Machine Translation
Neural Machine Translation: A Review
The field of machine translation (MT), the automatic translation of written text from one natural language into another, has experienced a major paradigm shift in recent years. Statistical MT, which mainly relies on various count-based models and which used to dominate MT research for decades, has largely been superseded by neural machine translation (NMT), which tackles translation with a single neural network. In this work we will trace back the origins of modern NMT architectures to word and sentence embeddings and earlier examples of the encoder-decoder network family. We will conclude with a short survey of more recent trends in the field.
Autoregressive Entity Retrieval
De Cao, Nicola, Izacard, Gautier, Riedel, Sebastian, Petroni, Fabio
Entities are at the center of how we represent and aggregate knowledge. For instance, Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are structured by entities (e.g., one per article). The ability to retrieve such entities given a query is fundamental for knowledge-intensive tasks such as entity linking and open-domain question answering. One way to understand current approaches is as classifiers among atomic labels, one for each entity. Their weight vectors are dense entity representations produced by encoding entity information such as descriptions. This approach leads to several shortcomings: i) context and entity affinity is mainly captured through a vector dot product, potentially missing fine-grained interactions between the two; ii) a large memory footprint is needed to store dense representations when considering large entity sets; iii) an appropriately hard set of negative data has to be subsampled at training time. We propose GENRE, the first system that retrieves entities by generating their unique names, left to right, token-by-token in an autoregressive fashion, and conditioned on the context. This enables to mitigate the aforementioned technical issues: i) the autoregressive formulation allows us to directly capture relations between context and entity name, effectively cross encoding both; ii) the memory footprint is greatly reduced because the parameters of our encoder-decoder architecture scale with vocabulary size, not entity count; iii) the exact softmax loss can be efficiently computed without the need to subsample negative data. We show the efficacy of the approach with more than 20 datasets on entity disambiguation, end-to-end entity linking and document retrieval tasks, achieving new SOTA, or very competitive results while using a tiny fraction of the memory of competing systems. Finally, we demonstrate that new entities can be added by simply specifying their unambiguous name.
A survey on natural language processing (nlp) and applications in insurance
Ly, Antoine, Uthayasooriyar, Benno, Wang, Tingting
Text is the most widely used means of communication today. This data is abundant but nevertheless complex to exploit within algorithms. For years, scientists have been trying to implement different techniques that enable computers to replicate some mechanisms of human reading. During the past five years, research disrupted the capacity of the algorithms to unleash the value of text data. It brings today, many opportunities for the insurance industry.Understanding those methods and, above all, knowing how to apply them is a major challenge and key to unleash the value of text data that have been stored for many years. Processing language with computer brings many new opportunities especially in the insurance sector where reports are central in the information used by insurers. SCOR's Data Analytics team has been working on the implementation of innovative tools or products that enable the use of the latest research on text analysis. Understanding text mining techniques in insurance enhances the monitoring of the underwritten risks and many processes that finally benefit policyholders.This article proposes to explain opportunities that Natural Language Processing (NLP) are providing to insurance. It details different methods used today in practice traces back the story of them. We also illustrate the implementation of certain methods using open source libraries and python codes that we have developed to facilitate the use of these techniques.After giving a general overview on the evolution of text mining during the past few years,we share about how to conduct a full study with text mining and share some examples to serve those models into insurance products or services. Finally, we explained in more details every step that composes a Natural Language Processing study to ensure the reader can have a deep understanding on the implementation.
Does Machine Translation Affect International Trade? Evidence from a Large Digital Platform
Artificial intelligence (AI) is surpassing human performance in a growing number of domains. However, there is limited evidence of its economic effects. Using data from a digital platform, we study a key application of AI: machine translation. We find that the introduction of a new machine translation system has significantly increased international trade on this platform, increasing exports by 10.9%. Furthermore, heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with a substantial reduction in translation costs.
Hierarchical Pre-training for Sequence Labelling in Spoken Dialog
Chapuis, Emile, Colombo, Pierre, Manica, Matteo, Labeau, Matthieu, Clavel, Chloe
Sequence labelling tasks like Dialog Act and Emotion/Sentiment identification are a key component of spoken dialog systems. In this work, we propose a new approach to learn generic representations adapted to spoken dialog, which we evaluate on a new benchmark we call Sequence labellIng evaLuatIon benChmark fOr spoken laNguagE benchmark (\texttt{SILICONE}). \texttt{SILICONE} is model-agnostic and contains 10 different datasets of various sizes. We obtain our representations with a hierarchical encoder based on transformer architectures, for which we extend two well-known pre-training objectives. Pre-training is performed on OpenSubtitles: a large corpus of spoken dialog containing over $2.3$ billion of tokens. We demonstrate how hierarchical encoders achieve competitive results with consistently fewer parameters compared to state-of-the-art models and we show their importance for both pre-training and fine-tuning.
