The aim of the research is to assess the environmental performance of industrial companies operating in Lattakia Governorate using the data of the ISO14001 standard, represented by the variables (environmental policy, planning, implementation and ope
ration, environmental management system, environmental management tools and environmental performance dimensions). Theoretical, as the statistical survey method was used, where the researcher distributed (140) questionnaires to a sample of industrial companies operating in the Lattakia governorate under study, (137) questionnaires that fulfilled the research conditions were retrieved which represent (98%) of the distributed questionnaires. The researcher also analyzed the data by using the statistical analysis program (SPSS.23).
At the end of the research, the researcher reached a set of conclusions, the most important of which are: The actual environmental performance of the industrial companies under study does not correspond to the required environmental performance, where the statistical analysis of the data showed that all environmental performance variables except for the “planning” variable were below the required level, which indicates that the industrial companies under study does not take the environmental aspect seriously into consideration in its various activities. The researcher also made several recommendations, the most important of which are: The industrial companies operating in Lattakia Governorate should focus on developing a specific environmental policy with clear goals and objectives, in addition to setting up an environmental management system that integrates with other systems of companies, both administrative and financial, and the concerned authorities in the country must impose conditions on industrial companies to obtain international ISO certificates related to the environment or other equivalent certificates.
This paper describes Mininglamp neural machine translation systems of the WMT2021 news translation tasks. We have participated in eight directions translation tasks for news text including Chinese to/from English, Hausa to/from English, German to/fro
m English and French to/from German. Our fundamental system was based on Transformer architecture, with wider or smaller construction for different news translation tasks. We mainly utilized the method of back-translation, knowledge distillation and fine-tuning to boost single model, while the ensemble was used to combine single models. Our final submission has ranked first for the English to/from Hausa task.
This paper describes Tencent Translation systems for the WMT21 shared task. We participate in the news translation task on three language pairs: Chinese-English, English-Chinese and German-English. Our systems are built on various Transformer models
with novel techniques adapted from our recent research work. First, we combine different data augmentation methods including back-translation, forward-translation and right-to-left training to enlarge the training data. We also apply language coverage bias, data rejuvenation and uncertainty-based sampling approaches to select content-relevant and high-quality data from large parallel and monolingual corpora. Expect for in-domain fine-tuning, we also propose a fine-grained one model one domain'' approach to model characteristics of different news genres at fine-tuning and decoding stages. Besides, we use greed-based ensemble algorithm and transductive ensemble method to further boost our systems. Based on our success in the last WMT, we continuously employed advanced techniques such as large batch training, data selection and data filtering. Finally, our constrained Chinese-English system achieves 33.4 case-sensitive BLEU score, which is the highest among all submissions. The German-English system is ranked at second place accordingly.
Most of the time, when dealing with a particular Natural Language Processing task, systems are compared on the basis of global statistics such as recall, precision, F1-score, etc. While such scores provide a general idea of the behavior of these syst
ems, they ignore a key piece of information that can be useful for assessing progress and discerning remaining challenges: the relative difficulty of test instances. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the notion of differential evaluation which effectively defines a pragmatic partition of instances into gradually more difficult bins by leveraging the predictions made by a set of systems. Comparing systems along these difficulty bins enables us to produce a finer-grained analysis of their relative merits, which we illustrate on two use-cases: a comparison of systems participating in a multi-label text classification task (CLEF eHealth 2018 ICD-10 coding), and a comparison of neural models trained for biomedical entity detection (BioCreative V chemical-disease relations dataset).
Understanding the semantic meaning of content on the web through the lens of entities and concepts has many practical advantages. However, when building large-scale entity extraction systems, practitioners are facing unique challenges involving findi
ng the best ways to leverage the scale and variety of data available on internet platforms. We present learnings from our efforts in building an entity extraction system for multiple document types at large scale using multi-modal Transformers. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-lingual, multi-task and cross-document type learning. We also discuss the label collection schemes that help to minimize the amount of noise in the collected data.
