Learning idiomatic expressions is seen as one of the most challenging stages in second language learning because of their unpredictable meaning. A similar situation holds for their identification within natural language processing applications such as machine translation and parsing… The lack of high-quality usage samples exacerbates this challenge not only for humans but also for artificial intelligence systems. This article introduces a gamified crowdsourcing approach for collecting language learning materials for idiomatic expressions; a messaging bot is designed as an […]

We present our demonstration of two machine translation applications to historical documents. The first task consists in generating a new version of a historical document, written in the modern version of its original language… The second application is limited to a document’s orthography. It adapts the document’s spelling to modern standards in order to achieve an orthography consistency and accounting for the lack of spelling conventions. We followed an interactive, adaptive framework that allows the user to introduce corrections to […]

Assessment and reporting of skills is a central feature of many digital learning platforms. With students often using multiple platforms, cross-platform assessment has emerged as a new challenge… While technologies such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) have enabled communication between platforms, reconciling the different skill taxonomies they employ has not been solved at scale. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a methodology for finding and linking equivalent skills between platforms by utilizing problem content as well as the platform’s […]

Software log analysis helps to maintain the health of software solutions and ensure compliance and security. Existing software systems consist of heterogeneous components emitting logs in various formats… A typical solution is to unify the logs using manually built parsers, which is laborious. Instead, we explore the possibility of automating the parsing task by employing machine translation (MT). We create a tool that generates synthetic Apache log records which we used to train recurrent-neural-network-based MT models. Models’ evaluation on real-world […]

Hausa language belongs to the Afroasiatic phylum, and with more first-language speakers than any other sub-Saharan African language. With a majority of its speakers residing in the Northern and Southern areas of Nigeria and the Republic of Niger, respectively, it is estimated that over 100 million people speak the language… Hence, making it one of the most spoken Chadic language. While Hausa is considered well-studied and documented language among the sub-Saharan African languages, it is viewed as a low resource […]

Back-translation is an effective strategy to improve the performance of Neural Machine Translation~(NMT) by generating pseudo-parallel data. However, several recent works have found that better translation quality of the pseudo-parallel data does not necessarily lead to better final translation models, while lower-quality but more diverse data often yields stronger results… In this paper, we propose a novel method to generate pseudo-parallel data from a pre-trained back-translation model. Our method is a meta-learning algorithm which adapts a pre-trained back-translation model so […]

Changes in neural architectures have fostered significant breakthroughs in language modeling and computer vision. Unfortunately, novel architectures often require re-thinking the choice of hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate, warmup schedule, and momentum coefficients) to maintain stability of the optimizer… This optimizer instability is often the result of poor parameter initialization, and can be avoided by architecture-specific initialization schemes. In this paper, we present GradInit, an automated and architecture agnostic method for initializing neural networks. GradInit is based on a simple heuristic; […]

The standard approach to incorporate linguistic information to neural machine translation systems consists in maintaining separate vocabularies for each of the annotated features to be incorporated (e.g. POS tags, dependency relation label), embed them, and then aggregate them with each subword in the word they belong to. This approach, however, cannot easily accommodate annotation schemes that are not dense for every word… We propose a method suited for such a case, showing large improvements in out-of-domain data, and comparable quality […]

We show the formal equivalence of linearised self-attention mechanisms and fast weight memories from the early ’90s. From this observation we infer a memory capacity limitation of recent linearised softmax attention variants… With finite memory, a desirable behaviour of fast weight memory models is to manipulate the contents of memory and dynamically interact with it. Inspired by previous work on fast weights, we propose to replace the update rule with an alternative rule yielding such behaviour. We also propose a […]