This paper presents BiPaR, a bilingual parallel novel-style machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset, developed to support multilingual and cross-lingual reading comprehension. The biggest difference between BiPaR and existing reading comprehension datasets is that each triple (Passage, Question, Answer) in BiPaR is written parallelly in two languages. We collect 3,667 bilingual parallel paragraphs from Chinese and English novels, from which we construct 14,668 parallel question-answer pairs via crowdsourced workers following a strict quality control procedure. We analyze BiPaR in depth and find that BiPaR offers good diversification in prefixes of questions, answer types and relationships between questions and passages. We also observe that answering questions of novels requires reading comprehension skills of coreference resolution, multi-sentence reasoning, and understanding of implicit causality, etc. With BiPaR, we build monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual MRC baseline models. Even for the relatively simple monolingual MRC on this dataset, experiments show that a strong BERT baseline is over 30 points behind human in terms of both EM and F1 score, indicating that BiPaR provides a challenging testbed for monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual MRC on novels. The dataset is available at https://multinlp.github.io/BiPaR/.

Google Translate is one of the popular and highly useful product of Google. It is based on Artificial Intelligence Algorithm. Google is constantly changing its translation application using artificial intelligence (AI). It is using Neural Machine Translation into Google Translate, which has radically improved results. AI team of the company calls it the Google Neural Machine Translation System (GNMT).

Statements on social media can be analysed to identify individuals who are experiencing red flag medical symptoms, allowing early detection of the spread of disease such as influenza. Since disease does not respect cultural borders and may spread between populations speaking different languages, we would like to build multilingual models. However, the data required to train models for every language may be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain, particularly for low-resource languages. Taking Japanese as our target language, we explore methods by which data in one language might be used to build models for a different language. We evaluate strategies of training on machine translated data and of zero-shot transfer through the use of multilingual models. We find that the choice of source language impacts the performance, with Chinese-Japanese being a better language pair than English-Japanese. Training on machine translated data shows promise, especially when used in conjunction with a small amount of target language data.

The Japanese language is wonderfully unique, complex & can be one of the hardest languages to learn. So how well does machine translation handle the Japanese language? Have a read of our latest blog to find out.

Mozilla is hiring a Machine Learning Intern for our Emerging Technologies team. Emerging Technologies is Mozilla's early research and development organization focused on the areas of voice assistants, speech and language, and mixed reality. Our headquarters are based in the Bay Area, but this internship opportunity is at our Berlin Office. We are engineers, designers, makers, and problem solvers. We work in the fishbowl known as the open source community, with a clear focus on making the Web better.

Despite increased interest in and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the enterprise, 85% of AI projects ultimately fail to deliver on their intended promises to business, according to a Thursday report from Pactera Technologies. A major source of AI challenges is found in senior leadership, the report, titled Artificial Intelligence Localization, Winners, Losers, Heroes, Spectators, and You, found. Some 77% of those surveyed said they face barriers to entry from senior management not seeing value or wanting to make the investment in the emerging technology. These findings are in line with those from a recent Dimensional Research report, which found that eight out of 10 organizations engaged with AI and machine learning said those projects had stalled, and 96% said they have run into problems with data quality, data labelling, and building model confidence. Pactera presented the report to a group of tech industry leaders including those from Facebook, Adobe, Amazon, and Microsoft at a recent private event in Seattle.

Machine learning is experiencing an explosion of software and hardware solutions, and needs industry-standard performance benchmarks to drive design and enable competitive evaluation. However, machine learning training presents a number of unique challenges to benchmarking that do not exist in other domains: (1) some optimizations that improve training throughput actually increase time to solution, (2) training is stochastic and time to solution has high variance, and (3) the software and hardware systems are so diverse that they cannot be fairly benchmarked with the same binary, code, or even hyperparameters. We present MLPerf, a machine learning benchmark that overcomes these challenges. We quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of MLPerf in driving community progress on performance and scalability across two rounds of results from multiple vendors.

