essentially, we rely on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for generating new samples. We show that generalization can be improved comparing this methodology to other state-of-the-art techniques, e.g. semi-supervised learning with ladder networks. Furthermore, we show that RBM is better than VAE generating new samples for training a classifier with good generalization capabilities

One-Shot Neural Cross-Lingual Transfer for Paradigm Completion

We present a novel cross-lingual transfer method for paradigm completion, the task of mapping a lemma to its inflected forms, using a neural encoder-decoder model, the state of the art for the monolingual task. We use labeled data from a high-resource language to increase performance on a low-resource language. In experiments on 21 language pairs from four different language families, we obtain up to 58% higher accuracy than without transfer and show that even zero-shot and one-shot learning are possible. We further find that the degree of language relatedness strongly influences the ability to transfer morphological knowledge.Comment: Accepted at ACL 201

Leveraging native language information for improved accented speech recognition

Recognition of accented speech is a long-standing challenge for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, given the increasing worldwide population of bi-lingual speakers with English as their second language. If we consider foreign-accented speech as an interpolation of the native language (L1) and English (L2), using a model that can simultaneously address both languages would perform better at the acoustic level for accented speech. In this study, we explore how an end-to-end recurrent neural network (RNN) trained system with English and native languages (Spanish and Indian languages) could leverage data of native languages to improve performance for accented English speech. To this end, we examine pre-training with native languages, as well as multi-task learning (MTL) in which the main task is trained with native English and the secondary task is trained with Spanish or Indian Languages. We show that the proposed MTL model performs better than the pre-training approach and outperforms a baseline model trained simply with English data. We suggest a new setting for MTL in which the secondary task is trained with both English and the native language, using the same output set. This proposed scenario yields better performance with +11.95% and +17.55% character error rate gains over baseline for Hispanic and Indian accents, respectively.Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 201

Multilingual Language Processing From Bytes

We describe an LSTM-based model which we call Byte-to-Span (BTS) that reads text as bytes and outputs span annotations of the form [start, length, label] where start positions, lengths, and labels are separate entries in our vocabulary. Because we operate directly on unicode bytes rather than language-specific words or characters, we can analyze text in many languages with a single model. Due to the small vocabulary size, these multilingual models are very compact, but produce results similar to or better than the state-of- the-art in Part-of-Speech tagging and Named Entity Recognition that use only the provided training datasets (no external data sources). Our models are learning "from scratch" in that they do not rely on any elements of the standard pipeline in Natural Language Processing (including tokenization), and thus can run in standalone fashion on raw text

Polyglot: Distributed Word Representations for Multilingual NLP

Distributed word representations (word embeddings) have recently contributed to competitive performance in language modeling and several NLP tasks. In this work, we train word embeddings for more than 100 languages using their corresponding Wikipedias. We quantitatively demonstrate the utility of our word embeddings by using them as the sole features for training a part of speech tagger for a subset of these languages. We find their performance to be competitive with near state-of-art methods in English, Danish and Swedish. Moreover, we investigate the semantic features captured by these embeddings through the proximity of word groupings. We will release these embeddings publicly to help researchers in the development and enhancement of multilingual applications.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning CoNLL'201