October 31, 2018

Facebook Research at EMNLP

By: Meta Research

Natural language processing experts are gathering in Brussels, Belgium this week for the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Research from Facebook will be presented in oral paper and poster sessions.

Among this research is the paper XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations(Alexis Conneau, Ruty Rinott, Guillaume Lample, Adina Williams, Samuel R. Bowman, Holger Schwenk and Ves Stoyanov). The associated data set (XNLI) was created for evaluating cross-lingual approaches to natural language processing. This collaboration between Facebook and New York University builds on the commonly used Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MultiNLI) corpus, adding 14 languages to that English-only data set, including two low-resource languages: Swahili and Urdu. You can read more about this research here.

Facebook researchers and engineers will also be organizing and participating in workshops throughout the week. Keep reading to learn more about the research being presented at EMNLP.

Facebook research being presented at EMNLP 2018

A Dataset for Telling the Stories of Social Media Videos
Spandana Gella, Michael Lewis and Marcus Rohrbach

Video content in social media platforms constitutes a major part of the communication between people, as it allows everyone to share their stories. However, if someone is unable to consume video, either due to a disability or network bandwidth, this severely limits their participation and communication. Automatically telling the stories using multi-sentence descriptions of videos would allow bridging this gap. To learn and evaluate such models, we introduce VideoStory, a new large-scale dataset for video description as a new challenge for multi-sentence video description. Our VideoStory captions dataset is complimentary to prior work and contains 20k videos posted publicly on a social media platform amounting to 396 hours of video with 123k sentences, temporally aligned to the video.

Auto-Encoding Dictionary Definitions into Consistent Word Embeddings
Tom Bosc and Pascal Vincent

Monolingual dictionaries are widespread and semantically rich resources. This paper presents a simple model that learns to compute word embeddings by processing dictionary definitions and trying to reconstruct them. It exploits the inherent recursivity of dictionaries by encouraging consistency between the representations it uses as inputs and the representations it produces as outputs. The resulting embeddings are shown to capture semantic similarity better than regular distributional methods and other dictionary-based methods. In addition, the method shows strong performance when trained exclusively on dictionary data and generalizes in one shot.

Do explanations make VQA models more predictable to a human?
Arjun Chandrasekaran, Deshraj Yadav, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Viraj Prabhu, Devi Parikh

A rich line of research attempts to make deep neural networks more transparent by generating human-interpretable ‘explanations’ of their decision process, especially for interactive tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA). In this work, we analyze if existing explanations indeed make a VQA model – its responses as well as failures – more predictable to a human. Surprisingly, we find that they do not. On the other hand, we find that human-in-the-loop approaches that treat the model as a black-box do.

Dynamic Meta-Embeddings for Improved Sentence Representations
Douwe Kiela, Changhan Wang and Kyunghyun Cho

While one of the first steps in many NLP systems is selecting what pre-trained word embeddings to use, we argue that such a step is better left for neural networks to figure out by themselves. To that end, we introduce dynamic meta-embeddings, a simple yet effective method for the supervised learning of embedding ensembles, which leads to state-of-the-art performance within the same model class on a variety of tasks. We subsequently show how the technique can be used to shed new light on the usage of word embeddings in NLP systems.

Extending Neural Generative Conversational Model using External Knowledge Sources
Joelle Pineau and Prasanna Parthasarathi

The use of connectionist approaches in conversational agents has been progressing rapidly due to the availability of large corpora. However current generative dialogue models often lack coherence and are content poor. This work proposes an architecture to incorporate unstructured knowledge sources to enhance the next utterance prediction in chit-chat type of generative dialogue models. We focus on Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) conversational agents trained with the Reddit News dataset, and consider incorporating external knowledge from Wikipedia summaries as well as from the NELL knowledge base. Our experiments show faster training time and improved perplexity when leveraging external knowledge.

How agents see things: On visual representations in an emergent language game
Diane Bouchacourt and Marco Baroni

There is growing interest in the language developed by agents interacting in emergent-communication settings. Earlier studies have focused on the agents’ symbol usage, rather than on their representation of visual input. In this paper, we consider the referential games of Lazaridou et al. (2017), and investigate the representations the agents develop during their evolving interaction. We find that the agents establish successful communication by inducing visual representations that almost perfectly align with each other, but, surprisingly, do not capture the conceptual properties of the objects depicted in the input images. We conclude that, if we care about developing language-like communication systems, we must pay more attention to the visual semantics agents associate to the symbols they use.

Loss in Translation: Learning Bilingual Word Mapping with a Retrieval Criterion
Armand Joulin, Piotr Bojanowski, Tomas Mikolov, Hérve Jégou and Edouard Grave

Continuous word representations learned separately on distinct languages can be aligned so that their words become comparable in a common space. Existing works typically solve a least-square regression problem to learn a rotation aligning a small bilingual lexicon, and use a retrieval criterion for inference. In this paper, we propose an unified formulation that directly optimizes a retrieval criterion in an end-to-end fashion. Our experiments on standard benchmarks show that our approach outperforms the state of the art on word translation, with the biggest improvements observed for distant language pairs such as English-Chinese.

Neural Compositional Denotational Semantics for Question Answering
Nitish Gupta and Michael Lewis

Answering compositional questions requiring multi-step reasoning is challenging. We introduce an end-to-end differentiable model for interpreting questions about a knowledge graph (KG), which is inspired by formal approaches to semantics. Each span of text is represented by a denotation in a KG, together with a vector that captures ungrounded aspects of meaning. Learned composition modules recursively combine constituents, culminating in a grounding for the complete sentence which answers the question. For example, to interpret “not green”, the model represents “green” as a set of KG entities and “not” as a trainable ungrounded vector—and then uses this vector to parameterize a composition function to performs a complement operation. For each sentence, we build a parse chart subsuming all possible parses, allowing the model to jointly learn both the composition operators and output structure by gradient descent from end-task supervision. The model learns a variety of challenging semantic operators, such as quantifiers, disjunctions and composed relations, and infers latent syntactic structure. The model also generalizes well to longer sentences than seen in its training data, in contrast to LSTM, semantic parsing, and RelNet baselines.