The paradigm of leveraging large pre-trained language models has made significant progress on benchmarks on task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we combine this paradigm with multi-task learning framework for end-to-end TOD modeling b
y adopting span prediction as an auxiliary task. In end-to-end setting, our model achieves new state-of-the-art results with combined scores of 108.3 and 107.5 on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that multi-task learning improves not only the performance of model but its generalization capability through domain adaptation experiments in the few-shot setting. The code is available at github.com/bepoetree/MTTOD.
Pre-trained language-vision models have shown remarkable performance on the visual question answering (VQA) task. However, most pre-trained models are trained by only considering monolingual learning, especially the resource-rich language like Englis
h. Training such models for multilingual setups demand high computing resources and multilingual language-vision dataset which hinders their application in practice. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a knowledge distillation approach to extend an English language-vision model (teacher) into an equally effective multilingual and code-mixed model (student). Unlike the existing knowledge distillation methods, which only use the output from the last layer of the teacher network for distillation, our student model learns and imitates the teacher from multiple intermediate layers (language and vision encoders) with appropriately designed distillation objectives for incremental knowledge extraction. We also create the large-scale multilingual and code-mixed VQA dataset in eleven different language setups considering the multiple Indian and European languages. Experimental results and in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed VQA model over the pre-trained language-vision models on eleven diverse language setups.
This paper discusses the WMT 2021 terminology shared task from a meta'' perspective. We present the results of our experiments using the terminology dataset and the OpenNMT (Klein et al., 2017) and JoeyNMT (Kreutzer et al., 2019) toolkits for the lan
guage direction English to French. Our experiment 1 compares the predictions of the two toolkits. Experiment 2 uses OpenNMT to fine-tune the model. We report our results for the task with the evaluation script but mostly discuss the linguistic properties of the terminology dataset provided for the task. We provide evidence of the importance of text genres across scores, having replicated the evaluation scripts.
Persuasion dialogue system reflects the machine's ability to make strategic moves beyond verbal communication, and therefore differentiates itself from task-oriented or open-domain dialogues and has its own unique values. However, the repetition and
inconsistency problems still persist in dialogue response generation and could substantially impact user experience and impede the persuasion outcome. Besides, although reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have achieved big success in strategic tasks such as games, it requires a sophisticated user simulator to provide real-time feedback to the dialogue system, which limits the application of RL on persuasion dialogues. To address these issues towards a better persuasion dialogue system, we apply RL to refine a language model baseline without user simulators, and distill sentence-level information about repetition, inconsistency, and task relevance through rewards. Moreover, to better accomplish the persuasion task, the model learns from human demonstration to imitate human persuasion behavior and selects the most persuasive responses. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art dialogue models on both automatic metrics and human evaluation results on a donation persuasion task, and generates more diverse, consistent and persuasive conversations according to the user feedback. We will make the code and model publicly available.
In recent years, speech synthesis system can generate speech with high speech quality. However, multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) system still require large amount of speech data for each target speaker. In this study, we would like to construct a m
ulti-speaker TTS system by incorporating two sub modules into artificial neural network-based speech synthesis system to alleviate this problem. First module is to add speaker embedding into encoding module for generating speech while a large amount of the speech data from target speaker is not necessary. For speaker embedding method, in our study, two main speaker embedding methods, namely speaker verification embedding and voice conversion embedding, are compared to deciding which one is suitable for our personalized TTS system. Second, we substituted the conventional post-net module, which is adopted to enhance the output spectrum sequence, to further improving the speech quality of the generated speech utterance. Here, a post-filter network is used. Finally, experiment results showed that the speaker embedding is useful by adding it into encoding module and the resultant speech utterance indeed perceived as the target speaker. Also, the post-filter network not only improving the speech quality and also enhancing the speaker similarity of the generated speech utterances. The constructed TTS system can generate a speech utterance of the target speaker in fewer than 2 seconds. In the future, we would like to further investigate the controllability of the speaking rate or perceived emotion state of the generated speech.
