No Arabic abstract
Code understanding is an increasingly important application of Artificial Intelligence. A fundamental aspect of understanding code is understanding text about code, e.g., documentation and forum discussions. Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) are a popular approach for various NLP tasks, and there are now a variety of benchmarks, such as GLUE, to help improve the development of such models for natural language understanding. However, little is known about how well such models work on textual artifacts about code, and we are unaware of any systematic set of downstream tasks for such an evaluation. In this paper, we derive a set of benchmarks (BLANCA - Benchmarks for LANguage models on Coding Artifacts) that assess code understanding based on tasks such as predicting the best answer to a question in a forum post, finding related forum posts, or predicting classes related in a hierarchy from class documentation. We evaluate the performance of current state-of-the-art language models on these tasks and show that there is a significant improvement on each task from fine tuning. We also show that multi-task training over BLANCA tasks helps build better language models for code understanding.
In this work, we explore joint energy-based model (EBM) training during the finetuning of pretrained text encoders (e.g., Roberta) for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Our experiments show that EBM training can help the model reach a better calibration that is competitive to strong baselines, with little or no loss in accuracy. We discuss three variants of energy functions (namely scalar, hidden, and sharp-hidden) that can be defined on top of a text encoder, and compare them in experiments. Due to the discreteness of text data, we adopt noise contrastive estimation (NCE) to train the energy-based model. To make NCE training more effective, we train an auto-regressive noise model with the masked language model (MLM) objective.
Few-shot learning (FSL) is one of the key future steps in machine learning and has raised a lot of attention. However, in contrast to the rapid development in other domains, such as Computer Vision, the progress of FSL in Nature Language Processing (NLP) is much slower. One of the key reasons for this is the lacking of public benchmarks. NLP FSL researches always report new results on their own constructed few-shot datasets, which is pretty inefficient in results comparison and thus impedes cumulative progress. In this paper, we present FewJoint, a novel Few-Shot Learning benchmark for NLP. Different from most NLP FSL research that only focus on simple N-classification problems, our benchmark introduces few-shot joint dialogue language understanding, which additionally covers the structure prediction and multi-task reliance problems. This allows our benchmark to reflect the real-word NLP complexity beyond simple N-classification. Our benchmark is used in the few-shot learning contest of SMP2020-ECDT task-1. We also provide a compatible FSL platform to ease experiment set-up.
Contextualized entity representations learned by state-of-the-art transformer-based language models (TLMs) like BERT, GPT, T5, etc., leverage the attention mechanism to learn the data context from training data corpus. However, these models do not use the knowledge context. Knowledge context can be understood as semantics about entities and their relationship with neighboring entities in knowledge graphs. We propose a novel and effective technique to infuse knowledge context from multiple knowledge graphs for conceptual and ambiguous entities into TLMs during fine-tuning. It projects knowledge graph embeddings in the homogeneous vector-space, introduces new token-types for entities, aligns entity position ids, and a selective attention mechanism. We take BERT as a baseline model and implement the Knowledge-Infused BERT by infusing knowledge context from ConceptNet and WordNet, which significantly outperforms BERT and other recent knowledge-aware BERT variants like ERNIE, SenseBERT, and BERT_CS over eight different subtasks of GLUE benchmark. The KI-BERT-base model even significantly outperforms BERT-large for domain-specific tasks like SciTail and academic subsets of QQP, QNLI, and MNLI.
This paper presents the design of the machine learning architecture that underlies the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) a large scale Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables developers to extend the capabilities of Amazons virtual assistant, Alexa. At Amazon, the infrastructure powers over 25,000 skills deployed through the ASK, as well as AWSs Amazon Lex SLU Service. The ASK emphasizes flexibility, predictability and a rapid iteration cycle for third party developers. It imposes inductive biases that allow it to learn robust SLU models from extremely small and sparse datasets and, in doing so, removes significant barriers to entry for software developers and dialogue systems researchers.
Lack of training data presents a grand challenge to scaling out spoken language understanding (SLU) to low-resource languages. Although various data augmentation approaches have been proposed to synthesize training data in low-resource target languages, the augmented data sets are often noisy, and thus impede the performance of SLU models. In this paper we focus on mitigating noise in augmented data. We develop a denoising training approach. Multiple models are trained with data produced by various augmented methods. Those models provide supervision signals to each other. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing state of the art by 3.05 and 4.24 percentage points on two benchmark datasets, respectively. The code will be made open sourced on github.