Pay Better Attention to Attention: Head Selection in Multilingual and Multi-Domain Sequence Modeling

Abstract Multi-head attention has each of the attention heads collect salient information from different parts of an input sequence, making it a powerful mechanism for sequence modeling. Multilingual and multi-domain learning are common scenarios for sequence modeling, where the key challenge is to maximize positive transfer and mitigate negative interference across languages and domains. In this paper, we find that non-selective attention sharing is sub-optimal for achieving good generalization across all languages and domains. We further propose attention sharing strategies […]

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Performance and Efficiency Evaluation of ASR Inference on the Edge

Abstract Automatic speech recognition, a process of converting speech signals to text, has improved a great deal in the past decade thanks to the deep learning based systems. With the latest transformer based models, the recognition accuracy measured as word-error-rate (WER), is even below the human annotator error (4%). However, most of these advanced models run on big servers with large amounts of memory, CPU/GPU resources and have huge carbon footprint. This server based architecture of ASR is not viable […]

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Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation

November 8, 2021 By: Guillaume Wenzek, Vishrav Chaudhary, Angela Fan, Sahir Gomez, Naman Goyal, Somya Jain, Douwe Kiela, Tristan Thrush, Francisco Guzmán Abstract We present the results of the first task on Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. The task consists on the many-to-many evaluation of a single model across a variety of source and target languages. This year, the task consisted on three different settings: (i) SMALLTASK1 (Central/South-Eastern European Languages), (ii) the SMALL-TASK2 (South East Asian Languages), and (iii) FULL-TASK (all […]

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Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

November 8, 2021 By: Lucia Specia, Frédéric Blain, Marina Fomicheva, Chrysoula Zerva, Zhenhao Li, Vishrav Chaudhary, André F. T. Martins Abstract We report the results of the WMT 2021 shared task on Quality Estimation, where the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels. This edition focused on two main novel additions: (i) prediction for unseen languages, i.e. zero-shot settings, and (ii) prediction of sentences with catastrophic errors. […]

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Can Transformers Jump Around Right in Natural Language? Assessing Performance Transfer from SCAN

Abstract Despite their failure to solve the compositional SCAN dataset, seq2seq architectures still achieve astonishing success on more practical tasks. This observation pushes us to question the usefulness of SCAN-style compositional generalization in realistic NLP tasks. In this work, we study the benefit that such compositionality brings about to several machine translation tasks. We present several focused modifications of Transformer that greatly improve generalization capabilities on SCAN and select one that remains on par with a vanilla Transformer on a […]

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DOBF: A Deobfuscation Pre-Training Objective for Programming Languages

Abstract Recent advances in self-supervised learning have dramatically improved the state of the art on a wide variety of tasks. However, research in language model pre-training has mostly focused on natural languages, and it is unclear whether models like BERT and its variants provide the best pre-training when applied to other modalities, such as source code. In this paper, we introduce a new pre-training objective, DOBF, that leverages the structural aspect of programming languages and pre-trains a model to recover […]

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Unsupervised Speech Recognition

Abstract Despite rapid progress in the recent past, current speech recognition systems still require labeled training data which limits this technology to a small fraction of the languages spoken around the globe. This paper describes wav2vec-U, short for wav2vec Unsupervised, a method to train speech recognition models without any labeled data. We leverage self-supervised speech representations to segment unlabeled audio and learn a mapping from these representations to phonemes via adversarial training. The right representations are key to the success […]

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Relation Prediction as an Auxiliary Training Objective for Improving Multi-Relational Graph Representations

Abstract Learning good representations on multi-relational graphs is essential to knowledge base completion (KBC). In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised training objective for multi-relational graph representation learning, via simply incorporating relation prediction into the commonly used 1vsAll objective. The new training objective contains not only terms for predicting the subject and object of a given triple, but also a term for predicting the relation type. We analyse how this new objective impacts multi-relational learning in KBC: experiments on […]

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Dynamic Encoder Transducer: A Flexible Solution For Trading Off Accuracy For Latency

August 30, 2021 By: Yangyang Shi, Varun Nagaraja, Chunyang Wu, Jay Mahadeokar, Duc Le, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Alex Xiao, Ching-Feng Yeh, Julian Chan, Christian Fuegen, Ozlem Kalinli, Michael L. Seltzer Abstract We propose a dynamic encoder transducer (DET) for on-device speech recognition. One DET model scales to multiple devices with different computation capacities without retraining or fine-tuning. To trading off accuracy and latency, DET assigns different encoders to decode different parts of an utterance. We apply and compare the layer dropout […]

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