Twitter round-up: Google's neural machine translation system most popular AI tweet in August 2020
Verdict lists ten of the most popular tweets on artificial intelligence (AI) in August 2020 based on data from GlobalData's Influencer Platform. The top tweets were chosen from influencers as tracked by GlobalData's Influencer Platform, which is based on a scientific process that works on pre-defined parameters. Influencers are selected after a deep analysis of the influencer's relevance, network strength, engagement, and leading discussions on new and emerging trends. Ronald van Loon, principal analyst and CEO of Intelligent World, shared a video from the World Economic Forum on a neural machine translation technology developed by Google to provide natural translation between different languages using artificial intelligence and deep learning. The system was also used to translate two languages without using English as a bridge.
Public Health Informatics: Proposing Causal Sequence of Death Using Neural Machine Translation
Zhu, Yuanda, Sha, Ying, Wu, Hang, Li, Mai, Hoffman, Ryan A., Wang, May D.
Each year there are nearly 57 million deaths around the world, with over 2.7 million in the United States. Timely, accurate and complete death reporting is critical in public health, as institutions and government agencies rely on death reports to analyze vital statistics and to formulate responses to communicable diseases. Inaccurate death reporting may result in potential misdirection of public health policies. Determining the causes of death is, nevertheless, challenging even for experienced physicians. To facilitate physicians in accurately reporting causes of death, we present an advanced AI approach to determine a chronically ordered sequence of clinical conditions that lead to death, based on decedent's last hospital admission discharge record. The sequence of clinical codes on the death report is named as causal chain of death, coded in the tenth revision of International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD-10); the priority-ordered clinical conditions on the discharge record are coded in ICD-9. We identify three challenges in proposing the causal chain of death: two versions of coding system in clinical codes, medical domain knowledge conflict, and data interoperability. To overcome the first challenge in this sequence-to-sequence problem, we apply neural machine translation models to generate target sequence. We evaluate the quality of generated sequences with the BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) score and achieve 16.44 out of 100. To address the second challenge, we incorporate expert-verified medical domain knowledge as constraint in generating output sequence to exclude infeasible causal chains. Lastly, we demonstrate the usability of our work in a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface to address the third challenge.
Generative Imagination Elevates Machine Translation
Long, Quanyu, Wang, Mingxuan, Li, Lei
There are thousands of languages on earth, but visual perception is shared among peoples. Existing multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) methods achieve knowledge transfer by enforcing one encoder to learn shared representation across textual and visual modalities. However, the training and inference process heavily relies on well-aligned bilingual sentence - image triplets as input, which are often limited in quantity. In this paper, we hypothesize that visual imagination via synthesizing visual representation from source text could help the neural model map two languages with different symbols, thus helps the translation task. Our proposed end-to-end imagination-based machine translation model (ImagiT) first learns to generate semantic-consistent visual representation from source sentence, and then generate target sentence based on both text representation and imagined visual representation. Experiments demonstrate that our translation model benefits from visual imagination and significantly outperforms the text-only neural machine translation (NMT) baseline. We also conduct analyzing experiments, and the results show that imagination can help fill in missing information when performing the degradation strategy.
Target Conditioning for One-to-Many Generation
Lachaux, Marie-Anne, Joulin, Armand, Lample, Guillaume
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models often lack diversity in their generated translations, even when paired with search algorithm, like beam search. A challenge is that the diversity in translations are caused by the variability in the target language, and cannot be inferred from the source sentence alone. In this paper, we propose to explicitly model this one-to-many mapping by conditioning the decoder of a NMT model on a latent variable that represents the domain of target sentences. The domain is a discrete variable generated by a target encoder that is jointly trained with the NMT model. The predicted domain of target sentences are given as input to the decoder during training. At inference, we can generate diverse translations by decoding with different domains. Unlike our strongest baseline (Shen et al., 2019), our method can scale to any number of domains without affecting the performance or the training time. We assess the quality and diversity of translations generated by our model with several metrics, on three different datasets.