No Arabic abstract
LSTMs and other RNN variants have shown strong performance on character-level language modeling. These models are typically trained using truncated backpropagation through time, and it is common to assume that their success stems from their ability to remember long-term contexts. In this paper, we show that a deep (64-layer) transformer model with fixed context outperforms RNN variants by a large margin, achieving state of the art on two popular benchmarks: 1.13 bits per character on text8 and 1.06 on enwik8. To get good results at this depth, we show that it is important to add auxiliary losses, both at intermediate network layers and intermediate sequence positions.
We explore the suitability of self-attention models for character-level neural machine translation. We test the standard transformer model, as well as a novel variant in which the encoder block combines information from nearby characters using convolutions. We perform extensive experiments on WMT and UN datasets, testing both bilingual and multilingual translation to English using up to three input languages (French, Spanish, and Chinese). Our transformer variant consistently outperforms the standard transformer at the character-level and converges faster while learning more robust character-level alignments.
Character-level models have been used extensively in recent years in NLP tasks as both supplements and replacements for closed-vocabulary token-level word representations. In one popular architecture, character-level LSTMs are used to feed token representations into a sequence tagger predicting token-level annotations such as part-of-speech (POS) tags. In this work, we examine the behavior of POS taggers across languages from the perspective of individual hidden units within the character LSTM. We aggregate the behavior of these units into language-level metrics which quantify the challenges that taggers face on languages with different morphological properties, and identify links between synthesis and affixation preference and emergent behavior of the hidden tagger layer. In a comparative experiment, we show how modifying the balance between forward and backward hidden units affects model arrangement and performance in these types of languages.
Chest radiography is a general method for diagnosing a patients condition and identifying important information; therefore, radiography is used extensively in routine medical practice in various situations, such as emergency medical care and medical checkup. However, a high level of expertise is required to interpret chest radiographs. Thus, medical specialists spend considerable time in diagnosing such huge numbers of radiographs. In order to solve these problems, methods for generating findings have been proposed. However, the study of generating chest radiograph findings has primarily focused on the English language, and to the best of our knowledge, no studies have studied Japanese data on this subject. There are two challenges involved in generating findings in the Japanese language. The first challenge is that word splitting is difficult because the boundaries of Japanese word are not clear. The second challenge is that there are numerous orthographic variants. For deal with these two challenges, we proposed an end-to-end model that generates Japanese findings at the character-level from chest radiographs. In addition, we introduced the attention mechanism to improve not only the accuracy, but also the interpretation ability of the results. We evaluated the proposed method using a public dataset with Japanese findings. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed using the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy score. And, we were confirmed from the generated findings that the proposed method was able to consider the orthographic variants. Furthermore, we confirmed via visual inspection that the attention mechanism captures the features and positional information of radiographs.
We model coherent conversation continuation via RNN-based dialogue models equipped with a dynamic attention mechanism. Our attention-RNN language model dynamically increases the scope of attention on the history as the conversation continues, as opposed to standard attention (or alignment) models with a fixed input scope in a sequence-to-sequence model. This allows each generated word to be associated with the most relevant words in its corresponding conversation history. We evaluate the model on two popular dialogue datasets, the open-domain MovieTriples dataset and the closed-domain Ubuntu Troubleshoot dataset, and achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art and baselines on several metrics, including complementary diversity-based metrics, human evaluation, and qualitative visualizations. We also show that a vanilla RNN with dynamic attention outperforms more complex memory models (e.g., LSTM and GRU) by allowing for flexible, long-distance memory. We promote further coherence via topic modeling-based reranking.
Improving the efficiency of Transformer-based language pre-training is an important task in NLP, especially for the self-attention module, which is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective solution, called emph{LazyFormer}, which computes the self-attention distribution infrequently. LazyFormer composes of multiple lazy blocks, each of which contains multiple Transformer layers. In each lazy block, the self-attention distribution is only computed once in the first layer and then is reused in all upper layers. In this way, the cost of computation could be largely saved. We also provide several training tricks for LazyFormer. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.