Malta

In this paper, we re-examine the Markov property in the context of neural machine translation. 
We design a Markov Autoregressive Transformer~(MAT) and undertake a comprehensive assessment of its performance across four WMT benchmarks. 
Our findings indicate that MAT with an order larger than 4 can generate translations with quality on par with that of conventional autoregressive transformers. 
In addition, counter-intuitively, we also find that the advantages of utilizing a higher-order MAT do not specifically contribute to the translation of longer sentences.

EACL 2024

Revisiting the Markov Property for Machine Translation

markov property

machine translation

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Data annotation is an essential step for constructing new datasets. However, the conventional approach of data annotation through crowdsourcing is both time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the complexity of this process increases when dealing with low-resource languages owing to the difference in the language pool of crowdworkers. To address these issues, this study proposes an autonomous annotation method by utilizing large language models, which have been recently demonstrated to exhibit remarkable performance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is not just cost-efficient but also applicable for low-resource language annotation. Additionally, we constructed an image captioning dataset using our approach and are committed to open this dataset for future study. We have opened our source code for further study and reproducibility.

GPTs Are Multilingual Annotators for Sequence Generation Tasks

Mainstream cross-lingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems leverage the transfer learning paradigm by training a joint model for intent recognition and slot-filling in English and applying it, zero-shot, to other languages.
We address a gap in prior research, which often overlooked the transfer to lower-resource colloquial varieties due to limited test data.
Inspired by prior work on English varieties, we craft and manually evaluate perturbation rules that transform German sentences into colloquial forms and use them to synthesize test sets in four ToD datasets.
Our perturbation rules cover 18 distinct language phenomena, enabling us to explore the impact of each perturbation on slot and intent performance.
Using these new datasets, we conduct an experimental evaluation across six different transformers.
Here, we demonstrate that when applied to colloquial varieties, ToD systems maintain their intent recognition performance, losing 6% (4.62 percentage points) in accuracy on average. 
However, they exhibit a significant drop in slot detection, with a decrease of 31% (21 percentage points) in slot F$_1$ score.
Our findings are further supported by a transfer experiment from Standard American English to synthetic Urban African American Vernacular English.

Exploring the Robustness of Task-oriented Dialogue Systems for Colloquial German Varieties

Recently, reference-free metrics such as CLIPScore (Hessel et al., 2021), UMIC (Lee et al., 2021), and PAC-S (Sarto et al., 2023) have been proposed for automatic reference-free evaluation of image captions. Our focus lies in evaluating the robustness of these metrics in scenarios that require distinguishing between two captions with high lexical overlap but very different meanings. Our findings reveal that despite their high correlation with human judgments, CLIPScore, UMIC, and PAC-S struggle to identify fine-grained errors. While all metrics exhibit strong sensitivity to visual grounding errors, their sensitivity to caption implausibility errors is limited. Furthermore, we found that all metrics are sensitive to variations in the size of image-relevant objects mentioned in the caption, while CLIPScore and PAC-S are also sensitive to the number of mentions of image-relevant objects in the caption. Regarding linguistic aspects of a caption, all metrics show weak comprehension of negation, and CLIPScore and PAC-S are insensitive to the structure of the caption to a great extent. We hope our findings will guide further improvements in reference-free evaluation of image captioning.

An Examination of the Robustness of Reference-Free Image Captioning Evaluation Metrics

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLM-Sim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLM-Sim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.

mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, yet their evaluation, particularly in languages beyond the top $20$, remains inadequate due to existing benchmarks and metrics limitations. Employing LLMs as evaluators to rank or score other models' outputs emerges as a viable solution, addressing the constraints tied to human annotators and established benchmarks. In this study, we explore the potential of LLM-based evaluators in enhancing multilingual evaluation by calibrating them against $20$K human judgments across three text-generation tasks, five metrics, and eight languages. Our analysis reveals a bias in LLM-based evaluators towards higher scores, underscoring the necessity of calibration with native speaker judgments, especially in low-resource and non-Latin script languages, to ensure accurate evaluation of LLM performance across diverse languages.

Are Large Language Model-based Evaluators the Solution to Scaling Up Multilingual Evaluation?

