No Arabic abstract
Signed languages are the primary means of communication for many deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Since signed languages exhibit all the fundamental linguistic properties of natural language, we believe that tools and theories of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are crucial towards its modeling. However, existing research in Sign Language Processing (SLP) seldom attempt to explore and leverage the linguistic organization of signed languages. This position paper calls on the NLP community to include signed languages as a research area with high social and scientific impact. We first discuss the linguistic properties of signed languages to consider during their modeling. Then, we review the limitations of current SLP models and identify the open challenges to extend NLP to signed languages. Finally, we urge (1) the adoption of an efficient tokenization method; (2) the development of linguistically-informed models; (3) the collection of real-world signed language data; (4) the inclusion of local signed language communities as an active and leading voice in the direction of research.
Neural networks models for NLP are typically implemented without the explicit encoding of language rules and yet they are able to break one performance record after another. This has generated a lot of research interest in interpreting the representations learned by these networks. We propose here a novel interpretation approach that relies on the only processing system we have that does understand language: the human brain. We use brain imaging recordings of subjects reading complex natural text to interpret word and sequence embeddings from 4 recent NLP models - ELMo, USE, BERT and Transformer-XL. We study how their representations differ across layer depth, context length, and attention type. Our results reveal differences in the context-related representations across these models. Further, in the transformer models, we find an interaction between layer depth and context length, and between layer depth and attention type. We finally hypothesize that altering BERT to better align with brain recordings would enable it to also better understand language. Probing the altered BERT using syntactic NLP tasks reveals that the model with increased brain-alignment outperforms the original model. Cognitive neuroscientists have already begun using NLP networks to study the brain, and this work closes the loop to allow the interaction between NLP and cognitive neuroscience to be a true cross-pollination.
Reliable uncertainty quantification is a first step towards building explainable, transparent, and accountable artificial intelligent systems. Recent progress in Bayesian deep learning has made such quantification realizable. In this paper, we propose novel methods to study the benefits of characterizing model and data uncertainties for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. With empirical experiments on sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and language modeling using convolutional and recurrent neural network models, we show that explicitly modeling uncertainties is not only necessary to measure output confidence levels, but also useful at enhancing model performances in various NLP tasks.
Increasing concerns and regulations about data privacy, necessitate the study of privacy-preserving methods for natural language processing (NLP) applications. Federated learning (FL) provides promising methods for a large number of clients (i.e., personal devices or organizations) to collaboratively learn a shared global model to benefit all clients, while allowing users to keep their data locally. To facilitate FL research in NLP, we present the FedNLP, a research platform for federated learning in NLP. FedNLP supports various popular task formulations in NLP such as text classification, sequence tagging, question answering, seq2seq generation, and language modeling. We also implement an interface between Transformer language models (e.g., BERT) and FL methods (e.g., FedAvg, FedOpt, etc.) for distributed training. The evaluation protocol of this interface supports a comprehensive collection of non-IID partitioning strategies. Our preliminary experiments with FedNLP reveal that there exists a large performance gap between learning on decentralized and centralized datasets -- opening intriguing and exciting future research directions aimed at developing FL methods suited to NLP tasks.
Federated Learning aims to learn machine learning models from multiple decentralized edge devices (e.g. mobiles) or servers without sacrificing local data privacy. Recent Natural Language Processing techniques rely on deep learning and large pre-trained language models. However, both big deep neural and language models are trained with huge amounts of data which often lies on the server side. Since text data is widely originated from end users, in this work, we look into recent NLP models and techniques which use federated learning as the learning framework. Our survey discusses major challenges in federated natural language processing, including the algorithm challenges, system challenges as well as the privacy issues. We also provide a critical review of the existing Federated NLP evaluation methods and tools. Finally, we highlight the current research gaps and future directions.
Many search systems work with large amounts of natural language data, e.g., search queries, user profiles and documents, where deep learning based natural language processing techniques (deep NLP) can be of great help. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study of applying deep NLP techniques to five representative tasks in search engines. Through the model design and experiments of the five tasks, readers can find answers to three important questions: (1) When is deep NLP helpful/not helpful in search systems? (2) How to address latency challenges? (3) How to ensure model robustness? This work builds on existing efforts of LinkedIn search, and is tested at scale on a commercial search engine. We believe our experiences can provide useful insights for the industry and research communities.