Large-scale models for learning fixed-dimensional cross-lingual sentence representations like LASER (Artetxe and Schwenk, 2019b) lead to significant improvement in performance on downstream tasks. However, further increases and modifications based on
such large-scale models are usually impractical due to memory limitations. In this work, we introduce a lightweight dual-transformer architecture with just 2 layers for generating memory-efficient cross-lingual sentence representations. We explore different training tasks and observe that current cross-lingual training tasks leave a lot to be desired for this shallow architecture. To ameliorate this, we propose a novel cross-lingual language model, which combines the existing single-word masked language model with the newly proposed cross-lingual token-level reconstruction task. We further augment the training task by the introduction of two computationally-lite sentence-level contrastive learning tasks to enhance the alignment of cross-lingual sentence representation space, which compensates for the learning bottleneck of the lightweight transformer for generative tasks. Our comparisons with competing models on cross-lingual sentence retrieval and multilingual document classification confirm the effectiveness of the newly proposed training tasks for a shallow model.
Multimodal neural machine translation (NMT) has become an increasingly important area of research over the years because additional modalities, such as image data, can provide more context to textual data. Furthermore, the viability of training multi
modal NMT models without a large parallel corpus continues to be investigated due to low availability of parallel sentences with images, particularly for English-Japanese data. However, this void can be filled with comparable sentences that contain bilingual terms and parallel phrases, which are naturally created through media such as social network posts and e-commerce product descriptions. In this paper, we propose a new multimodal English-Japanese corpus with comparable sentences that are compiled from existing image captioning datasets. In addition, we supplement our comparable sentences with a smaller parallel corpus for validation and test purposes. To test the performance of this comparable sentence translation scenario, we train several baseline NMT models with our comparable corpus and evaluate their English-Japanese translation performance. Due to low translation scores in our baseline experiments, we believe that current multimodal NMT models are not designed to effectively utilize comparable sentence data. Despite this, we hope for our corpus to be used to further research into multimodal NMT with comparable sentences.
Lexically cohesive translations preserve consistency in word choices in document-level translation. We employ a copy mechanism into a context-aware neural machine translation model to allow copying words from previous translation outputs. Different f
rom previous context-aware neural machine translation models that handle all the discourse phenomena implicitly, our model explicitly addresses the lexical cohesion problem by boosting the probabilities to output words consistently. We conduct experiments on Japanese to English translation using an evaluation dataset for discourse translation. The results showed that the proposed model significantly improved lexical cohesion compared to previous context-aware models.
A visual relationship denotes a relationship between two objects in an image, which can be represented as a triplet of (subject; predicate; object). Visual relationship detection is crucial for scene understanding in images. Existing visual relations
hip detection datasets only contain true relationships that correctly describe the content in an image. However, distinguishing false visual relationships from true ones is also crucial for image understanding and grounded natural language processing. In this paper, we construct a visual relationship authenticity dataset, where both true and false relationships among all objects appeared in the captions in the Flickr30k entities image caption dataset are annotated. The dataset is available at https://github.com/codecreator2053/VR_ClassifiedDataset. We hope that this dataset can promote the study on both vision and language understanding.
We propose a novel video understanding task by fusing knowledge-based and video question answering. First, we introduce KnowIT VQA, a video dataset with 24,282 human-generated question-answer pairs about a popular sitcom. The dataset combines visual,
textual and temporal coherence reasoning together with knowledge-based questions, which need of the experience obtained from the viewing of the series to be answered. Second, we propose a video understanding model by combining the visual and textual video content with specific knowledge about the show. Our main findings are: (i) the incorporation of knowledge produces outstanding improvements for VQA in video, and (ii) the performance on KnowIT VQA still lags well behind human accuracy, indicating its usefulness for studying current video modelling limitations.
We propose a novel video understanding task by fusing knowledge-based and video question answering. First, we introduce KnowIT VQA, a video dataset with 24,282 human-generated question-answer pairs about a popular sitcom. The dataset combines visual,
textual and temporal coherence reasoning together with knowledge-based questions, which need of the experience obtained from the viewing of the series to be answered. Second, we propose a video understanding model by combining the visual and textual video content with specific knowledge about the show. Our main findings are: (i) the incorporation of knowledge produces outstanding improvements for VQA in video, and (ii) the performance on KnowIT VQA still lags well behind human accuracy, indicating its usefulness for studying current video modelling limitations.
The word order between source and target languages significantly influences the translation quality in machine translation. Preordering can effectively address this problem. Previous preordering methods require a manual feature design, making languag
e dependent design costly. In this paper, we propose a preordering method with a recursive neural network that learns features from raw inputs. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable gain in translation quality to the state-of-the-art method but without a manual feature design.
