No Arabic abstract
This paper describes our submission of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Sentence Level Direct Assessment, Quality Estimation (QE). In this study, we empirically reveal the textit{mismatching issue} when directly adopting BERTScore to QE. Specifically, there exist lots of mismatching errors between the source sentence and translated candidate sentence with token pairwise similarity. In response to this issue, we propose to expose explicit cross-lingual patterns, textit{e.g.} word alignments and generation score, to our proposed zero-shot models. Experiments show that our proposed QE model with explicit cross-lingual patterns could alleviate the mismatching issue, thereby improving the performance. Encouragingly, our zero-shot QE method could achieve comparable performance with supervised QE method, and even outperforms the supervised counterpart on 2 out of 6 directions. We expect our work could shed light on the zero-shot QE model improvement.
Transferring representations from large supervised tasks to downstream tasks has shown promising results in AI fields such as Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP). In parallel, the recent progress in Machine Translation (MT) has enabled one to train multilingual Neural MT (NMT) systems that can translate between multiple languages and are also capable of performing zero-shot translation. However, little attention has been paid to leveraging representations learned by a multilingual NMT system to enable zero-shot multilinguality in other NLP tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple framework, a multilingual Encoder-Classifier, for cross-lingual transfer learning by reusing the encoder from a multilingual NMT system and stitching it with a task-specific classifier component. Our proposed model achieves significant improvements in the English setup on three benchmark tasks - Amazon Reviews, SST and SNLI. Further, our system can perform classification in a new language for which no classification data was seen during training, showing that zero-shot classification is possible and remarkably competitive. In order to understand the underlying factors contributing to this finding, we conducted a series of analyses on the effect of the shared vocabulary, the training data type for NMT, classifier complexity, encoder representation power, and model generalization on zero-shot performance. Our results provide strong evidence that the representations learned from multilingual NMT systems are widely applicable across languages and tasks.
Previous works mainly focus on improving cross-lingual transfer for NLU tasks with multilingual pretrained encoder (MPE), or improving the translation performance on NMT task with BERT. However, how to improve the cross-lingual transfer of NMT model with multilingual pretrained encoder is under-explored. In this paper, we focus on a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer task in NMT. In this task, the NMT model is trained with one parallel dataset and an off-the-shelf MPE, then is directly tested on zero-shot language pairs. We propose SixT, a simple yet effective model for this task. The SixT model leverages the MPE with a two-stage training schedule and gets further improvement with a position disentangled encoder and a capacity-enhanced decoder. The extensive experiments prove that SixT significantly improves the translation quality of the unseen languages. With much less computation cost and training data, our model achieves better performance on many-to-English testsets than CRISS and m2m-100, two strong multilingual NMT baselines.
Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual applications, as most languages in the world are under-resourced. Here, we consider the setting of training models on multiple different languages at the same time, when little or no data is available for languages other than English. We show that this challenging setup can be approached using meta-learning, where, in addition to training a source language model, another model learns to select which training instances are the most beneficial to the first. We experiment using standard supervised, zero-shot cross-lingual, as well as few-shot cross-lingual settings for different natural language understanding tasks (natural language inference, question answering). Our extensive experimental setup demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of meta-learning for a total of 15 languages. We improve upon the state-of-the-art for zero-shot and few-shot NLI (on MultiNLI and XNLI) and QA (on the MLQA dataset). A comprehensive error analysis indicates that the correlation of typological features between languages can partly explain when parameter sharing learned via meta-learning is beneficial.
Transfer learning between different language pairs has shown its effectiveness for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in low-resource scenario. However, existing transfer methods involving a common target language are far from success in the extreme scenario of zero-shot translation, due to the language space mismatch problem between transferor (the parent model) and transferee (the child model) on the source side. To address this challenge, we propose an effective transfer learning approach based on cross-lingual pre-training. Our key idea is to make all source languages share the same feature space and thus enable a smooth transition for zero-shot translation. To this end, we introduce one monolingual pre-training method and two bilingual pre-training methods to obtain a universal encoder for different languages. Once the universal encoder is constructed, the parent model built on such encoder is trained with large-scale annotated data and then directly applied in zero-shot translation scenario. Experiments on two public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms strong pivot-based baseline and various multilingual NMT approaches.
Cross-language entity linking grounds mentions in multiple languages to a single-language knowledge base. We propose a neural ranking architecture for this task that uses multilingual BERT representations of the mention and the context in a neural network. We find that the multilingual ability of BERT leads to robust performance in monolingual and multilingual settings. Furthermore, we explore zero-shot language transfer and find surprisingly robust performance. We investigate the zero-shot degradation and find that it can be partially mitigated by a proposed auxiliary training objective, but that the remaining error can best be attributed to domain shift rather than language transfer.