Beto, Bentz, Becas: The Surprising Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of BERT

Pretrained contextual representation models (Peters et al., 2018; Devlin et al., 2018) have pushed forward the state-of-the-art on many NLP tasks. A new release of BERT (Devlin, 2018) includes a model simultaneously pretrained on 104 languages with impressive performance for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on a natural language inference task. This paper explores the broader cross-lingual potential of mBERT (multilingual) as a zero shot language transfer model on 5 NLP tasks covering a total of 39 languages from various language families: NLI, document classification, NER, POS tagging, and dependency parsing. We compare mBERT with the best-published methods for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer and find mBERT competitive on each task. Additionally, we investigate the most effective strategy for utilizing mBERT in this manner, determine to what extent mBERT generalizes away from language specific features, and measure factors that influence cross-lingual transfer.Comment: EMNLP 2019 Camera Read

Robust Orthogonal Complement Principal Component Analysis

Recently, the robustification of principal component analysis has attracted lots of attention from statisticians, engineers and computer scientists. In this work we study the type of outliers that are not necessarily apparent in the original observation space but can seriously affect the principal subspace estimation. Based on a mathematical formulation of such transformed outliers, a novel robust orthogonal complement principal component analysis (ROC-PCA) is proposed. The framework combines the popular sparsity-enforcing and low rank regularization techniques to deal with row-wise outliers as well as element-wise outliers. A non-asymptotic oracle inequality guarantees the accuracy and high breakdown performance of ROC-PCA in finite samples. To tackle the computational challenges, an efficient algorithm is developed on the basis of Stiefel manifold optimization and iterative thresholding. Furthermore, a batch variant is proposed to significantly reduce the cost in ultra high dimensions. The paper also points out a pitfall of a common practice of SVD reduction in robust PCA. Experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of ROC-PCA in both synthetic and real data

Doing business in China : a primer for foreign architects

With more and more U.S. and other foreign businesses investing in the Chinese market, it is a good time for American architectural firms to enter this great market and play an important role. This thesis analyzes the prospects and feasibility of cooperation between U.S. and Chinese architects by investigating China\u27s construction market, architects and firms. In an overseas investment and architectural project, foreign and Chinese architects have to learn how to co-operate. They will encounter many special problems in this new work, which is very different from projects in their own countries. American architects and businessmen urgently need a reference guide to understand Chinese architectural laws, standards and code, and how to work in China with Chinese architects and government officials. This thesis provides firsthand material collected from recent foreign investment projects in China. It is hoped that this thesis will be a guide for U.S. architects who are interested in working in China

Generalized Jordan derivations on prime rings and standard operator algebras

In this paper we initiate the study of generalized Jordan derivations and generalized Jordan triple derivations on prime rings and standard operator algebras

BoundaryFace: A mining framework with noise label self-correction for Face Recognition

Face recognition has made tremendous progress in recent years due to the advances in loss functions and the explosive growth in training sets size. A properly designed loss is seen as key to extract discriminative features for classification. Several margin-based losses have been proposed as alternatives of softmax loss in face recognition. However, two issues remain to consider: 1) They overlook the importance of hard sample mining for discriminative learning. 2) Label noise ubiquitously exists in large-scale datasets, which can seriously damage the model's performance. In this paper, starting from the perspective of decision boundary, we propose a novel mining framework that focuses on the relationship between a sample's ground truth class center and its nearest negative class center. Specifically, a closed-set noise label self-correction module is put forward, making this framework work well on datasets containing a lot of label noise. The proposed method consistently outperforms SOTA methods in various face recognition benchmarks. Training code has been released at https://github.com/SWJTU-3DVision/BoundaryFace.Comment: ECCV 2022. Code available at https://github.com/SWJTU-3DVision/BoundaryFac

Applying the Transformer to Character-level Transduction

The transformer has been shown to outperform recurrent neural network-based sequence-to-sequence models in various word-level NLP tasks. Yet for character-level transduction tasks, e.g. morphological inflection generation and historical text normalization, there are few works that outperform recurrent models using the transformer. In an empirical study, we uncover that, in contrast to recurrent sequence-to-sequence models, the batch size plays a crucial role in the performance of the transformer on character-level tasks, and we show that with a large enough batch size, the transformer does indeed outperform recurrent models. We also introduce a simple technique to handle feature-guided character-level transduction that further improves performance. With these insights, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on morphological inflection and historical text normalization. We also show that the transformer outperforms a strong baseline on two other character-level transduction tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and transliteration.Comment: EACL 202