Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe

Towards Bidirectional Hierarchical Representations for Attention-Based Neural Machine Translation

This paper proposes a hierarchical attentional neural translation model which focuses on enhancing source-side hierarchical representations by covering both local and global semantic information using a bidirectional tree-based encoder. To maximize the predictive likelihood of target words, a weighted variant of an attention mechanism is used to balance the attentive information between lexical and phrase vectors. Using a tree-based rare word encoding, the proposed model is extended to sub-word level to alleviate the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. Empirical results reveal that the proposed model significantly outperforms sequence-to-sequence attention-based and tree-based neural translation models in English-Chinese translation tasks.Comment: Accepted for publication at EMNLP 201

Unsupervised Chunking Based on Graph Propagation from Bilingual Corpus

This paper presents a novel approach for unsupervised shallow parsing model trained on the unannotated Chinese text of parallel Chinese-English corpus. In this approach, no information of the Chinese side is applied. The exploitation of graph-based label propagation for bilingual knowledge transfer, along with an application of using the projected labels as features in unsupervised model, contributes to a better performance. The experimental comparisons with the state-of-the-art algorithms show that the proposed approach is able to achieve impressive higher accuracy in terms of F-score

Assessing the Ability of Self-Attention Networks to Learn Word Order

Self-attention networks (SAN) have attracted a lot of interests due to their high parallelization and strong performance on a variety of NLP tasks, e.g. machine translation. Due to the lack of recurrence structure such as recurrent neural networks (RNN), SAN is ascribed to be weak at learning positional information of words for sequence modeling. However, neither this speculation has been empirically confirmed, nor explanations for their strong performances on machine translation tasks when "lacking positional information" have been explored. To this end, we propose a novel word reordering detection task to quantify how well the word order information learned by SAN and RNN. Specifically, we randomly move one word to another position, and examine whether a trained model can detect both the original and inserted positions. Experimental results reveal that: 1) SAN trained on word reordering detection indeed has difficulty learning the positional information even with the position embedding; and 2) SAN trained on machine translation learns better positional information than its RNN counterpart, in which position embedding plays a critical role. Although recurrence structure make the model more universally-effective on learning word order, learning objectives matter more in the downstream tasks such as machine translation.Comment: ACL 201

Human-in-the-loop Machine Translation with Large Language Model

The large language model (LLM) has garnered significant attention due to its in-context learning mechanisms and emergent capabilities. The research community has conducted several pilot studies to apply LLMs to machine translation tasks and evaluate their performance from diverse perspectives. However, previous research has primarily focused on the LLM itself and has not explored human intervention in the inference process of LLM. The characteristics of LLM, such as in-context learning and prompt engineering, closely mirror human cognitive abilities in language tasks, offering an intuitive solution for human-in-the-loop generation. In this study, we propose a human-in-the-loop pipeline that guides LLMs to produce customized outputs with revision instructions. The pipeline initiates by prompting the LLM to produce a draft translation, followed by the utilization of automatic retrieval or human feedback as supervision signals to enhance the LLM's translation through in-context learning. The human-machine interactions generated in this pipeline are also stored in an external database to expand the in-context retrieval database, enabling us to leverage human supervision in an offline setting. We evaluate the proposed pipeline using GPT-3.5-turbo API on five domain-specific benchmarks for German-English translation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the pipeline in tailoring in-domain translations and improving translation performance compared to direct translation. Additionally, we discuss the results from the following perspectives: 1) the effectiveness of different in-context retrieval methods; 2) the construction of a retrieval database under low-resource scenarios; 3) the observed domains differences; 4) the quantitative analysis of linguistic statistics; and 5) the qualitative analysis of translation cases. The code and data are available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/HIL-MT/.Comment: Accepted to MT Summit 202

Context-Aware Self-Attention Networks

Self-attention model have shown its flexibility in parallel computation and the effectiveness on modeling both long- and short-term dependencies. However, it calculates the dependencies between representations without considering the contextual information, which have proven useful for modeling dependencies among neural representations in various natural language tasks. In this work, we focus on improving self-attention networks through capturing the richness of context. To maintain the simplicity and flexibility of the self-attention networks, we propose to contextualize the transformations of the query and key layers, which are used to calculates the relevance between elements. Specifically, we leverage the internal representations that embed both global and deep contexts, thus avoid relying on external resources. Experimental results on WMT14 English-German and WMT17 Chinese-English translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the proposed methods. Furthermore, we conducted extensive analyses to quantity how the context vectors participate in the self-attention model.Comment: AAAI 201