Non-Adversarial Unsupervised Word Translation
Yedid Hoshen and Lior Wolf

Unsupervised word translation from non-parallel inter-lingual corpora has attracted much research interest. Very recently, neural network methods trained with adversarial loss functions achieved high accuracy on this task. Despite the impressive success of the recent techniques, they suffer from the typical drawbacks of generative adversarial models: sensitivity to hyper-parameters, long training time and lack of interpretability. In this paper, we make the observation that two sufficiently similar distributions can be aligned correctly with iterative matching methods. We present a novel method that first aligns the second moment of the word distributions of the two languages and then iteratively refines the alignment. Extensive experiments on word translation of European and Non-European languages show that our method achieves better performance than recent state-of-the-art deep adversarial approaches and is competitive with the supervised baseline. It is also efficient, easy to parallelize on CPU and interpretable.

Best Paper Award: Phrase-Based & Neural Unsupervised Machine Translation
Guillaume Lample, Myle Ott, Alexis Conneau, Ludovic Denoyer and Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

Machine translation systems achieve near human-level performance on some languages, yet their effectiveness strongly relies on the availability of large amounts of bitexts, which hinders their applicability to the majority of language pairs. This work investigates how to learn to translate when having access to only large monolingual corpora in each language. We propose two model variants, a neural and a phrase-based model. Both versions leverage automatic generation of parallel data by back-translating with a backward model operating in the other direction, and the denoising effect of a language model trained on the target side. These models are significantly better than methods from the literature, while being simpler and having fewer hyper-parameters. On the widely used WMT’14 English-French and WMT’16 German-English benchmarks, our models respectively obtain 27.1 and 23.6 BLEU points without using a single parallel sentence, outperforming the state of the art by more than 11 BLEU points.

Semantic Parsing for Task Oriented Dialog using Hierarchical Representations
Sonal Gupta, Rushin Shah, Mrinal Mohit, Anuj Kumar and Michael Lewis

Task oriented dialog systems typically first parse user utterances to semantic frames comprised of intents and slots. Previous work on task oriented intent and slot-filling work has been restricted to one intent per query and one slot label per token, and thus cannot model complex compositional requests. Alternative semantic parsing systems have represented queries as logical forms, but these are challenging to annotate and parse. We propose a hierarchical annotation scheme for semantic parsing that allows the representation of compositional queries, and can be efficiently and accurately parsed by standard constituency parsing models. We release a dataset of 44k annotated queries, and show that parsing models outperform sequence-to-sequence approaches on this dataset. You can download the dataset here.

Training Millions of Personalized Agents
Pierre-Emmanuel Mazare, Samuel Humeau, Martin Raison and Antoine Bordes

Current dialogue systems are not very engaging for users, especially when trained end-to-end without relying on proactive reengaging scripted strategies. Zhang et al. (2018) showed that the engagement level of end-to-end dialogue models increases when conditioning them on text personas providing some personalized back-story to the model. However, the dataset used in (Zhang et al., 2018) is synthetic and of limited size as it contains around 1k different personas. In this paper we introduce a new dataset providing 5 million personas and 700 million persona-based dialogues. Our experiments show that, at this scale, training using personas still improves the performance of end-to-end systems. In addition, we show that other tasks benefit from the wide coverage of our dataset by fine-tuning our model on the data from (Zhang et al., 2018) and achieving state-of-the-art results.

Understanding Back-Translation at Scale
Sergey Edunov, Myle Ott, Michael Auli and David Grangier

An effective method to improve neural machine translation with monolingual data is to augment the parallel training corpus with back-translations of target language sentences. This work broadens the understanding of back-translation and investigates a number of methods to generate synthetic source sentences. We find that in all but resource poor settings back-translations obtained via sampling or noised beam outputs are most effective. Our analysis shows that sampling or noisy synthetic data gives a much stronger training signal than data generated by beam or greedy search. We also compare how synthetic data compares to genuine bitext and study various domain effects. Finally, we scale to hundreds of millions of monolingual sentences and achieve a new state of the art of 35 BLEU on the WMT’14 English-German test set.

XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations
Alexis Conneau, Ruty Rinott, Guillaume Lample, Adina Williams, Samuel R. Bowman, Holger Schwenk and Ves Stoyanov

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in cross-lingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 15 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.

Other activities at EMNLP 2018

Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP
Paper: Jump to better conclusions: SCAN both left and right
Joost Bastings, Marco Baroni, Jason Weston, Kyunghyun Cho and Douwe Kiela

The First Workshop on Fact Extraction and Verification (FEVER)
Invited speaker: Tim Rocktaschel

Search-Oriented Conversational AI
Joelle Pineau, steering committee
Evgeny Kharitonov, program committee

Paper: Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational Agents
Jason Weston (speaker), Emily Dinan, Stephen Roller, Kurt Shuster, Angela Fan and Michael Auli (joint first authors)

Third Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Myle Ott, James Cross, program committee

Paper: Scaling Neural Machine Translation
Myle Ott, Sergey Edunov, David Grangier and Michael Auli

Paper: Simple Fusion: Return of the Language Model
Felix Stahlberg, James Cross and Ves Stoyanov


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