There have been efforts in cross-lingual transfer learning for various tasks. We present an approach utilizing an interpolative data augmentation method, Mixup, to improve the generalizability of models for part-of-speech tagging trained on a source
language, improving its performance on unseen target languages. Through experiments on ten languages with diverse structures and language roots, we put forward its applicability for downstream zero-shot cross-lingual tasks.
After a neural sequence model encounters an unexpected token, can its behavior be predicted? We show that RNN and transformer language models exhibit structured, consistent generalization in out-of-distribution contexts. We begin by introducing two i
dealized models of generalization in next-word prediction: a lexical context model in which generalization is consistent with the last word observed, and a syntactic context model in which generalization is consistent with the global structure of the input. In experiments in English, Finnish, Mandarin, and random regular languages, we demonstrate that neural language models interpolate between these two forms of generalization: their predictions are well-approximated by a log-linear combination of lexical and syntactic predictive distributions. We then show that, in some languages, noise mediates the two forms of generalization: noise applied to input tokens encourages syntactic generalization, while noise in history representations encourages lexical generalization. Finally, we offer a preliminary theoretical explanation of these results by proving that the observed interpolation behavior is expected in log-linear models with a particular feature correlation structure. These results help explain the effectiveness of two popular regularization schemes and show that aspects of sequence model generalization can be understood and controlled.
Following the increasing performance of neural machine translation systems, the paradigm of using automatically translated data for cross-lingual adaptation is now studied in several applicative domains. The capacity to accurately project annotations
remains however an issue for sequence tagging tasks where annotation must be projected with correct spans. Additionally, when the task implies noisy user-generated text, the quality of translation and annotation projection can be affected. In this paper we propose to tackle multilingual sequence tagging with a new span alignment method and apply it to opinion target extraction from customer reviews. We show that provided suitable heuristics, translated data with automatic span-level annotation projection can yield improvements both for cross-lingual adaptation compared to zero-shot transfer, and data augmentation compared to a multilingual baseline.
Undirected neural sequence models have achieved performance competitive with the state-of-the-art directed sequence models that generate monotonically from left to right in machine translation tasks. In this work, we train a policy that learns the ge
neration order for a pre-trained, undirected translation model via reinforcement learning. We show that the translations decoded by our learned orders achieve higher BLEU scores than the outputs decoded from left to right or decoded by the learned order from Mansimov et al. (2019) on the WMT'14 German-English translation task. On examples with a maximum source and target length of 30 from De-En and WMT'16 English-Romanian tasks, our learned order outperforms all heuristic generation orders on three out of four language pairs. We next carefully analyze the learned order patterns via qualitative and quantitative analysis. We show that our policy generally follows an outer-to-inner order, predicting the left-most and right-most positions first, and then moving toward the middle while skipping less important words at the beginning. Furthermore, the policy usually predicts positions for a single syntactic constituent structure in consecutive steps. We believe our findings could provide more insights on the mechanism of undirected generation models and encourage further research in this direction.
Incorporating lexical knowledge into deep learning models has been proved to be very effective for sequence labeling tasks. However, previous works commonly have difficulty dealing with large-scale dynamic lexicons which often cause excessive matchin
g noise and problems of frequent updates. In this paper, we propose DyLex, a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks. Instead of leveraging embeddings of words in the lexicon as in conventional methods, we adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation while updating the lexicon. Moreover, we employ an effective supervised lexical knowledge denoising method to smooth out matching noise. Finally, we introduce a col-wise attention based knowledge fusion mechanism to guarantee the pluggability of the proposed framework. Experiments on ten datasets of three tasks show that the proposed framework achieves new SOTA, even with very large scale lexicons.
Sequence labeling aims to predict a fine-grained sequence of labels for the text. However, such formulation hinders the effectiveness of supervised methods due to the lack of token-level annotated data. This is exacerbated when we meet a diverse rang
e of languages. In this work, we explore multilingual sequence labeling with minimal supervision using a single unified model for multiple languages. Specifically, we propose a Meta Teacher-Student (MetaTS) Network, a novel meta learning method to alleviate data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. Prior teacher-student frameworks of self-training rely on rigid teaching strategies, which may hardly produce high-quality pseudo-labels for consecutive and interdependent tokens. On the contrary, MetaTS allows the teacher to dynamically adapt its pseudo-annotation strategies by the student's feedback on the generated pseudo-labeled data of each language and thus mitigate error propagation from noisy pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on both public and real-world multilingual sequence labeling datasets empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaTS.
The task of converting a nonstandard text to a standard and readable text is known as lexical normalization. Almost all the Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications require the text data in normalized form to build quality task-specific models.
Hence, lexical normalization has been proven to improve the performance of numerous natural language processing tasks on social media. This study aims to solve the problem of Lexical Normalization by formulating the Lexical Normalization task as a Sequence Labeling problem. This paper proposes a sequence labeling approach to solve the problem of Lexical Normalization in combination with the word-alignment technique. The goal is to use a single model to normalize text in various languages namely Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, Indonesian-English, German, Italian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, and Turkish-German. This is a shared task in 2021 The 7th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)'' in which the participants are expected to create a system/model that performs lexical normalization, which is the translation of non-canonical texts into their canonical equivalents, comprising data from over 12 languages. The proposed single multilingual model achieves an overall ERR score of 43.75 on intrinsic evaluation and an overall Labeled Attachment Score (LAS) score of 63.12 on extrinsic evaluation. Further, the proposed method achieves the highest Error Reduction Rate (ERR) score of 61.33 among the participants in the shared task. This study highlights the effects of using additional training data to get better results as well as using a pre-trained Language model trained on multiple languages rather than only on one language.
Different linearizations have been proposed to cast dependency parsing as sequence labeling and solve the task as: (i) a head selection problem, (ii) finding a representation of the token arcs as bracket strings, or (iii) associating partial transiti
on sequences of a transition-based parser to words. Yet, there is little understanding about how these linearizations behave in low-resource setups. Here, we first study their data efficiency, simulating data-restricted setups from a diverse set of rich-resource treebanks. Second, we test whether such differences manifest in truly low-resource setups. The results show that head selection encodings are more data-efficient and perform better in an ideal (gold) framework, but that such advantage greatly vanishes in favour of bracketing formats when the running setup resembles a real-world low-resource configuration.
Scripts capture commonsense knowledge about everyday activities and their participants. Script knowledge proved useful in a number of NLP tasks, such as referent prediction, discourse classification, and story generation. A crucial step for the explo
itation of script knowledge is script parsing, the task of tagging a text with the events and participants from a certain activity. This task is challenging: it requires information both about the ways events and participants are usually uttered in surface language as well as the order in which they occur in the world. We show how to do accurate script parsing with a hierarchical sequence model and transfer learning. Our model improves the state of the art of event parsing by over 16 points F-score and, for the first time, accurately tags script participants.
We investigate how sentence-level transformers can be modified into effective sequence labelers at the token level without any direct supervision. Existing approaches to zero-shot sequence labeling do not perform well when applied on transformer-base
d architectures. As transformers contain multiple layers of multi-head self-attention, information in the sentence gets distributed between many tokens, negatively affecting zero-shot token-level performance. We find that a soft attention module which explicitly encourages sharpness of attention weights can significantly outperform existing methods.
