25 accepted papers
Despite recent progress in Speech Translation (ST) research, the challenges posed by inherent speech phenomena that distinguish transcribed speech from written text are not well addressed. The informal and erroneous nature of spontaneous speech is inadequately represented in the typical parallel tex…
The performance of various tasks of natural language processing has greatly improved with the emergence of large language models. However, there is still much room for improvement in understanding certain specific linguistic phenomena, such as Chinese idioms, which are usually composed of four chara…
The recent release of GPT-4o showcased the potential of end-to-end multimodal models, not just in terms of low latency but also in their ability to understand and generate expressive speech with rich emotions. While the details are unknown to the open research community, it likely involves significa…
To achieve high-quality translation with low latency, a Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) system relies on a policy module to decide whether to translate immediately or wait for additional streaming input, along with a translation model capable of effectively handling partial speech input. P…
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract the triplets of aspect terms, their associated sentiment and opinion terms. Previous works based on different modeling paradigms have achieved promising results. However, these methods struggle to comprehensively explore the various specific…
Chinese idioms on social media demand a nuanced understanding for correct usage. The Chinese idiom cloze test poses a unique challenge for machine reading comprehension due to the figurative meanings of idioms deviating from their literal interpretations, resulting in a semantic bias in models’ comp…
Euphemisms are commonly used on social media and darknet marketplaces to evade platform regulations by masking their true meanings with innocent ones. For instance, “weed” is used instead of “marijuana” for illicit transactions. Thus, euphemism identification, i.e., mapping a given euphemism (“weed”…
Pre-trained speech models, such as wav2vec 2.0, have significantly advanced speech-related tasks, including speech recognition and translation. However, their applicability in streaming scenarios is limited because these models are trained on complete utterances, leading to a mismatch with increment…
Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) requires a robust read/write policy in conjunction with a high-quality translation model. Traditional methods rely on either a fixed wait-k policy coupled with a standalone wait-k translation model, or an adaptive policy jointly trained with the translation m…
Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) presents a unique challenge as it requires generating target tokens before the source sentence is fully consumed. This can lead to the hallucination problem, where target tokens are generated without support from the source sentence. The prefix-to-prefix train…
Data augmentation techniques have been used to alleviate the problem of scarce labeled data in various NER tasks (flat, nested, and discontinuous NER tasks). Existing augmentation techniques either manipulate the words in the original text that break the semantic coherence of the text, or exploit ge…
One of the main problems in speech translation is the mismatches between different modalities. The second problem, scarcity of parallel data covering multiple modalities, means that the end-to-end multi-modal models tend to perform worse than cascade models, although there are exceptions under favor…
Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) is a task focused on ensuring high-quality translation of speech in low-latency situations. Despite this, the modality gap (\emph{e.g.}, unknown word boundaries) between audio and text presents a challenge. This gap hinders the effective application of pol…
End-to-end Speech Translation (ST) aims at translating the source language speech into target language text without generating the intermediate transcriptions. However, the training of end-to-end methods relies on parallel ST data, which are difficult and expensive to obtain. Fortunately, the superv…
Recently, Multi-modal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) has attracted a lot of attention. Most of the work utilizes image information through region-level visual representations obtained from a pretrained object detector and relies on an attention mechanism to model the interactions between image and…
Transition systems usually contain various dynamic structures (e.g., stacks, buffers). An ideal transition-based model should encode these structures completely and efficiently. Previous works relying on templates or neural network structures either only encode partial structure information or suffe…
Pretrained contextualized embeddings are powerful word representations for structured prediction tasks. Recent work found that better word representations can be obtained by concatenating different types of embeddings. However, the selection of embeddings to form the best concatenated representation…
Paraphrase generation plays key roles in NLP tasks such as question answering, machine translation, and information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for paraphrase generation. It simultaneously decodes the output sentence using a pretrained wordset-to-sequence model and a round…
Despite the near-human performances already achieved on formal texts such as news articles, neural machine translation still has difficulty in dealing with "user-generated" texts that have diverse linguistic phenomena but lack large-scale high-quality parallel corpora. To address this problem, we pr…
Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition (NER) show that document-level contexts can significantly improve model performance. In many application scenarios, however, such contexts are not available. In this paper, we propose to find external contexts of a sentence by retrieving and selecting a se…
Entity retrieval, which aims at disambiguating mentions to canonical entities from massive KBs, is essential for many tasks in natural language processing. Recent progress in entity retrieval shows that the dual-encoder structure is a powerful and efficient framework to nominate candidates if entiti…
In structured prediction problems, cross-lingual transfer learning is an efficient way to train quality models for low-resource languages, and further improvement can be obtained by learning from multiple source languages. However, not all source models are created equal and some may hurt performanc…
Zero-shot sequence labeling aims to build a sequence labeler without human-annotated datasets. One straightforward approach is utilizing existing systems (source models) to generate pseudo-labeled datasets and train a target sequence labeler accordingly. However, due to the gap between the source an…
Knowledge distillation is a critical technique to transfer knowledge between models, typically from a large model (the teacher) to a more fine-grained one (the student). The objective function of knowledge distillation is typically the cross-entropy between the teacher and the student’s output distr…
Adapting word order from one language to another is a key problem in cross-lingual structured prediction. Current sentence encoders (e.g., RNN, Transformer with position embeddings) are usually word order sensitive. Even with uniform word form representations (MUSE, mBERT), word order discrepancies…