No Arabic abstract
In Automatic Speech Recognition it is still challenging to learn useful intermediate representations when using high-level (or abstract) target units such as words. For that reason, character or phoneme based systems tend to outperform word-based systems when just few hundreds of hours of training data are being used. In this paper, we first show how hierarchical multi-task training can encourage the formation of useful intermediate representations. We achieve this by performing Connectionist Temporal Classification at different levels of the network with targets of different granularity. Our model thus performs predictions in multiple scales for the same input. On the standard 300h Switchboard training setup, our hierarchical multi-task architecture exhibits improvements over single-task architectures with the same number of parameters. Our model obtains 14.0% Word Error Rate on the Eval2000 Switchboard subset without any decoder or language model, outperforming the current state-of-the-art on acoustic-to-word models.
Recently, there has been an increasing interest in end-to-end speech recognition that directly transcribes speech to text without any predefined alignments. One approach is the attention-based encoder-decoder framework that learns a mapping between variable-length input and output sequences in one step using a purely data-driven method. The attention model has often been shown to improve the performance over another end-to-end approach, the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), mainly because it explicitly uses the history of the target character without any conditional independence assumptions. However, we observed that the performance of the attention has shown poor results in noisy condition and is hard to learn in the initial training stage with long input sequences. This is because the attention model is too flexible to predict proper alignments in such cases due to the lack of left-to-right constraints as used in CTC. This paper presents a novel method for end-to-end speech recognition to improve robustness and achieve fast convergence by using a joint CTC-attention model within the multi-task learning framework, thereby mitigating the alignment issue. An experiment on the WSJ and CHiME-4 tasks demonstrates its advantages over both the CTC and attention-based encoder-decoder baselines, showing 5.4-14.6% relative improvements in Character Error Rate (CER).
We present methods for multi-task learning that take advantage of natural groupings of related tasks. Task groups may be defined along known properties of the tasks, such as task domain or language. Such task groups represent supervised information at the inter-task level and can be encoded into the model. We investigate two variants of neural network architectures that accomplish this, learning different feature spaces at the levels of individual tasks, task groups, as well as the universe of all tasks: (1) parallel architectures encode each input simultaneously into feature spaces at different levels; (2) serial architectures encode each input successively into feature spaces at different levels in the task hierarchy. We demonstrate the methods on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, where a grouping of tasks into different task domains leads to improved performance on ATIS, Snips, and a large inhouse dataset.
This paper explores the task of answer-aware questions generation. Based on the attention-based pointer generator model, we propose to incorporate an auxiliary task of language modeling to help question generation in a hierarchical multi-task learning structure. Our joint-learning model enables the encoder to learn a better representation of the input sequence, which will guide the decoder to generate more coherent and fluent questions. On both SQuAD and MARCO datasets, our multi-task learning model boosts the performance, achieving state-of-the-art results. Moreover, human evaluation further proves the high quality of our generated questions.
Sentiment analysis is directly affected by compositional phenomena in language that act on the prior polarity of the words and phrases found in the text. Negation is the most prevalent of these phenomena and in order to correctly predict sentiment, a classifier must be able to identify negation and disentangle the effect that its scope has on the final polarity of a text. This paper proposes a multi-task approach to explicitly incorporate information about negation in sentiment analysis, which we show outperforms learning negation implicitly in a data-driven manner. We describe our approach, a cascading neural architecture with selective sharing of LSTM layers, and show that explicitly training the model with negation as an auxiliary task helps improve the main task of sentiment analysis. The effect is demonstrated across several different standard English-language data sets for both tasks and we analyze several aspects of our system related to its performance, varying types and amounts of input data and different multi-task setups.
Recently, there have been significant advances in neural methods for tackling knowledge-intensive tasks such as open domain question answering (QA). These advances are fueled by combining large pre-trained language models with learnable retrieval of documents. Majority of these models use separate encoders for learning query representation, passage representation for the retriever and an additional encoder for the downstream task. Using separate encoders for each stage/task occupies a lot of memory and makes it difficult to scale to a large number of tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Retrieval Optimized Multi-task (ROM) framework for jointly training self-supervised tasks, knowledge retrieval, and extractive question answering. Our ROM approach presents a unified and generalizable framework that enables scaling efficiently to multiple tasks, varying levels of supervision, and optimization choices such as different learning schedules without changing the model architecture. It also provides the flexibility of changing the encoders without changing the architecture of the system. Using our framework, we achieve comparable or better performance than recent methods on QA, while drastically reducing the number of parameters.