Machine Translation
First Experiments with Neural Translation of Informal to Formal Mathematics
Wang, Qingxiang, Kaliszyk, Cezary, Urban, Josef
We report on our first experiments to train deep neural networks that automatically translate informalized $\LaTeX{}$-written Mizar texts into the formal Mizar language. Using Luong et al.'s neural machine translation model (NMT), we tested our aligned informal-formal corpora against various hyperparameters and evaluated their results. Our experiments show that NMT is able to generate correct Mizar statements on more than 60 percent of the inference data, indicating that formalization through artificial neural network is a promising approach for automated formalization of mathematics. We present several case studies to illustrate our results.
On the Limitations of Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction
Søgaard, Anders, Ruder, Sebastian, Vulić, Ivan
Unsupervised machine translation---i.e., not assuming any cross-lingual supervision signal, whether a dictionary, translations, or comparable corpora---seems impossible, but nevertheless, Lample et al. (2018) recently proposed a fully unsupervised machine translation (MT) model. The model relies heavily on an adversarial, unsupervised alignment of word embedding spaces for bilingual dictionary induction (Conneau et al., 2018), which we examine here. Our results identify the limitations of current unsupervised MT: unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction performs much worse on morphologically rich languages that are not dependent marking, when monolingual corpora from different domains or different embedding algorithms are used. We show that a simple trick, exploiting a weak supervision signal from identical words, enables more robust induction, and establish a near-perfect correlation between unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction performance and a previously unexplored graph similarity metric.
Polite Dialogue Generation Without Parallel Data
Stylistic dialogue response generation, with valuable applications in personality-based conversational agents, is a challenging task because the response needs to be fluent, contextually-relevant, as well as paralinguistically accurate. Moreover, parallel datasets for regular-to-stylistic pairs are usually unavailable. We present three weakly-supervised models that can generate diverse polite (or rude) dialogue responses without parallel data. Our late fusion model (Fusion) merges the decoder of an encoder-attention-decoder dialogue model with a language model trained on stand-alone polite utterances. Our label-fine-tuning (LFT) model prepends to each source sequence a politeness-score scaled label (predicted by our state-of-the-art politeness classifier) during training, and at test time is able to generate polite, neutral, and rude responses by simply scaling the label embedding by the corresponding score. Our reinforcement learning model (Polite-RL) encourages politeness generation by assigning rewards proportional to the politeness classifier score of the sampled response. We also present two retrieval-based polite dialogue model baselines. Human evaluation validates that while the Fusion and the retrieval-based models achieve politeness with poorer context-relevance, the LFT and Polite-RL models can produce significantly more polite responses without sacrificing dialogue quality.
Interpretable Adversarial Perturbation in Input Embedding Space for Text
Sato, Motoki, Suzuki, Jun, Shindo, Hiroyuki, Matsumoto, Yuji
Following great success in the image processing field, the idea of adversarial training has been applied to tasks in the natural language processing (NLP) field. One promising approach directly applies adversarial training developed in the image processing field to the input word embedding space instead of the discrete input space of texts. However, this approach abandons such interpretability as generating adversarial texts to significantly improve the performance of NLP tasks. This paper restores interpretability to such methods by restricting the directions of perturbations toward the existing words in the input embedding space. As a result, we can straightforwardly reconstruct each input with perturbations to an actual text by considering the perturbations to be the replacement of words in the sentence while maintaining or even improving the task performance.
Multimodal Machine Translation with Reinforcement Learning
Qian, Xin, Zhong, Ziyi, Zhou, Jieli
Multimodal machine translation is one of the applications that integrates computer vision and language processing. It is a unique task givent that in the field of machine translation, many state-of-the-arts algorithms still only employ textual information. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of reinforcement learning in multimodal machine translation. We present a novel algorithm based on the Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) algorithm that specifically cater to the multimodal machine translation task of the EMNLP 2018 Third Conference on Machine Translation (WMT18). We experiment our proposed algorithm on the Multi30K multilingual English-German image description dataset and the Flickr30K image entity dataset. Our model takes two channels of inputs, image and text, uses translation evaluation metrics as training rewards, and achieves better results than supervised learning MLE baseline models. Furthermore, we discuss the prospects and limitations of using reinforcement learning for machine translation. Our experiment results suggest a promising reinforcement learning solution to the general task of multimodal sequence to sequence learning.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Interactive-Predictive Neural Machine Translation
Lam, Tsz Kin, Kreutzer, Julia, Riezler, Stefan
We present an approach to interactive-predictive neural machine translation that attempts to reduce human effort from three directions: Firstly, instead of requiring humans to select, correct, or delete segments, we employ the idea of learning from human reinforcements in form of judgments on the quality of partial translations. Secondly, human effort is further reduced by using the entropy of word predictions as uncertainty criterion to trigger feedback requests. Lastly, online updates of the model parameters after every interaction allow the model to adapt quickly. We show in simulation experiments that reward signals on partial translations significantly improve character F-score and BLEU compared to feedback on full translations only, while human effort can be reduced to an average number of $5$ feedback requests for every input.
MLPerf – Will New Machine Learning Benchmark Help Propel AI Forward?
Let the AI benchmarking wars begin. Today, a diverse group from academia and industry – Google, Baidu, Intel, AMD, Harvard, and Stanford among them – released MLPerf, a nascent benchmarking tool "for measuring the speed of machine learning software and hardware." Arrival of MLPerf follows what has been a smattering of ad hoc AI performance comparisons trickling to market. Today Intel posted a blog with data showing for select machine translation using RNNs "the Intel Xeon Scalable processor outperforms NVidia V100 by 4x on the AWS Sockeye Neural Machine Translation model." For quite some time there has been vigorous discussion around the need for meaningful AI benchmarks with proponents suggesting that the lack of meaningful benchmark tools has restrained AI adoption.
Toward the Jet Age of machine learning
Check out the "Software Development in the Age of Deep Learning" session at the AI Conference in San Francisco, September 4-7, 2018. Hurry--best price ends June 8. Machine learning today resembles the dawn of aviation. In 1903, dramatic flights by the Wright brothers ushered in the Pioneer Age of aviation, and within a decade, there was widespread belief that powered flight would revolutionize transportation and society more generally. Machine learning (ML) today is also rapidly advancing.
KNPTC: Knowledge and Neural Machine Translation Powered Chinese Pinyin Typo Correction
Cai, Hengyi, Ji, Xingguang, Song, Yonghao, Jin, Yan, Zhang, Yang, Mansur, Mairgup, Zhao, Xiaofang
Chinese pinyin input methods are very important for Chinese language processing. Actually, users may make typos inevitably when they input pinyin. Moreover, pinyin typo correction has become an increasingly important task with the popularity of smartphones and the mobile Internet. How to exploit the knowledge of users typing behaviors and support the typo correction for acronym pinyin remains a challenging problem. To tackle these challenges, we propose KNPTC, a novel approach based on neural machine translation (NMT). In contrast to previous work, KNPTC is able to integrate explicit knowledge into NMT for pinyin typo correction, and is able to learn to correct a variety of typos without the guidance of manually selected constraints or languagespecific features. In this approach, we first obtain the transition probabilities between adjacent letters based on large-scale real-life datasets. Then, we construct the "ground-truth" alignments of training sentence pairs by utilizing these probabilities. Furthermore, these alignments are integrated into NMT to capture sensible pinyin typo correction patterns. KNPTC is applied to correct typos in real-life datasets, which achieves 32.77% increment on average in accuracy rate of typo correction compared against the state-of-the-art system.