Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models through positional encodings. This prompts a fundamental inquiry: Is there a correlation between the morphological complexity of a language and the utilization of positional encoding in pre-trained language models? In pursuit of an answer, we present the first study addressing this question, encompassing 22 languages and 5 downstream tasks. Our findings reveal that the importance of positional encoding diminishes with increasing morphological complexity in languages. Our study motivates the need for a deeper understanding of positional encoding, augmenting them to better reflect the different languages under consideration.

Foundational models with billions of parameters which have been trained on large corpora of data have demonstrated non-trivial skills in a variety of domains. However, due to their monolithic structure, it is challenging and expensive to augment them or impart new skills. On the other hand, due to their adaptation abilities, several new instances of these models are being trained towards new domains and tasks. In this work, we study the problem of efficient and practical composition of existing foundation models with more specific models to enable newer capabilities. To this end, we propose CALM -- Composition to Augment Language Models -- which introduces cross-attention between models to compose their representations and enable new capabilities. Salient features of CALM are: (i) Scales up LLMs on new tasks by 're-using' existing LLMs along with a few additional parameters and data, (ii) Existing model weights are kept intact, and hence preserves existing capabilities, and (iii) Applies to diverse domains and settings. We illustrate that augmenting PaLM2-S with a smaller model trained on low-resource languages results in an absolute improvement of up to 13\% on tasks like translation into English and arithmetic reasoning for low-resource languages. Similarly, when PaLM2-S is augmented with a code-specific model, we see a relative improvement of 40\% over the base model for code generation and explanation tasks -- on-par with fully fine-tuned counterparts.

Language Models (LMs) pre-trained with self-supervision on large text corpora have become the default starting point for developing models for various NLP tasks. Once the pre-training corpus has been assembled, all data samples in the corpus are treated with equal importance during LM pre-training. However, due to varying levels of relevance and quality of data, equal importance to all the data samples may not be the optimal choice. While data reweighting has been explored in the context of task-specific supervised learning and LM fine-tuning, model-driven reweighting for pre-training data has not been explored. We fill this important gap and propose PRESENCE, a method for jointly reweighting samples by leveraging self-influence (SI) scores as an indicator of sample importance and pre-training. PRESENCE promotes novelty and stability for model pre-training. Through extensive analysis spanning multiple model sizes, datasets, and tasks, we present PRESENCE as an important first step in the research direction of sample reweighting for pre-training language models.

In the recent years, speech representation learning is constructed primarily as a self-supervised learning (SSL) task, using the raw audio signal alone, while ignoring the side-information that is often available for a given speech recording. In this paper, we propose MASR, a Multi-label Aware Speech Representation learning framework, which addresses the aforementioned limitations. MASR enables the inclusion of multiple external knowledge sources to enhance the utilization of meta-data information. The external knowledge sources are incorporated in the form of sample-level pair-wise similarity matrices that are useful in a hard-mining loss. A key advantage of the MASR framework is that it can be combined with any choice of SSL method. Using MASR representations, we perform evaluations on several downstream tasks such as language identification, speech recognition and other non-semantic tasks such as speaker and emotion recognition. In these experiments, we illustrate significant performance improvements for the MASR over other established benchmarks. We perform a detailed analysis on the language identification task to provide insights on how the proposed loss function enables the representations to separate closely related languages.

Spoken language identification refers to the task of automatically predicting the spoken language in a given utterance. Conventionally, it is modeled as a speech-based language identification task. Prior techniques have been constrained to a single modality; however in the case of video data there is a wealth of other metadata that may be beneficial for this task. In this work, we propose MuSeLI, a Multimodal Spoken Language Identification method, which delves into the use of various metadata sources to enhance language identification. Our study reveals that metadata such as video title, description and geographic location provide substantial information to identify the spoken language of the multimedia recording. We conduct experiments using two diverse public datasets of YouTube videos, and obtain state-of-the-art results on the language identification task. We additionally conduct an ablation study that describes the distinct contribution of each modality for language recognition.

Speech representation learning approaches for non-semantic tasks such as language recognition have either explored supervised embedding extraction methods using a classifier model or self-supervised representation learning approaches using raw data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of combining self-supervised representation learning with the language label information for the pre-training task. This framework, termed as Label Aware Speech Representation (LASR) learning, uses a triplet based objective function to incorporate language labels along with the self-supervised loss function. The speech representations are further fine-tuned for the downstream task. The language recognition experiments are performed on two public datasets - FLEURS and Dhwani. In these experiments, we illustrate that the proposed LASR framework improves over the state-of-the-art systems on language identification. We also report an analysis of the robustness of LASR approach to noisy/missing labels as well as its application to multi-lingual speech recognition tasks.

To successfully negotiate a deal, it is not enough to communicate fluently: pragmatic planning of persuasive negotiation strategies is essential. While modern dialogue agents excel at generating fluent sentences, they still lack pragmatic grounding and cannot reason strategically. We present DialoGraph, a negotiation system that incorporates pragmatic strategies in a negotiation dialogue using graph neural networks. DialoGraph explicitly incorporates dependencies between sequences of strategies to enable improved and interpretable prediction of next optimal strategies, given the dialogue context. Our graph-based method outperforms prior state-of-the-art negotiation models both in the accuracy of strategy/dialogue act prediction and in the quality of downstream dialogue response generation. We qualitatively show further benefits of learned strategy-graphs in providing explicit associations between effective negotiation strategies over the course of the dialogue, leading to interpretable and strategic dialogues.

Predicting properties of nodes in a graph is an important problem with applications in a variety of domains. Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods aim to address this problem by labeling a small subset of the nodes as seeds and then utilizing the graph structure to predict label scores for the rest of the nodes in the graph. Recently, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved impressive performance on the graph-based SSL task. In addition to label scores, it is also desirable to have confidence scores associated with them. Unfortunately, confidence estimation in the context of GCN has not been previously explored. We fill this important gap in this paper and propose ConfGCN, which estimates labels scores along with their confidences jointly in GCN-based setting. ConfGCN uses these estimated confidences to determine the influence of one node on another during neighborhood aggregation, thereby acquiring anisotropic capabilities. Through extensive analysis and experiments on standard benchmarks, we find that ConfGCN is able to outperform state-of-the-art baselines. We have made ConfGCN's source code available to encourage reproducible research.

Document date is essential for many important tasks, such as document retrieval, summarization, event detection, etc. While existing approaches for these tasks assume accurate knowledge of the document date, this is not always available, especially for arbitrary documents from the Web. Document Dating is a challenging problem which requires inference over the temporal structure of the document. Prior document dating systems have largely relied on handcrafted features while ignoring such document internal structures. In this paper, we propose NeuralDater, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based document dating approach which jointly exploits syntactic and temporal graph structures of document in a principled way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of deep learning for the problem of document dating. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we find that NeuralDater significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline by 19% absolute (45% relative) accuracy points.