Neural sequence-to-sequence models, particularly the Transformer, are the state of the art in machine translation. Y et these neural networks are very sensitive to architecture and hyper-parameter settings. Optimizing these settings by grid or random search is computationally expensive because it requires many training runs. In this paper, we incorporate architecture search into a single training run through auto-sizing, which uses regularization to delete neurons in a network over the course of training. On very low-resource language pairs, we show that auto-sizing can improve BLEU scores by up to 3.9 points while removing one-third of the parameters from the model.

A BSTRACT Distributed optimization is essential for training large models on large datasets. Multiple approaches have been proposed to reduce the communication overhead in distributed training, such as synchronizing only after performing multiple local SGD steps, and decentralized methods ( e.g., using gossip algorithms) to decouple communications among workers. Although these methods run faster than A LLR EDUCEbased methods, which use blocking communication before every update, the resulting models may be less accurate after the same number of updates. Inspired by the BMUF method of Chen & Huo (2016), we propose a slow momentum (S LOWM O) framework, where workers periodically synchronize and perform a momentum update, after multiple iterations of a base optimization algorithm. Experiments on image classification and machine translation tasks demonstrate that S LOWM O consistently yields improvements in optimization and generalization performance relative to the base optimizer, even when the additional overhead is amortized over many updates so that the S LOWM O runtime is on par with that of the base optimizer. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees showing that S LOWM O converges to a stationary point of smooth non-convex losses. Since BMUF is a particular instance of the S LOWM O framework, our results also correspond to the first theoretical convergence guarantees for BMUF. 1 I NTRODUCTION Distributed optimization (Chen et al., 2016; Goyal et al., 2017) is essential for training large models on large datasets (Radford et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2019; Mahajan et al., 2018b). Currently, the most widely-used approaches have workers compute small mini-batch gradients locally, in parallel, and then aggregate these using a blocking communication primitive, A LLR EDUCE, before taking an optimizer step. Communication overhead is a major issue limiting the scaling of this approach, since A LLR EDUCE must complete before every step and blocking communications are sensitive to stragglers (Dutta et al., 2018; Ferdinand et al., 2019). Multiple complementary approaches have recently been investigated to reduce or hide communication overhead. Decentralized training (Jiang et al., 2017; Lian et al., 2017; 2018; Assran et al., 2019) reduces idling due to blocking and stragglers by employing approximate gradient aggregation ( e.g., via gossip or distributed averaging). Approaches such as Local SGD reduce the frequency of communication by having workers perform multiple updates between each round of communication (McDonald et al., 2010; McMahan et al., 2017; Zhou & Cong, 2018; Stich, 2019; Y u et al., 2019b). It is also possible to combine decentralized algorithms with Local SGD (Wang & Joshi, Work performed while doing an internship at Facebook AI Research. 1 arXiv:1910.00643v1

Self-training is one of the earliest and simplest semi-supervised methods. The key idea is to augment the original labeled dataset with unlabeled data paired with the model's prediction (i.e. pseudo-parallel data). While self-training has been extensively studied on classification problems, in complex sequence generation tasks (e.g. machine translation) it is still unclear how self-training works due to the compositionality of the target space. In this work, we first empirically show that self-training is able to decently improve the supervised baseline on neural sequence generation tasks. Through careful examination of the performance gains, we find that the perturbation on the hidden states (i.e. dropout) is critical for self-training to benefit from the pseudo-parallel data, which acts as a regularizer and forces the model to yield close predictions for similar unlabeled inputs. Such effect helps the model correct some incorrect predictions on unlabeled data. To further encourage this mechanism, we propose to inject noise to the input space, resulting in a "noisy" version of self-training. Empirical study on standard machine translation and text summarization benchmarks shows that noisy self-training is able to effectively utilize unlabeled data and improve the performance of the supervised baseline by a large margin.