Cross-lingual transfer of language models trained on high-resource languages like English has been widely studied for many NLP tasks, but focus on conversational tasks has been rather limited. This is partly due to the high cost of obtaining non-English conversational data, which results in limited coverage. In this work, we introduce for cross-lingual alignment pretraining, a parallel and large-scale multilingual conversation dataset that we created by translating the English-only Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset (Rastogi et al., 2020) into 105 other languages. XSGD contains about 330k utterances per language. To facilitate aligned cross-lingual representations, we develop an efficient prompt-tuning-based method for learning alignment prompts. We also investigate two different classifiers: NLI-based and vanilla classifiers, and test cross-lingual capability enabled by the aligned prompts. We evaluate our model's cross-lingual generalization capabilities on two conversation tasks: slot-filling and intent classification. Our results demonstrate strong and efficient modeling ability of NLI-based classifiers and the large cross-lingual transfer improvements achieved by our aligned prompts, particularly in few-shot settings. We also conduct studies on large language models (LLMs) such as text-davinci-003 and ChatGPT in both zero- and few-shot settings. While LLMs exhibit impressive performance in English, their cross-lingual capabilities in other languages, particularly low-resource ones, are limited.

Efficiently Aligned Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Conversational Tasks using Prompt-Tuning

Many approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks often treat them as single-step problems, where an agent receives an instruction, executes it, and is evaluated based on the final outcome. However, language is inherently interactive, as evidenced by the back-and-forth nature of human conversations. In light of this, we posit that human-AI collaboration should also be interactive, with humans monitoring the work of AI agents and providing feedback that the agent can understand and utilize. Further, the AI agent should be able to detect when it needs additional information and proactively ask for help. Enabling this scenario would lead to more natural, efficient, and engaging human-AI collaboration.
In this paper, we investigate these directions using the challenging task established by the IGLU competition, an interactive grounded language understanding task in a MineCraft-like world. We delve into multiple types of help players can give to the AI to guide it and analyze the impact of this help on behavior, resulting in performance improvements and an end-to-end interactive system.

Improving Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment by Interacting with Agents Through Help Feedback

Code-switching (CS) is a common linguistic phenomenon wherein speakers fluidly transition between languages in conversation. While the cognitive processes driving CS remain a complex domain, earlier investigations have shed light on its multifaceted triggers. This study delves into the influence of Part-of-Speech (POS) on the propensity of bilinguals to engage in CS, employing a comprehensive analysis of Spanish-English and Mandarin-English corpora. Compared with prior research, our findings not only affirm the existence of a statistically significant connection between POS and the likelihood of CS across language pairs, but notably find this relationship exhibits its maximum strength in proximity to CS instances, progressively diminishing as tokens distance themselves from these CS points.

Analyzing the Role of Part-of-Speech in Code-Switching: A Corpus-Based Study

Context-aware Machine Translation aims to improve translations of sentences by incorporating surrounding sentences as context. Towards this task, two main architectures have been applied, namely single-encoder (based on concatenation) and multi-encoder models. In this study, we show that a special case of multi-encoder architecture, where the latent representation of the source sentence is cached and reused as the context in the next step, achieves higher accuracy on the contrastive datasets (where the models have to rank the correct translation among the provided sentences) and comparable BLEU and COMET scores as the single- and multi-encoder approaches. Furthermore, we investigate the application of Sequence Shortening to the cached representations. We test three pooling-based shortening techniques and introduce two novel methods - Latent Grouping and Latent Selecting, where the network learns to group tokens or selects the tokens to be cached as context. Our experiments show that the two methods achieve competitive BLEU and COMET scores and accuracies on the contrastive datasets to the other tested methods while potentially allowing for higher interpretability and reducing the growth of memory requirements with increased context size.

Sequence Shortening for Context-Aware Machine Translation

We study the effect of one type of imbalance often present in real-life multilingual classification datasets: an uneven distribution of labels across languages. We show evidence that fine-tuning a transformer-based Large Language Model (LLM) on a dataset with this imbalance leads to worse performance, a more pronounced separation of languages in the latent space, and the promotion of uninformative features. We modify the traditional class weighing approach to imbalance by calculating class weights separately for each language and show that this helps mitigate those detrimental effects. These results create awareness of the negative effects of language-specific class imbalance in multilingual fine-tuning and the way in which the model learns to rely on the separation of languages to perform the task.

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GPTs Are Multilingual Annotators for Sequence Generation Tasks

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